h/t James Delingpole – Britain’s Labour Opposition Party, which has a real chance of winning the next UK election, is seriously considering a think tank proposal to radically cut working hours and wages to reduce everyone’s carbon footprint.
Plan for 10-hour working week with 75% paycut under Labour
Martine Berg Olsen Monday 10 Jun 2019 7:54 am
The Labour Party is discussing plans to bring in a 10-hour working week and slash pay by 75 per cent to tackle climate change. The radical report titled The Ecological Limits of Work by the Autonomy Group states unless current carbon emissions are cut there would be an ‘unprecedented decrease in the economic activity’.It says the sustainable work week would likely be ‘well below 10 hours per week’.
Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, who has previously backed a four-day working week, said: ‘This is a vital contribution to the growing debate around free time and reducing the working week.’ Leo Murray, adviser to Shadow Treasury minister Clive Lewis, said: ‘I like this take a lot.’
Lewis has previously backed another controversial report from the group on reducing the working week.
Read more: https://metro.co.uk/2019/06/10/plan-10-hour-working-week-75-paycut-labour-9878450/
…
The full report, “The Ecological Limits of Work”, is available here.
Under the topic “other considerations”, the report authors express concern that their proposed cut might not be deep enough, because people working shorter hours might be more productive during the time they do work, which would cancel some of the ecological “benefit” of a shorter working week.
This is not a fringe proposal. Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, who praised the proposal, is a senior figure in the Labour Party, and has a real chance of being put in charge of Britain’s banking system and economy after the next election.
The report kind of skips over issues which might concern some workers, like how British workers already suffering fuel poverty are supposed to warm their homes and feed their families with 75% less money, and how they are supposed to pay their mortgages and bills (maybe all mortgages will be forgiven?), but I doubt the politicians considering this radical policy proposal have ever personally experienced real hunger, poverty or cold.
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C’mon, man, this has to be from the Babylon Bee or the Onion.
sorry…. this guy waved Mao’s little red book in parliament.
That’s ok! It wasn’t a lump of coal.
Maybe Mad Magazine?
The National Lampoon would have run this, but I don’t think they are still in press.
No it aint .
No one can live on a 75% pay cut , the socialists have decided to cut the population by starving the British population down to a sustainable number , around twenty million .
Do you really believe people would sit quietly at home and die of starvation? Umm, no. It would be France ^ 10.
Break out the BLADE……heads will roll!!! Just sayin’.
Can’t wait to see the 1/4 pound note. Perhaps instead of Her Royal Highness’ face, the McD 1/4 pounder will feature prominently
You misspelled doubling the work week to 10 hours. We’ve always been at war with Eurasia.
The only way to make it work would be to cut everything %75 across the board …
Prices
Rents
Property values
Goods and services
Taxes
Lordship fees
AND
live with an isolationist policy.
No imports
No EU grid electricity
No foreign travel out of country (wouldn’t be able to afford it anyway)
Full charge pricing for foreign travelers within the country
Put the GMO people to work on humans. Engineer us to go into suspended animation 75% of the time.
Day World- by phillip jose Farmer is about exactly that 😉 excellent book
as for this gem of an idea..i remember a mate saying by yr 2k wed be on 20hr weeks lotsa leisure etc. well pt time or casuals ar and they are lucky to pay rent n eat let alone spend on leisure..
i liked this…because after i cleaned up my snorted coffee it was the funniest thing this week
theyre serious? seriously deranged and on a fast trail to zero.
deservedly so if theyre that nutty
Bryan A:
You forgot to mention food!
It’s starting to sound a lot like the old USSR…
Is that a bug, or a feature?
That’s the selling point. On the front cover, in all caps.
I feel ya – it’s hard to accept ANY people being this crazy/stupid – it’s flat terrifying when it’s people empowered to DO it.
Its never going to happen. How did this even get published here?
If I had a $100 for everytime I heard “it’s not going to happen” then it did maybe not right away but it did. Or the slippery slope arguments turned out correct. I could retire. I remember when both sides said the Supreme Court wouldn’t force citizen’s to buy private products. Yet we now have Obama care.
Population is the real problem.
We just have to get back to about 1 billion people worldwide, as was the case in 1800.
Offer $5000 to women of childbearing age, no matter where they live, to be sterilized.
Tens of millions of the poorer ones likely would accept it.
With fewer women having children, population would rapidly decrease.
Population is a problem? Only in your mind. Despite the billions of us, we are better fed, better housed, with better health than at any time in the past.
So where’s the problem?
China tried something similar and actually did manage to get their population (up) to 1B
They even tried getting rid of their girl babies and now, as a direct result, gangs of unmarried men roam the streets with no wives and no prospects looking for any woman around just for sex.(rape)
Actually, the Chinese government didn’t want to get rid of girl babies, or I don’t think they did. That was a mistake rooted in the failure to realize that allowing people only 1 child would result in a great many of their citizens committing selective infanticide until they got a male child. I could be wrong, it’s not like the Chinese government consulted me on this… but their attempts to “steal” women from other nations makes it pretty clear they wanted fewer children, not fewer women.
Precisely but families want their name to endure which doesn’t happen with women.
If you look at the trend line, China’s one-child policy was enacted at a point where the existing downward trend in average fertility suddenly flattened out. In other words, for the one-child policy to have an effect on Chinese fertility it would have to have discovered time travel.
Population is not the problem.
Religious beliefs, cultural beliefs and lack of education is the problem.
No Samuel, traditional Judeo Christian values are what laid the foundation for Western society, which was by far the freest and safest, most prosperous and comfortable ever.
The religion of Islam, CAGW, and statism (including all forms) are the extremely dangerous ideologies. The historical evidence is absolute on this
“HA”, …… first you disagree ….. and the next breath you agree with what you disagreed with.
World population is currently roughly 7,700,000,000, the land area of Texas is 171,891,840 acres, divided one by the other and you get 45 people per acre, almost exactly the same as the population density of New York City. Yup, everybody in the world could fit into Texas living as New Yorkers leaving the rest of the planet empty!
Greenpeace activists actually have a plan to reduce world population by 6 in 7 through genocide.
The greatest atrocities in mankind’s history have been committed by those that truly believe their actions are justified…
Yeah, I get the point, but “living as New Yorkers”? Hopefully could improve on that……
There is no problem with population. The world could easily handle twice the population.
Well Willem.
If you think the population is the problem.
Why don’t you lead by example then?
I did.
I am 82, married for 57 years, no children.
The population explosion is not in Japan, not in Europe, not in Russia, etc., but in underdeveloped countries.
Almost all of them have an excess of population growth, such as Pakistan, Egypt, India, mostly due to religious dogmas, and not enough resources to provide for them.
10 billion people need a lot of room and resources.
They will take them from the other fauna and flora, which will shrink more and more, as happened during the past 200 years.
Well known biological scientists at Harvard and Stamford U, think even 1 billion would be too many, because that 1 billion would do much more damage than the 1 billion alive in 1800. Just google.
The way to reduce population is increase standard of living. That is why China no longer has one child law.
Based on the diversity of comments by readers, I want to emphasize the worldwide program is ENTIRELY VOLUNTARY.
Women would get PAID, several times the annual household income in poorer countries, for voluntarily being sterilized.
This has nothing to do with China which FORCED people to have just one child (NO COMPENSATION), with severe penalties for having a second child. Just google
No point in that. Most Western women have only one or two children, which is too little to prevent Western countries from crashing with or without immigration. We needed the contrary, give money to anyone who gives birth to a child. And that happens in Nordic countries, with almost zero effect on aboriginal fertility,but more on immigrant fertility.
My language, my history, my color are all going to disappear in a one big cultural suicide taking about 50 to 100 years before being well committed to. But it is evident already. Valuing immigrants over aboriginals will be for destruction of aboriginals.
It may, but they underestimate the true grit of some of us Patriots.
Globalism cannot proceed unless the biggest threat to collectivism (historically white Western societies with Judeo Christian values) is eradicated and absorbed into the light brown blob of “diversity”. It is the virtue signaling, self loathing extreme liberals who are guilty of pushing this (only group through polling that has a negative self valuation compared to other ethnicities), and the rest of us to a lesser but still responsible degree for not unifying when this shift began
Willem, where on earth does anyone come up with such a notion that 1 billion is the right number?
Real world data and research indicate that this would result in worse economic conditions, not better. PEOPLE are the worlds most valuable and creative resource.
At least the intelligent ones…..
How did AOC miss this?
Man, our socialists just suck.
Getting rid of 75% of the population would cut hours and wages by the same amount as propososed, without the economic pain.
This excerpt from the article, …… was beautiful, …… absolutely beautiful, to wit:
I think they got that backwards. If they unwisely implement this plan, there will be an “unprecedented decrease in the economic activity’”
We have to destroy the economy in order to save it.
+42
Prosperity – gotta get rid of it to save the planet.
If they cut everyone’s pay by 75%, then everyone will be reduced to cutting down their urban forests to heat their homes and business. What are these people thinking, worrying about a ‘carbon footprint’? The UK was the first to adopt wholesale carbon fuels to replace having to cut down forests for heating and charcoal for things like steel making. However, I would support the 10 hour work week, at least for Gov’t bureaucrats, since the damage they do to the economy is immense when they just show up for work. In fact, I would support just paying them to stay home.
Earthling2
Presumably then, every pensioner with an institutional or private pension would become the new upper class wealthy.
I’m up for that!
Except I wouldn’t retire to the UK (an option in two years) I would be heading Stateside with everyone else.
HotScot, I hate to point this out to you, but Stateside is where AOC lives and agitates, along with the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Al Gore that Mann chap and his hockey stick fixation, Bernie Sanders, Bloomberg, and too many other fruitcakes to mention them all.
Are you sure choosing the USA is a wise option at this stage of their shakedown?
Maybe try Canada first for the full fat option of Green lunacy, just to see if you like it. If it doesn’t work out, there is always Australia, which should have returned to the sane world within the next couple of years/ A safe haven from Green destruction should become available down there. They are finally asking the right questions of Greens and they don’t think paying AL Gore to speak nonsense at tax payers expense was a good idea either.
It reminds me of the joke back in the days of union/industrial unrest of strike after strike after strike in 1970s Britain! The left kept saying, “all we’re asking for is an honest week’s pay for an honest day’s work!!!
Just goes to show how there are no limits to the eco-insanity that pervades the mids ofthe Left! I wonder, as I have said some time ago, the BBC Horizon programme did a special on the Sun & Solar activity, they tracked (or rather their experts did) Sunspot activity & the higher it was, the more curious the behaviour of Humanity appeared to be, e.g. the rise & fall ofhemlines in the 1960s correlated with Sunspot activity!!! Perhaps the new Grand Solar Minimum has already kicked in exerting its lunatic affects!!! AND before anyone thinks I am being too serious, absences of evidence is NOT evidence of absence!!!
as long as their stay home pay is = to their unemployment rates…yes
Er…..does this include a cut in politician’s salaries too?
I thought not.
Good Lord no, they need those cuts to increase their salaries & expenses allowances!!!! OT, not sure Len Jay if you’re from the Virginian Colonies, but it has always been symptomatic of the British Civil Service, that nobody ever has a headache or a cold, it’s always a migrane or flu, requiring a day off sick!!! Sarc but true!!!
You know there’s just too much good living been going on ’round here. Our think tank studies assure that the apex has been reached and we’re all headed down to the new normal of deprivation by design. So do stop your unmutual conduct and torch yourselves!
Well most certainly. Right after you, commissar.
I bet that searches for “pitchfork” on eBay have spiked (no pun)
From part 1 of the report = History of an Idea
As early as the 1880s, Paul Lafargue, a son-in-law of Karl
Marx, put forth the demand for a three-hour work day,
enthusiastically highlighting the emancipatory potentials of
technological progress (Lafargue 1883). Roughly half a century
later, John Maynard Keynes dedicated himself to discussing
the “economic possibilities for our grandchildren”, likewise
putting forth the prospect of three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour
work week (Keynes 1930). Societal development, however,
took a different route: working hours largely decreased, but
nowhere near to the extent discussed by Lafargue and Keynes,
whilst increases in productivity lead to qualitatively and
quantitatively vastly expanded production that provided the
base for modern-day mass-consumer culture.
Had we been willing to settle for the standard of living enjoyed by the average person 100 years ago, we could have cut the work week down to 10 to 15 hours. People chose to spend part of the bonus from increased productivity on better lives for themselves and their families.
No it wouldn’t. You can’t innovate without making new things, and the only way to keep the standards of, say, 1900 without inventing new things is to invent new ways of making the old things. But those new ways are themselves new things.
Consider the people who invented pottery and made better and longer-lasting dishes and ways of preserving and transporting food than wood. You can’t make better dishes by innovating wood work; it takes pottery, and that’s a new product with unforeseen advanced uses which change society.
How could you improve personal transport in 1900 without inventing cars? You can’t breed smaller cheaper stronger horses who eat and shit less.
One of the ways people got more productive was washing machines and refrigerators. You couldn’t reduce women’s working hours (this is 1900, remember) without inventing those two machines.
Refrigerators had the knock-on affect of eliminating the need to go shopping for food every day, or twice day. Congratulations, you’ve just moved beyond 1900.
And people seem to have settled on a 40 hour work week. If you tried to force everybody to limit work to 10 hours a week, people would find side jobs. Or if you made it such a terrible crime so well enforced that people really did stop working more than 10 hours a week, what would they do? People in 1900 were not very rich. They could not afford to take vacations. Those people are going to be bored stiff and *find* things to do which can make them more money.
And anyone self-employed will sometimes find themselves working 70 plus hour weeks, as the job actually has to get done on time.
“You can’t make better dishes by innovating wood work; it takes pottery, and that’s a new product with unforeseen advanced uses which change society.”
I think I know where you are coming from, but POI, pottery has been around for well over 3-4 thousand years so cannot be descirbed as new!
But excessive improvements to pottery can result in a dead end. The Chinese and by extension the Japanese made such high quality pottery that they missed out on a superior technology, glass. Glass is a more versatile material in its many varied forms.
At some point pottery was new, just as wood dishes were new at some point.
I say, increasing productivity increases wealth.
You say, not that’s wrong, you can’t innovate without making new things.
While I don’t necessarily disagree with what you are saying, I’m struggling to find the thread by which your comment is connected to mine, much less proves that what I said is wrong.
@MarkW. There isn’t a connecting thread. You aren’t wrong. He’s doing damage limitation by pretending there’s a counter-point, but there isn’t one.
You said, “Had we been willing to settle for the standard of living enjoyed by the average person 100 years ago, we could have cut the work week down to 10 to 15 hours”.
I’m saying you could not have both settled for the standard of living of 100 years ago AND innovated to cut the work week down to 10 to 15 hours.
The only way to cut the work week down is to make old things better. If you innovate by making new things, you have improved the standard of living.
Felix – June 12, 2019 at 7:01 pm
Felix, your 1st sentence was OK iffen you were talking post-1950’s, …… but the next two I hafta question.
And remember, there was and still is, a big difference in the “labor intensiveness” of urban and rural living, especially after 1900.
Washing clothes was “labor intensive”, with or without a washing machine ……. until electric water well pumps, in home plumbing and the “automatic” washing machines were invented.
And home refrigerators didn’t really eliminate the “labor intensive” acts of raising livestock, raising a garden and canning-drying-salting “down” your harvested food for later consumption.
It was the increase in urban population that made refrigerator-freezers and well-stocked neighborhood retail stores a “labor saving” necessity.
My point is that you can’t increase manufacturing efficiency to support a 10-15 hour work week without inventing new things which take you out of the static lifestyle which was part of the original supposition. Innovation and stasis are incompatible.
“Had we been willing to settle for the standard of living enjoyed by the average person 100 years ago, we could have cut the work week down to 10 to 15 hours.”
Can’t be done.
Felix, …… I was not and did not ……. critique the above quote you posted.
I was merely critiquing your beliefs about earlier (late 1800’s early 1900’s) living conditions
Thanks, NMD – I will look these up, as part of my study in The History of Ideas.
All ideas have a history.
I have posted before – not in a while – that this shorter work week idea HAS come to fruition, but not as we anticipated. I had only gone back to post-WWII. Here is my observation:
We had a boom post-WWII. Especially in technology. Two areas: designing and mass-producing mechanical things, and chemistry. We had the advent of the many labor-saving devices – washing machines, vacuums, etc. And, we had the day of “Better Living Through Chemistry.”
We also had an economic boom so vast swaths of the population could buy things.
The idea was discussed a lot: in the future, we would all live lives of leisure, since we were saving so much time, and having healthier lives.
Here is what happened. On average, we have ALL had our work week shrink, and we all live a good life. But the work week has not shrunk for all of us, equally. This enhanced productivity has allowed us to have the productive people stay busy at 60 hours a week, and the wealth is transferred to the unproductive people. I work 60 hours a week so some unknown person can be supported by my tax dollars.
That is where my 3-day work week has gone.
no, you work 60 hours a week to provide money for bullshit jobs in which people also work 60 hours a week.
I certainly think it is the height of stupidity to do it to curb carbon emissions – but I can see it happen somehow in the future as automation spreads in all workplaces. You would need to tax more – and introduce negative tax. In effect pay each human being a lifelong fixed amount of money from the date of birth.
Let’s see… Now everyone will need four jobs to make the same income, but now they’ll be traveling more to get to all those jobs, and that will of course drive up emissions. Yeah, I’m going to say they didn’t think this one all the way through…
Wrong – the transportation is going to be bicycles or horses [carriages OK]
Naah. The high poobahs of the green movement really envision sedan chairs, with them riding, rather than carrying one.
Bicycles maybe. Horses no, they fart too much. Rikshaws maybe, if you can get there and back in 10 hours at a normal human trot. Would stopping for a cupa’ be counted in the 10 hours? Oh MY Gawd, this would eliminate professional cricket. Ain’t no way anyone could finish a match in just 10 hours.
they are NUTZ
I beg to differ, they are nucking futs!
Richard Chenoweth – Nah, but IMO it is Cultural Marxist kite-flying. So why fly this kite, now? Is UK Labour trying to get a feeling for how gullible the UK voter is?
The UK officially needs a gulag archipelago for these characters. Western Falkland Islands living in a tent for 10 years maybe?
The gulag is likely to be set up as reeducation camps for those who disagree with these planteray saviours…..
South Georgia would be better. They can hug penguins to keep warm. Won’t be allowed to hurt them because protected species, naturally.
The actual working paper was published in April. Sooooo …
This is just short of Venezuela and it’s problems right now. This proposal creates mass poverty and confiscation of one’s wealth by the government and is step away from a socialist state if it goes down this path.
Ah, you have noticed what they want to model our new economy on then. Having even 10 hours work is a miracle there at the moment for most.
“people working shorter hours might be more productive during the time they dowork which would cancel some of the ecological benefit” Easy to solve – just make them all government employees and the productivity issue is solved.
Um, isn’t that called Socialism?
Besides, if you turned up to work 1 day a week, how are you going to remember what you were doing 6 days ago? How can you arrange appointments with external consultants? It takes years to do an engineering project now with 5 days x 9 hours per day. At 1 day x 10 hours, it would take 5 times longer to build anything at all…. Doh!
But there’d be no money available anyway as taxes would be cut by 1/5th, therefor no welfare, no roads, no railway, no building maintenance, no public transport, no public parks, no police?
What makes you think taxes would be cut?
Someone should pass this idea onto Warren. It sounds like something she’d jump on.
Or put them on a benefit to make up for the loss in income. After all, the government has lots of cash, and can always print more if its needed…….
….N.U.T.S…..!
Step away from the kool aid now.
The Labor-NOT party.
I guess after you starve to death your carbon foot print really takes a nose dive! Seriously who is this STUPID???
‘because people working shorter hours might be more productive during the time they do work”
who are these morons?…
People will work at exactly the same pace…you’ll only get 10 hours of work…instead of 40
…actually…they will more than likely work slower and less….no one likes to crank it up after doing nothing
nothing becomes the new norm
The UK public service unions will not have a bar of working a 10 hour week.
They’re not going to put in another 4 hours for any ba5tard bosses.
Well, sure, if everyone starves to death or freezes to death, then you would reduce everyone’s carbon footprint.
“unless current carbon emissions are cut there would be an ‘unprecedented decrease in the economic activity’”
To avoid this they propose a drastic evisceration of economic activity to prevent… an unprecedented decrease in the economic activity.
Of course they are loony. WTF do they think a 75% reduction in economic activity is?
Should not one expect that a 75% reduction in working hours also bring about a 75% reduction in productivity (GDP)?
With a 75% reduction in GDP mightn’t the government expect a 75% reduction in tax revenues?
Surely they haven’t thought this through very far.
Maybe the intent is to increase tax by about 300%?
“Surely they haven’t thought this through very far.”
That’s because they can’t think.
The irony is that reducing ‘carbon footprint’ would have no significant effect on climate. Patrick Michaels of Cato discusses the colossal mistakes being made by ‘climate science’ here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA5sGtj7QKQ&authuser=0 .
You can discover what has actually caused warming here http://diyclimateanalysis.blogspot.com . This method is easily adaptable to calculating future temperature using data up to any year in the past. The prediction using water vapor, SSN and a simple approximation of SST up to 2005 calculated the measured, 5-year smoothed, temperature trend for 2018 within 0.05 K.
Yep. Delays the global temp. rise by 70 days. Have we reached peak moron yet?
Hard to tell. Lots of folks have been indoctrinated with the false notion that CO2 has a significant effect on warming. The observation that CO2 continues its current rapid rate of increase (CO2 increased 2002-2018 by 40% of the increase 1800-2002) while the temperature trend increase rate has since about 2002 slowed to a creep, should eventually sink in.
Gosh, why didn’t I think of that? Let everyone starve to death or just commit suicide from the sheer hopelessness of it all. Lets see how Venezuela turns out and use that as a template, eh?
Sounds like a good way to bring down the British economy, and British social order with it. Once the chaos begins, no one in Britain will give a damn what the climate is doing.
It is a descent into sheer madness if it’s not a joke article from The Onion. But these days, you can hardly tell with the nuts from Labour.