Control over working time — a twenty-first-century issue
The history of workers’ struggles over working time
“Eight hours’ work, eight hours’ rest, eight hours for what we will.” The rallying call of the trade union movement in the late nineteenth-century for an eight-hour day put the issue of working time at the centre of working people’s concerns.
When the Trades Union Congress (TUC) was founded in 1868, working hours averaged 62 hours a week. It is therefore unsurprising that campaigns on the length of the working day, crystallised in the eight-hour movement, were one of the trade union movement’s early goals.
In 1890, the international trade union movement called for an international demonstration to demand an eight-hour day. But it was not until 1919, and the founding of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), that this was recognised. The first convention of the new tri-partite organisation was on working time ensuring that (with certain exceptions), “the working hours of persons employed in any public or private industrial undertaking or in any branch thereof ... shall not exceed eight in the day and forty-eight in the week” (ILO, 2019).
Improvements in workers’ ability to control their working time advanced throughout the century — with new ILO conventions on “weekly rest” (in 1921 and 1957), holidays with pay (1970), night work (1990) and part time work (1994) (ILO, 2019a). Legislation in the UK in 2002 gave workers the right to request more flexible working patterns (Employment Act, 2002). By 2018, almost one in four of the UK workforce was engaged in some form of flexible working arrangement (Low Pay Commission, 2018) and the average working week had almost halved to 32 hours (TUC, 2018).
Contemporary issues in working time
While progress has been made, the battles over working time are far from won. And while the first industrial revolution gave birth to the trade union movement, the fourth industrial revolution, and advances in new technology including the rise of big data, robotics and artificial intelligence are reshaping the terrain on which these battles are fought.
One current issue is the encroachment of work into non-working time. This can lead to additional stress and often leaves workers conducting unpaid labour. The rise of communications technology that enables you to access emails or other work when not in the office means that the end of the working day can be an elastic concept. Research by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) in 2017 found that almost a third of workers believed that having remote access to the workplace means they cannot switch off in their personal time. This “always on” culture may also be contributing to the rise in work intensity identified by the Skills and Employment Survey in 2017, which found that “the proportion of workers in jobs where it was required to work at ‘very high speed’ for most or all of the time rose by 4 percentage points to 31 percent in 2017” (Green et al., 2018). The TUC’s own research found that workers in the UK worked two billion hours unpaid in 2018 (Sellers, 2019).
A related issue is the unpredictability of working hours, also enabled by new technological innovations, in particular scheduling systems and platforms that enable faster interactions between an employer and large groups of people. These technologies help to enable extreme forms of labour flexibility, with the primary aim of reducing employer costs. There are now 974,000 people on zero-hours contracts in the UK (Office for National Statistics (ONS), 2020), which provide no guaranteed hours of work each week. This has pushed the risk of managing inconsistent demand within a company from the employer to the worker, who is offered work only within the hours where it is profitable for the employer. Over half of these workers have had a shift cancelled at less than 24 hours’ notice, and 75 per cent have been offered work within the same time period, making it hard to plan either working or non-working time (Collinson, 2019).
The rise of platform-based working seeks to follow the same strategy. Work is parcelled into ever smaller tasks, with workers only paid while it can be demonstrated that they are delivering profit for the company. This is not innovation — the dock workers schemes of the nineteenth century saw dockers queuing for work, and only paid once hired. Companies have sought to claim that people working in these forms of work are “independent contractors” and therefore not eligible for the minimum wage and holiday pay — key legal protections that ensure working time is paid. Unions across Europe have been demonstrating in the courts that these claims are bogus. In the UK, a case against Uber found that its drivers should be classified as workers — meaning they are entitled to core protections — rather than as self-employed (though Uber are currently appealing this judgement at the Supreme Court) (British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 2018). In the Netherlands, the union Federatie Nederlandse Vakbeweging (FNV) has won a similar case against Deliveroo (Fair Transport Europe, 2019). But as these cases apply to individual workers only, many workers are still missing out on key protections.
