>This was, at bottom, a political decision
>with little economic jusification, decreed from management's political
>masters who were under pressure from the corporate sector and taxpayers to
>cut the public sector. I suspect this is how many layoffs also occur in the
>private sector - under pressure from shareholders eager to increase profits,
>with little economic justification apart from that.
I agree that often, especially over the last 30 years, the position of management has little to do with the economics of working time and everything to do with the politics of finance. Under those circumstances it is usually impossible for the union to offer an acceptable solution because management doesn't want a solution -- it wants a "triumph" over the union.
>The level of wages and hours doesn't depend
>primarily on the subjective factor, ie. the existence of "smart unions" who
>know how to "trade off current income" for "increased bargaining power" -
>either now or "in the future". It has everything to do with the rapidly
>evolving global division of labour and corresponding relationship of
>bargaining power between labour and capital which has become worse, not
>better, as a result of these changing objective conditions. . I don't think it's an either/or proposition. The four-day workweek, as a response to automation, was high on the agenda when the AFL and the CIO merged in the 1950s. What happened though is that Sputnik was launched in 1957 and JFK was elected in 1960 and the unions went for "retraining" and full employment through defense industry jobs and set the four-day workweek aside. It was a cold war thing. I don't know how far we would get debating between the primacy of subjective and objective factors.
The Sandwichman