Labour is treating businesses as if they are the enemy
THE best that can be said for John McDonnell’s proposal for a four-day week is that it is one better than the threeday week – forced upon Edward Heath’s government in the 1970s as militant unions closed down power stations, causing blackouts and requiring electricity to be rationed. Even so, it would do untold damage to the economy.
According to a study by the Centre for Policy Studies, the imposition of a 32-hour, four-day week would cost the public sector alone between £17billion and £45billion a year as employers would be forced to hire extra staff to fill the missing hours.
The single biggest victim of the policy would be the NHS. Earlier this week Labour was boasting that it will increase NHS funding to £155billion a year, in today’s terms. That is £6billion a year more than the Conservatives have promised to spend, but anyone who thinks it would mean NHS patients being able to enjoy an extra £6billion worth of healthcare a year is fooling themselves. That sum would be more than swallowed up by the costs involved in hiring extra doctors, nurses and ancillary staff.
WHEN this was pointed out to Labour, its various spokespeople flapped around – some telling us that the NHS would be exempt from the four-day week and some telling us that no, it would be forced on every employer, NHS included.
After all, it would seem a little odd if librarians and council gardeners were ordered to knock off for the week on Thursday afternoon for the benefit of their health while doctors and nurses had to do an extra day’s work.
McDonnell’s claim that his four-day week would be paid for by an increase in productivity is absurd. It is true that productivity increased in Victorian factories as the working day was shortened. But that coincided with a period of rapid mechanisation. Moreover, factory workers at that time were working extremely long hours in very physical work and with poor diets.
However much Labour tries to tell us otherwise, British workplaces are a long way from Victorian sweatshops.
And in a modern servicebased economy it is much harder to increase productivity by utilising technology. Hospital patients need to be cared for 24 hours a day. The only way you can increase productivity in nursing is to demand that nurses look after more patients at a time. I wonder if John McDonnell has consulted the nursing unions on that.
He might find that NHS staff have different priorities than fewer working hours – such as not being ripped off by the cowboy parking companies who now run many hospital car parks. In fact, has McDonnell really asked any of us if we want to reduce our working week from 37.3 hours – the current average – to 32 hours? Some might appreciate extra leisure time, but there may be others who enjoy their work, see it as a vocation, not just a means to earn money, and have no desire for an extra day playing golf.
McDonnell surely falls into this category himself. For the sake of all of us, I wish he would reduce his working week – preferably to zero hours – but there is little sign of that. He can’t stop himself making speeches and popping up on TV.
The four-day week would sting taxpayers, but it would also bring many private businesses to their knees. How would they compete with US and Asian manufacturers where there is a very different attitude to hard work? It is typical of
Labour’s attitude to business. Every day we have some new burden. Yesterday it was yet more threats of heavy fines for companies that fail to provide data on equal pay – this from a party which has yet to elect its first female leader, 40 years after the Conservatives gave Britain its first female PM.
JEREMY Corbyn’s Labour has an institutional dislike of business. It doesn’t trust people who work hard, create jobs and pay large taxes. To Corbyn and McDonnell they are just there to be milked, threatened and generally treated like criminals.
It is no way to run an economy. If we want to remain a wealthy country with good public services, we need a lively private sector where businesses are allowed to get on without government ministers breathing down their necks, telling them who they are allowed to employ, how long workers are allowed to work, and how much each of them should be paid.
Without strong businesses, the Government won’t have strong tax receipts to pay for public services. Not that this seems to register in John McDonnell’s fools’ paradise.
‘The single biggest victim of a four-day week would be the NHS’