First they came for hoop earrings, then Dr Seuss. Now guilt-laden liberals are claiming a FOUR-DAY WEEK IS RACIST!
WHEN I was five years old, my parents took me and my eldest brother to the cinema. This was a rare treat and I remember being so excited I could barely sleep the night before.
But as we lined up to enter the theatre, a man walking past me, looked me straight in the eyes and — with a smirk — called me the N-word. At the time, I didn’t know what it meant. But the way in which he said it left me terrified. I’ll never forget it.
That, dear reader, is racism — pure and simple. Yes, it can take on a more covert form but, in a nutshell, it’s a form of hatred. So forgive me for having burst into laughter this week when I read a new report from the Welsh Labour government describing the idea of a four-day working week as . . . wait for it . . . ‘racist.’
According to the report, it discriminates against ethnic minorities who disproportionately work in frontline public sector roles where a four-day week is impractical. They claim, therefore, that is exacerbates ‘existing inequalities’.
I understand, of course, that linking racism to everything under the sun has become de rigueur in the salons of the metropolitan elite. It’s a surefire way for guilt-laden liberals to disavow their privilege and prove their woke credentials.
It’s by no means the most absurd phenomenon to have attracted this slur, of course. A list of things that have been labelled racist in the past five years includes a ficional character from one of Dr Seuss’s books, which an elementary school in America has banned for perpetuating ‘harmful stereotypes’.
Apparently, The Cat In The Hat is not . . . a cat in a hat, but a metaphor for a racist minstrel performer. Go figure!
THEN there’s hoop earrings, which — according to one Australian journalist — amount to racial appropriation of Latina culture and are therefore a form of colonial plundering.
The list goes on and on, from rubbish bins and latex gloves to crying ‘Hip hip hooray’ and playing Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. So, yes, there’s a precedent here.
But as someone who has experienced real racism at first hand, I find it grossly offensive to link such innocuous things with a truly heinous form of discrimination.
In fact, calling everything racist undermines the severity of what actually constitutes genuinely harmful racism.
The four- day week does discriminate, that’s for sure. Not on the grounds of race, but class. The hard-working people who clean our streets, take away our rubbish and provide other vital services are not exclusively ‘black’ — they are working class.
But, sadly, the bleeding heart liberals who spout nonsense about four-day weeks being racist are not inclined to voice sympathy for the white working class because it only serves to highlight their own privilege.
They’re also reluctant to call the four-day week out for what it really is: an irresponsible betrayal of the tax payer, who will still have to pay the same amount into government coffers for public services only to receive an inevitably reduced service.
It’s somehow appropriate that this analysis originated in Wales. For decades, the Welsh education system has been in tatters. Standards of reading, writing and arithmetic in the country are at their lowest levels since 2012. A report published last year by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) found Welsh students to be the worst performing of all four home nations.
And then there’s the failing Welsh NHS. Waiting lists in Wales are currently at a record high, with more than 760,000 patients queuing for treatment, some 20 per cent of whom have been waiting more than a year. The idea of introducing a four-day week under such circumstances sounds like a grotesque practical joke.
There have also been cuts to the Welsh police force, a 35 per cent reduction in business rate relief for pubs, shops and restaurants and a 10 per cent cut in funding for arts and culture bodies.
Meanwhile, the Senedd — the Welsh parliament — is also considering making people pay to visit museums, and is planning to increase university tuition fees and impose further charges for dental and social care.
This is not a nation ready to take an extra day off each week. This is a nation fiddling while Cardiff burns!
And yet, following a year-long consultation, a trial of the fourday week for some public sector staff in Wales looks destined to go ahead this year, with Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools supposedly lined up to make up most of the shortfall in workloads.
I have a pretty good idea of how this trial is going to pan out. It’ll be very similar to what happened with the work-from-home boom during Covid. To begin with, employees will work hard to prove the new system works. And then, once it’s in place and irreversible, productivity will drop, laziness will set in and the standard of public services will decline, something that will affect us all, whatever our skin colour.
Of course, trials of a four- day working week are nothing new. Perhaps most notoriously, Lib Dem-run South Cambridgeshire district council in January last year moved 500 desk-based staff onto a four- day week, without docking their pay, with the aim of improving employee ‘wellbeing’.
In fact, it wasn’t even a full fourday week, but a rather leisurely ‘30-hour week’.
Unsurprisingly, there was uproar from local residents at the idea of paying civil servants to enjoy a three-day weekend.
The Government duly stepped in and issued a ‘best value’ notice, which forced the council to prove it was acting in the interests of its angry residents.
The council’s high- handed response was to say it would ‘consider’ the Government’s notice but, at the time of writing, was carrying on with its trial.
ALMOST unbelievably, it later emerged that the council’s chief executive Liz Watts was researching a PhD thesis on the benefits of a four-day week.
Not only will her council provide a useful case-study for her project but the day off a week she is entitled to, along with all the council’s other workers, might well give her time to write it.
In 2022, 61 British organisations took part in what was the world’s biggest ever trial of the four-day working week. The results only confirm my suspicions. Eightytwo per cent of CEOs and managers who took part said staff wellbeing seemed to improve, while 96 per cent of staff felt it was a boon to their personal lives.
Well, I’m sure my wellbeing would improve if I spent six months of the year on an exotic beach with a pina colada, but that doesn’t make it a sensible thing to do.
Even more worrying is that, earlier this year, the Scottish government launched its own trial in a selection of its public services. The scheme was spearheaded by First Minister Humza Yousaf. If the trial lasts as long as he’s likely to, I suppose we should’t be too worried.
Here’s an idea: perhaps the public could vote for what work won’t be done by public sector workers struggling to complete their duties in their shortened week? Let’s start with diversity and inclusivity training and go from there, shall we?
But for all the hot-air about wellbeing and staff retention, the truth is that the four- day week smacks of a society that has given up on hard work, abandoned any sense of duty and forgotten the value of honest graft.
But whatever you may think of it, it is not ‘racist’.