Greece has adopted a voluntary six-day workweek for businesses that offer round-the-clock services. “Voluntary” applies, of course, to the business, not the worker. That means bosses can force workers to come in for a sixth day, at a cost. Employers will get a 40 percent wage premium, which is to say, overtime. Except, of course, this is not extra pay for optional work performed outside normal work hours.
The origins of the law are predictable: a right-wing, market-fundamentalist government, an aging population, state anxiety about its capacity to produce enough workers to support the aging population and sustain the economy, and the lingering effects of long-term financial crises.
Globally, there’s a push to move to a four-day workweek. Shorter weeks have been proven to boost worker health, well-being, satisfaction, and, as it happens, productivity. They lead to less stress, anxiety, and burnout. They even lower pollution. While some countries, like the United States and South Korea, are flirting with a six-day workweek for some employees, the trend is moving toward four days or maintaining the status quo five-day week.
The Greek move to a six-day workweek takes a bit of the wind out of the sails of the global four-day workweek campaign. The austerity crew and market fundamentalists will use this as a precedent to argue that other countries should follow suit, claiming that the problems the Greeks face aren’t unique. After all, aging populations are a common challenge worldwide.
The very idea of the extended workweek is an insult to the long-fought struggle for humane working conditions. In the nineteenth century, the Ten-Hour Movement aimed to cut down working hours for minors under sixteen, which came ahead of the Factory Act, which so graciously limited the workday to a dozen hours for workers under eighteen — which is to say, adolescents. It also set an upper limit for the workweek for children between nine and thirteen…
La suite est à lire sur: jacobin.com
Auteur: David Moscrop
