“A journal … also encourages you to capture “fringe thoughts”: various ideas which may be by-products of everyday life, snatches of conversation overheard on the street, or, for that matter, dreams. Once noted, these may lead to more systematic thinking, as well as lend intellectual relevance to more directed experience.” C.Wright Mills. 1952
I tend to think in pictures, often when I’m listening to a seminar or reading a journal article or planning a piece of writing, I take my notes in cartoon form, drawing little pictures, arrows, cartoon like headings. These presentations do the same, very effectively. It makes me think perhaps it’s time to go back to chalk and do the same when teaching or presenting. Anyhow, for your summer viewing, two great RSA animates; one on David Harvey speaking about the crisis in capitalism, one on Philip Zimbardo speaking about orientations to the past and the present (and on technologies impact on our perspectives on time). Also, a song about Marx.
In this blog, I have been noting how the economic crash is affecting working time. National governments have proposed increases in working hours as a way of escaping recessions. These proposals have been either supported (Ireland) or opposed (Denmark) by the unions. Private companies are also drawing on the economic collapse as a rational for increasing working time, and in some cases, such as the transport industry, attempts to alter contracts have resulted in industrial action.So what about the last great crash – the Great Depression. What were the nature of working time struggles then?I have been reading an interesting article by Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt in the edited collection Work Time and Industrialisation that looks at New Deal and the Shorter-Hour movement.
In the early years of the twentieth centuary working hours in the US declined. Trade union struggles mobilised around calls for shorter hours. Following the economic crash in the 1920s unions threatened ‘universal strike if national 30 hour legislation was not introduced in order to reduce job losses caused by the economic downturn. Businessmen and industrialists also supported the shorter hours calls, albeit demanding that wages be reduced accordingly and that hours were reduced only for a temporary period. In 1932 half of American industry had shortened hours in order to save jobs. By then the “share the work” movement was growing and both Hoover and Roosevelt incorporated “share the work” policies into their political platforms. With Roosevelt’s election, the move was towards a legalisative basis to working hour reductions. A 30 hour bill was drafted and passed its first senate reading. However, whereas business would contance reducing hours voluntarily and on their own terms, they weren’t comfortable with legalisation.Opposition to the bill began to grow, an opposition that was drew on a new definition of progress, a definition based on “right to work” and a “full-time job”. Ultimately Roosvelt bowed to this pressure.Kline argues that this commitment to shorter hours was abandoned as Roosevelt and other politicans came to see the free-time produced by these policies as a threat; the policy agenda moved towards increasing employment and working time – and this policy has continued through to the present day. Trade-unions similarily changed their approach to working hours “labor’s call for “the progresive reduction in the hours of work” has been replaced by the more general call for more work and more jobs (1988: 237)
In the Irish context, is interesting to see a similar process for work today. Rather than calling for short hours, some like the INTO executive, recommend their members vote for an agreement that increases working hours. In this trade unions accept a definition of efficiency, drawn from business interests, that see progress and economic recovery as being based on more hours worked. To give a sense of how things have changed, I’ve added one of my favourite trade union posters to this post. From the Irish Women Worker’s Union at the turn of the century, it proclaims “The Irish Women Worker’s Union is out for more independence, more leisure and more comfort for the Working Classes”. I wish.
Cross, Gary. 1988. Work Time and Industrialization: An International History. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Cutright, P. 1986.
For years, Marxists have been accused by their opponents of believing in a crude economic determinism. However, it is not so much Marxists who believe this as our rulers. George Osborne described his Budget yesterday as “unavoidable.” His stooges have described the measures as “necessary.”
This is bull. The austerity is not necessary or unavoidable. It is the outcome of a choice, a judgment: should we risk damaging economic growth in order to placate the markets, or should we risk a sell-off in gilts to nurture the recovery? By all means argue that the government has made the right choice. But don’t pretend there wasn’t one.
Just got notice that there are some places available on this masters, for details follow the links below
MSc European Employment Studies at Trinity College Dublin
There are a few places left on the MSc European Employment Studies at Trinity College Dublin.
Applications will be accepted until 31 July 2010.
For further information including course contents, admission requirements, fees and how to
apply please consult http://www.tcd.ie/ERC/MSC/index.php
We now finally have a programme for the social movements / activist research workshop “Learning from each other’s struggles”, in Maynooth next weekend. There are some real highlights - Ziggy from Kolinko talking about organising call-centre workers as militant research, Dave Landy from the IPSC talking about the inside story of their year, a joint workshop on activists and media with Mimi Doran, Yuvi Basanth and Barra Hamilton, a workshop on the Really Open University with Andre Pusey and Elsa Noterman, and our friends from the Nottingham Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice doing a workshop on subjectivities and personal politics with a very Latin American flavour, among others.
All the details are here and a PDF of the provisional timetable is here.
Finally got Interface vol. 2 issue 1 online - feels like the gentle art of zine publishing never died, even though now it’s doing peer-reviewed journals with people around the world and broadband connections rather than a bunch of friends in a room with a Gestetner (I hasten to add that it is the comradely feelings that make the similarity!)
One of the oddest things about moving to England is the fact that the press is so right wing, and Sir Tony O’Reilly is so opportunistic, that the main O’Reilly newspaper is centre left. Anyway their front page today is pretty good.
Text reads:
Inside Parliament: “Legislation will be brought forward to restore freedoms and civil liberties”
Outside Parliament: “Peace Protesters targeted in Westminster: veteran campaigner Brian Haw is arrested”
For those of you who don’t know, BrianHaw is a peace campaigner who has been protesting against the ‘war of terror’ continuouslygdsfg day and night since 2001.
The following conference at NUI Maynooth looks interesting:
Spalpeens, Gombeens, Squireens: Class Relations in Nineteenth Century Ireland.
A one day interdisciplinary conference aiming to bring together researchers whose work offers an insight into the lives of ordinary people in nineteenth century Ireland. The particular focus is on class as those lives were bound up with production, domination, exploitation and conflict.
Given the relatively sparsely documented nature of this topic and the consequent challenges to research, employing the different approaches represented by different disciplines can be of great utility in giving us a fuller picture. In addition political/elite history is still the predominate focus of research on the Irish past, but a comprehensive understanding is only possible with a commensurate orientation towards the mass of the population. It is intended that the conference will attract the participation of people from different fields including post-medieval archaeology, historical geography, historical sociology, social history, and economic history (and others are welcome).
The conference will take place in N.U.I. Maynooth on Saturday the 31st of July 2010.
Further information from Eoin O’Flaherty and Terry Dunne at classconferencenuim@gmail.com:
There may be a nominal registration fee (e.g. approx. €20) – further details to be confirmed, we would appreciate it if people planning on attending but not presenting also notify us by Monday the 21st of June at classconferencenuim@gmail.com
Below are some charts indicating how the vote in the Croke Park deal is going. I’ll update them as the votes come in.
(If you want to see a bigger version, click on them, that will bring you to a flickr page, and then click on the small “all sizes” button on the top to open the full version.)
A friend of mine used to work for Microsoft in Denmark. She was offered the opportunity to re-locate to the mothership in Seattle. While the challenge of a change was tempting, the miserable annual leave on offer in the US was not. In Denmark, there is a legal requirement for companies to give Danish workers five weeks leave a year. In the US there are no legal obligations for employers to offer any holidays, though most offer somewhere between 10 and 20 days. Unsurprisingly she turned the job down.
In terms of working hours, the Scandinavian countries are often held up as a positive example of how things could be, so it’s interesting to note that an effect of the banking crisis has been an attempt, in many countries, to row back on working time gains. In Ireland, it is the neo-liberal ruling party, Fianna Fáil, which is proposing an increase in working hours. One of the conditions of the “Transformation Agenda” is that for teachers and lecturers work an extra hour a week. Whilst in Denmark, an even further-reaching policy is being proposed by the social democratic opposition party. The Social Democrats and Socialist People’s Party (SF) have included in their manifesto a plan to increase working hours accross the public sector from 37 hours to 38.
The Danish Confederation of Trade Unions is unhappy with the proposal. Thorkild E. Jensen, the president of trade union Danish Metal, said “I can’t envision that we’ll go along with increasing the working week by an hour for all employees.’ He could be right: According to Statistics Denmark’s ‘Workforce Survey 2009’, only 6 percent of the population is in favour of working more, while 14 percent are ready to work fewer hours. The remaining 80 percent are satisfied with the current 37 hour working week.
In contrast in Ireland, the leadership of many of the public sector unions supported the proposed extra hours. Perhaps in these two different trade union responses, we can understand why it is the Danish have their five-weeks of paid holidays a year
