An article in today’s Guardian, which is very similar to one from a few days ago, is all about this country’s ‘long hours culture’.

When I read this sort of thing I realise how lucky I am where I work in this respect. Even after being sold off from British Rail many, many years ago, and even after being bought and sold by a couple of multi-nationals our place still keeps a rail culture of working to the contracted hours.

On top of that, our unions negotiated a reduction in contracted hours to 35 hours per week a couple of years ago. Personally I would have preferred the money, but there you go.

We are not forced to work extra hours, we have no trouble taking a full hour at lunch, we all manage to take all our 27 annual leave days. But it looks like that is very much not the norm in the real world.

I have seen a bit of this in jobs I have applied for, or thought about applying for, and I am mentally prepared for the fact I will probably have at least a 40-hour week and maybe fewer holiday days. When I was working for ICL I remember I used to work extraordinarily late and often at weekends too. At the time I had no problems with that as I was enjoying the work and always learning and stretching myself, but I don’t think it can be right if people are forced into that position.

And now we come to the real point. Since moving to a shorter-hours company I have been able to spend a lot more time with the family and with hobbies and I can see it is a good thing. Our company has sent out the odd e-mail telling us that if we wanted to work more than 48 hours a week regularly we will have to sign an opt-out form, but they have not pushed it. Many companies, apparently, do push this issue. They put pressure on people to ‘voluntarily’ opt out of the European Working Hours Directive, sometimes subtly and sometimes not so subtly.

In my opinion the opt-out was a mistake in the first place, and now there is pressure from the EU to end it. I support that 100% The article states:

Yet while other European governments are aiming to reduce weekly working hours below the working-time directive limit of 48 hours, our government is still desperately trying to keep the opt-out.

Why is a supposedly broadly socialist party trying “desperately” to retain a mechanism which allows employers to effectively force their staff to work more hours than they want to?

Its not even as if the government is keeping this measure because of some sort of oversight: they are actively working to keep it. I believe our Labour MEPs voted to remove the opt-out and had some criticism from the party.

We keep being told by the unions that long hours causes safety problems and causes workers to suffer a reduced quality of life through not seeing their families enough.

On the other hand we are told by the employers’ organisations that not allowing people to work more than 48 hours per week (That is more than 9.5 hours a day for a 5-day week) will cause economic collapse and that many workers will suffer as a result of having piss-poor wages that they can only live on if they work overtime.

These are the same organisations who said that having a minimum wage would wreck the economy! Why is our government siding with the employers rather than the workers? This is exactly the sort of thing which gives ‘New’ Labour a bad name amongst socialists.