Making overtime work for YOU

Union strategies for gaining control of overtime

THE REAL ALTERNATIVE to job loss, pay chiseling and health threats lies in shortening work time substantially.

Resistance to this comes not only from employers who see their profits threatened, but from many workers who see their income endangered. Most of us working longer hours are just trying to catch up on the shrinking power of our paycheck. While real wages have gone up in the last year, they remain about 12 percent below their 1979 value. As one author described it, a lot of us are working longer just to keep up with a 1970s lifestyle.

This being the case, many union members are unlikely to be enthusiastic about an idea that suggests a cut in buying power, even if it brings improvements in family social life and creates jobs for others.

In cutting work time, pay must be adjusted up enough to cover lost hours, including at least some of the sacrificed overtime.

Employer resistance, of course, will be strong. Yet, across the industrial world, unions and governments are taking big steps toward shorter work time.

The best known example is in Germany where the unions in the metal working industries succeeded in establishing the 35-hour week by 1995. Other unions followed in their path. It took a decade of struggle, but they did it. Now the major unions are considering a push for even shorter hours.

Less well known is the recent action of the French government. In the wake of the 1995 public sector strikes, the union-backed Socialist Party won election in 1996 on the promise of a 35-hour week with no reduction in pay.

This May the French National Assembly, France's Congress, passed the 35-hour bill over vigorous opposition of the employers and their conservative political representatives.

French firms with more than 20 employees have until 2000 to cut their hours, while those with fewer than 20 workers have until 2002. The actual implementation will be negotiated between unions and employers at the industry level. It will apply, however, even to companies in the industry where unions are weak, divided, or non-existent.

In Denmark this spring, the majority of the nation's private sector workers launched a remarkable strike that paralyzed the country for eleven days. They were demanding a sixth week of paid vacation time - they already had a 37-hour week and five weeks paid vacation. In the end, they won an extra two days for single workers and three for those with families.

In most countries of the European Union the standard workweek is around 37 hours; seldom is it more than 39.

For every 100 hours, American workers worked in 1995, the Germans put in 76, the French 81 (before the new law), and the Swedes 83. Hourly wages and benefit costs were significantly higher in those countries.

Closer to home
In Canada, work time has become a bargaining focus for some unions. Since the Canadian bargaining system is similar to ours and many of the Canadian unions' employers are American-based corporations, we may have much to learn from the Canadian experience.

In 1993 bargaining with the Big Three auto makers, the Canadian Auto Workers began bargaining for reduced annual work One by increasing the number of paid days off. The CAW won three new paid days off that year.

At the same time, they took advantage of a request from Chrysler to add a third shift at its Windsor, Ontario plant to negotiate a seven-and-a-half-hour day for all three shifts at that plant, creating 1,300 additional jobs.

In 1996 they won an additional ten days off. This Big Three pattern was then imposed on CAMI, the super lean joint venture of GM and Suzuki, this year.

While this is only a small step toward anything like a 35-hour week, when these 80 new missing hours per worker are multiplied by the 25,000 or so workers under these contracts, it would produce over a thousand new jobs, all things being equal.

In the province of Quebec, the Confederation of National Trade Unions or Confederation des Syndicats Nationaux (CSN), which represents workers in the public and private service sectors, has published a series of studies to aid local unions in negotiating shorter work time.

The CSN advocates looking at total work time over the "whole active life span of workers." So in addition to reducing the workweek or day, early retirement or more paid days off can have a beneficial effect on employment and worker well-being.

The CSN also argues that no loss of purchasing power should accompany reduced work time and proposes a number of ways to maintain purchasing power.

Response from U.S. unions
With few exceptions, unions in the United States abandoned the quest for shorter work time long ago.

One exception was the United Auto Workers which, in the 1970s, bargained 19 additional paid days off for Big Three workers. Employment in the auto industry grew in the 1970s despite increased over- seas competition and a major recession.

The 19 days were given back in the concessions wave of the early 1980s that followed the Chrysler bailout. After that, auto employment dropped steadily. Of course, the gain and subsequent loss of paid days off was not the only cause of either the growth of the 1970s or the decline since, but it contributed to both.

Panaceas and pitfalls:
No strings
The CSN points out that while shorter work time can save or create jobs, improve health and safety conditions and enrich our personal lives, it is not a panacea. For one thing, the employers have many ways to undermine the impact of reduced hours.

In Britain in the early 1990s, for example, the unions in the metal working industries won reduced hours ranging from 37 to 39.

Yet, the employers extracted so many "flexibility" concessions from the unions that within months employment was once again dropping as individual companies implemented various work rule changes and flexible work schedules.

Today in Britain, public sector employers like London Transport (subway workers) and the Royal Mail actually offered shorter work time in exchange for concessions on work rules and schedules. Workers there added the demand for "no strings" that would undermine employment. In Germany, the employers have been pushing for and sometimes winning what they call the "Hours Corridor." This is a system of averaging the hours of the workweek over the year. This allows the company to work people long hours when they want production and much shorter hours when demand is slack.

It means that in slack periods the worker's income drops significantly and unpredictably. It also means people can be putting in long days or weeks with no overtime pay, so long as the total annual hours don't exceed an average of 35 per week.

Learning the lessons of what to bargain for is obviously as important as the idea itself. If jobs are to be created, "no strings" should be attached to reduced work time.

It takes a movement
While someone has to start the ball rolling here in the U.S., it will be most effective when it becomes a demand across the entire labor movement.

For one thing, it will take that kind of power for any of us to win a reduction in work time substantial enough to make a difference.

For another, as more unions win serious reductions in work time, it will create additional jobs.

Ironically, the movement for shorter work time began in the United States in the nineteenth century. Its climax came with a national general strike for the eight-hour day on May 1, 1886.

While many groups of workers won the eight-hour day or forty-hour week in the years after that, it didn't become law until 1938 with the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act. So, it is 60 years since we made any real progress.

While the corporations scream about "competitiveness," American business has experienced an unprecedented period of high profitability for the last six years. There is no excuse for us not to demand or them not to concede significant advances toward shorter work time across the economy.

It will, of course, take a fight. We need to deploy every weapon we have. Along with unions beginning to put this on the table, we need to think of this as a political fight.

The Labor Party founded by the OCAW and other unions in 1996 could help make this a political cause as well.

Organized labor has a couple of political victories under its belt in the defeat of fast track and proposition 226. The mobilizing tactics used in these fights could be applied to this one as well.

The Republicans are trying to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to gut the 40-hour week. Organized labor might propose to amend it to specify a 35 or even 30-hour standard workweek.

Shorter work time is labor's way of regulating the labor market. Even if a political start toward this seems far off, the launch of a bargaining campaign across several major industries would offer millions of working people an alternative to Corporate America's ruthless downsizing, work-intensifying regime.

In the process, as those outside the unions see labor fighting for them as well, it just might be the means to the growth our unions so badly need to win further victories.

(Mr. Moody is the director of Labor Notes.)

OCAW Reporter, July-August 1998