On Working Yourself Out of
 Your Job

One of the companies that put its workers on short-time is the Standard Motor Co. at its Coventry factories; where, out of 11,000 men, 250 a day were stood off on a rota system. The men did not like this and Mr. W, Warman, chairman of the Joint Shop Stewards’ Committee suggested a different solution:

“We do not accept short-time working. Production should be cut by a shorter working week and reduced efficiency for the same pay. We increased production by working harder and now we should just not work so hard. We have been advocating a 36-hour week at Standards.” (Manchester Guardian 5/3/56).

Mr. Warman’s few, well-chosen words, had quite a lively reception, as doubtless he knew they would. For he not only suggested unreduced pay for reduced hours but, what was far more provocative, he spoke against efficiency and in favour of not working so hard. And that simply isn’t done.

As the immediate cause of short-time working is that there are tens of thousands of motor cars that have been made to be sold but are unsold, the idea of making fewer of them would seem to be sensible. And if the world were organised in a rational sort of way, who could quarrel with Mr. Warman’s idea of the workers working fewer hours? And in such a world the last thing that could possibly occur would be a lowered standard of living. It is only in the world of today, this complicated bedlam, that people think it quite natural that workers who have produced more should be punished by consuming less.

But as we do live in this mad world of Capitalism Mr. Warman’s proposal was not accepted. As a matter of fact it was not really timely advice.

For obviously the time to act on such lines would be before output bad been pushed up, not after the employers had found that they could not sell cars and wanted to stand men off. As a correspondent in the Daily Herald, Mr. Maurice Fagence, pointed out, with more than 80,000 unsold cars in the stockpiles (of the manufacturers as a whole) “a strike at the present time cannot help the workers.” (Daily Herald, 5/3/56.)

But during recent years too many workers have been thinking more about getting overtime pay for excess hours of work than of trying to get higher pay for the normal hours of work. It is true that since 1939 there has been a fairly general reduction of normal hours from 47 or 48 hours a week to 44 hours. But instead of putting in fewer hours the average time actually worked each week is longer now than it was before the war. For men workers the average has gone up from 47.7 hours in 1938 to 48.9 hours in 1955. This chasing after overtime cannot be regarded as a sound policy for workers to adopt. But even if policy had been more far-sighted it would not have kept the workers out of trouble. Whatever the workers do under Capitalism difficulties face them and troubles arise. If they back productivity schemes, work hard and produce more they may find themselves sooner or later on short-time or out of work. But if they reduce efficiency and work less hard they may find themselves in the same fix because the firm they work for will dismiss them or may find itself bankrupt if other, more efficient, firms have been able to capture the market

And if they choose the middle way and work at a moderate pace, neither too fast nor too slow, they may still find themselves out of work. In 1952, when a textile slump hit producers in most parts of the world, over 150,000 textile workers in this country suddenly found themselves out-of-work and forced to live on unemployment pay. Many had to find jobs in other industries. Nobody suggested that they had increased their productivity unduly, in fact they were still being preached at for not having done so. And the wave of unemployment that hit them likewise hit textile industries of varying degrees of efficiency in U.S.A., Japan, and elsewhere.

By real working class unity, of all workers, in all trades, in all countries, some effective restraint could be imposed on the efforts of employers everywhere to increase the intensity of work. But with the outlook of the workers as it is at present this is not going to happen either. Unfortunately what most workers in most countries are now doing is backing up their employers and their governments to capture trade from the Capitalists in other countries. This short-sighted policy is encouraged by most of the workers’ industrial and political leaders, though it should be obvious that the workers of all countries would be in a stronger position against their employers if they all stood together and refused to be drawn into work harder campaigns designed to capture markets from other countries.

When all is said and done, even if all the workers stood unitedly together to get as much as they can out of Capitalism, what a very foolish thing they would still be doing. The only sensible thing for workers to do is to get together for something much more worth while, the establishment of Socialism. Then there would be no problem of working yourself out of a job, only the problem of producing as much of everything as people wanted.

H.