PARRY FOUR DAY WEEK

A four-day week is bad news for workers

By MIKE PARRY, writing in The Spectator

When I was a young reporter on the Daily Express in the 1980s I was sent to Belfast to cover the IRA’s hunger strikes campaign. It was a fast moving story, focused not just on the men who were dying from refusing food but all the riots, bombings and killings that accompanied their deaths. When you heard dustbin lids being banged on the pavements outside the Divis Flats on Belfast’s lower Falls Road at 2am it was the signal that another protestor had died.

Employees could be able to insist on finishing their contracted week’s hours on Thursday

It was an incredible story in which to be involved. But after four days of reporting on it for 18 hours a day I took a phone call in my hotel room from a colleague in the newsroom in Manchester. ‘OK – you’ve done your bit,’ he told me, ‘you can come home now’.

It was a strange thing to be told by a fellow reporter. I told him I had no intention of returning to Manchester as I was in the middle of an enormous story. I contacted the news editor and asked him what was going on. He explained that other reporters in the newsroom were insisting I should be re-called because to stay any longer was a breach of the four-day-week union agreement.

I told him I wanted to stay on the story as long as he was happy for me to be there. He said he was not going to order me back but I’d have to handle things with my fellow reporters when I eventually returned. I worked consecutively for the next 21 days.

When I eventually came home, I was given the cold shoulder by my fellow journalists who, when they did occasionally speak to me, mumbled and grumbled that I’d set a precedent of working more than four days a week and now the bosses might expect everybody to do it.

I tell this story because of the emergence of a ‘compressed hours’ clause which may be inserted into Angela Rayner’s new workers’ rights package. Under the shake-up, employees could be able to insist on finishing their contracted week’s hours on Thursday and have Friday off. Another proposal could hand workers the right to switch off, allowing staff to ignore emails or calls outside of strict working hours. This measure, in particular, is worrying for businesses. And what would it mean for journalists?

These measures could be just the start. And while Labour is posing as the champion of workers, it’s these same workers who will ultimately lose out.

This week, it was reported that Keir Starmer removed a portrait of Margaret Thatcher from Downing Street that the Prime Minister found ‘unsettling’. As well as taking down her picture, the Labour leader also seems determined to unpick Thatcher’s legacy more broadly.

The early 1980s were the start of the Thatcher years and Mrs Thatcher was laser-focused on scrapping legislation that was favourable to employees and anti-business. The laws surrounding workers’ rights were unbalanced. They emboldened the trade unions who had an iron grip on huge sections of the British workforce. The unions are not what they were, thanks to Thatcher’s changes. But the fear is that the lack of union muscle will be replaced by government rules. Such reforms will be just as ruinous to creativity, enterprise and investment. Employers will be treated as the ‘baddies’ even though they take all the risks in providing the jobs; and employees will be regarded as those who need protection against the dreadful people who provide them with work.

Improved working conditions for employees where it is possible is something we can all get behind. But if the pendulum swings too far towards workers’ rights, everybody will lose.

2 September 2024