In another blow to a decent life for the workers of the world (where have I heard that?), France has tossed its 35 hour work week out the window. It is considered a big drain on the economy, as an AP report today states, which is code for "It's a big drain on profits". Clearly the French state/corporate elite feels in order to compete with its peers it must milk more labor-value from French workers. Clearly this is one reason a globalizing economic system is the Devil's work.
Of course plenty of French people, like people everywhere, like to think there is more to life than work. That was the causitive concern which led to the collective pressure that in turn led to the laws that limited the work week there, as elsewhere. Similar concerns led to the 40 hour work week in the US.
The AP story quoted from a 2003 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) survey which found that "of 25 industrialized countries, only Norwegian and Dutch employees worked less time each year than the French, who worked an average 1,431 hours." In comparison, the report says quoting the survey, "German workers put in 1,446 hours, British 1,673 hours, Americans 1,792 hours and Koreans 2,390 hours."
First things first: Bless 'em, but the Koreans are just plain maniacal. Of course, we are the second most crazed bunch. Now the French wanna be crazed too! Or rather, as usual, the leaders want what benefits them even if it means more unhappiness and drearier lives for those they are milking.
As the concentration camp guests learned upon arrival, "Arbeit macht frei", which translates from German thus: "Works makes you free." There's more to it than coincidence that the Calvinist work ethic and the Nazi concentration camp promises have so much in common.
The French elite's victory in gaining more work hours from its labor force is part and parcel of the decades long erosion of previously gained worker's rights. The limited victories of people against capital that occurred late in the 19th and early in the 20th century (has it really been that long??) have been in many ways eroded mostly through propaganda. It is no coincidence that in addition to worker's rights, democracy has also been undermined. They go together. Or rather, the best we can hope for under the corporate capitalist system is to be gained from democracy and worker's rights. But as the Australian Alex Carey wrote in his book 'Taking the Risk Out of Democracy', "The twentieth century has been characterised by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy; the growth of corporate power; and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy." In other words, what powerful interests could not do by force, they managed by deception and manipulation. This propaganda has, essentially, served to undermine two main previously popular understandings: working people have more power if they group themselves together, say, in a union or some such organization, and the interests of the owners are not the same as that of their employees. Both of these ideas have been eroded through propaganda: associating them with communism, a system which in practice has proven problematic, to say the least, genocidal and crazed, to say the most. But associating said understandings with really-existing communism is like associating fellowship with the Jim Jones cult. Fellowship is still of value to human beings. Likewise, understanding the differences in interests between capital and labor and the value of collective action against powerful interests are still important and do not change because of corrupt systems that seemed to be based on those understandings. Just because it is 2005 and Fukuyama and other dreamers have declared the end of history, that is, the American system is, as is, the final and best system, it does not mean it is true. Just because it is 2005 and capitalism seems triumphant, it does not mean labor's interests are the same as capital's interests. Just because it is 2005 and it is still true that wage-labor is wage-slavery and that corporations are simply tyrannies organized to enrich a few by exploiting many. Just because someone tells you this is passé hippie nonsense, it does not mean it is.
But maybe we should think next time about doing more than extracting small concessions from capital, like the 40-hour work week, or a few more scraps and crums. Maybe we should demand a recognition once and for all that if you can't do all the work then you can't have all the power. Just because you "own" a company, it does not follow, either in terms of justice or in terms or reason (since both, as in most cases, agree on this), that you should control the company. We need more than a shorter work week. We need to undermine prevailing nonsense that says owners should dominate capital and decision-making power. As Proudhon put, "property is theft". If you work for a living, Uncle Sam may rob you, we all know that. But a truth many can't see is that Father Boss robs you first. It is time we start acting like we are being robbed.
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