I took a straw poll recently among an admittedly small selection of employees at Gosford Hospital (nurses, pink ladies, etc). The question I posed was simple: who works the longer hours – Australian workers or workers in the richest capitalist country on Earth, the USA? There was some initial hesitation on the part of some participants while they thought about it, but the answer was always the same: American workers, no question about it. And they were right.
Despite all the propaganda that US movies and television shows – not to mention political leaders – pump out about the privilege of living in the most powerful country in the world, it is common knowledge among working people that their counterparts in “God’s own country” get a very raw deal.
Not only do they put in more time on the job than workers in any other developed industrial country (and they certainly do that!), their health care system is a sick joke (no pun intended – it’s just a fact) and their lack of affordable housing is a scandal. Most American workers don’t even get paid annual leave or paid public holidays! Homelessness is rife. Even people who have jobs are living in their cars because they cannot afford an actual roof over their heads.
As I have commented on before: the outskirts of every town and city in the US are surrounded by acres of trailer homes, inhabited by folk the “American dream” has passed by. In any other country they would be called what they are: shanty towns, slums for the poor.
But things could be changing: as Dean Baker reported in the US on-line journal Truthout lastmonth, “This week New York’s city council will begin to consider a measure put forward by Mayor Bill de Blasio that would guarantee workers in the city at least 10 days of paid time off per year. This proposal is an important step toward bringing the United States inline with the other rich countries in guaranteeing its workers some amount of paid vacation.
“As a new report from Adewale Maye at the USA’s Center for Economic Research shows, the United States is very much an outlier from its peer countries in not guaranteeing its workers any paid vacation days or holidays. Countries in the European Union all guarantee workers at least four weeks of paid vacation (it’s a condition of EU membership). Many provide five weeks, in addition to an average of 10 paid holidays.” But American workers get zip.
The USA’s next-door neighbour, Canada “guarantees workers 10 days of paid vacation in addition to nine paid holidays. Even Japan, which has a reputation as being a workaholic country, guarantees workers 10 paid vacation days and 15 paid holidays. The 10 days of paid time off proposed by de Blasio would still be at the bottom of the list among wealthy countries, but it would at least be a step in the right direction,” says Dean Baker.
It certainly would, and it is something that US workers through their unions have campaigned for for many years, but they have usually traded such “luxuries” as paid holidays for necessities like getting a health or dental plan in their employment contract.
No wonder bosses in Australia – and their political parties, notably the Libs – are so keen to see a US-style “health care” system introduced here!
As for the actual number of hours worked each week, this used to be similar in the US to other developed countries. “If we go back to 1970, the average [American] worker put in somewhat more time than people in Denmark and the Netherlands, but less than people in France, Finland, and much less than workers in Japan.
“However, over the next five decades, the average length of the work year fell sharply in all of these countries, while just edging down by 5.0 percent in the United States. As a result, workers in the United States now put in more time than workers in any other wealthy country, including Japan,” notes Dean Baker.
In earlier years in the United States, when unions were much stronger than they are today, they negotiated employment contracts with bosses in which high-cost elements like health care insurance and pension benefits were provided primarily by the employer. Employers responded by requiring workers to put in more hours each year rather than allowing for shorter hours and hiring more workers, because – as Marx showed years ago – the longer hours workers can be made to work, the higher a boss’s profit from each worker.
However, the decline in union membership and strength in recent decades has seen a corresponding decline in the number of workers with traditional defined benefit pensions in the US. It is also now common for employers to pro-rate the portion of a health insurance benefit that they pay.
Workers know that they should share in any gains from higher productivity because it is their labour that creates the products and services in the first place. They are entitled to receive more leisure and a shorter working day as business profits and productivity go up. “Of course,” says Baker, “the big problem of the last four decades is that most workers [in the US] have not gotten their share of productivity growth at all.” This is a situation employers wish to see continue, and one way of achieving that is increased reliance on automation and the use of robots.
Of course, replacing workers with robots my boost profits but who will buy your products? Increasing productivity should mean shorter working hours, something employers regard as anathema. However, in Germany, the Netherlands and some other European countries with strong economies and also strong unions, workers already put in 20 percent fewer hours each year than in the United States.
Many US companies are shifting their businesses to low wage countries, to gain immediate benefits in lower overheads. But also because they know that in the longer term, workers in the US will not tolerate being exploited like this for ever.