On February 7, 2018, Justin Huggler writes on The Telegraph:
German metal workers have won the right to a 28-hour working week in a landmark deal between employers and Europe’s biggest union.
Under the deal, workers will be allowed to reduce their working week to just 28 hours for a temporary period of up to two years. Employers will not be able to block individual workers from taking up the offer.
Those who take advantage of the deal will only be paid for the hours worked and at the end of two years they will have to return to the current 35-hour working week.
The collective deal was agreed by IG Metall, Europe’s largest industrial union, and for now only covers around 900,000 workers in the metals and electrical industries in the south-western state of Baden-Württemberg.
But the state, home to major German industrial companies like Bosch and Daimler, the makers of Mercedes, is often seen as a weather vane for the German economy and it is likely to be rolled out across the whole economy.
The deal is seen as testament to the growing influence of German unions against a backdrop of the country’s strong economic performance and low unemployment.
Last year the German economy grew at its fastest rate since 2011 and umeployment is at its lowest since reunification in 1990, putting workers in a strong position.
The agreement came after IG Metall called three 24-hour strikes and workers downed tools at companies including Daimler, Siemens and Airbus
But economists say it is also a sign that factors such as work-life balance could be as important as pay in future negotiations.
IG Metall reportedly turned down a 6.8 per cent pay increase in favour of the reduced working week. It also won a 4.3 per cent pay increase and one-time payments to workers.
In return for agreeing the shorter week employers won the right to offer more workers longer 40-hour contracts, meaning the deal will offer more flexibility.
“The deal isn’t extremely good for unions, but it isn’t too bad either — overall they managed to push through more of their demands than expected,” said Andreas Scheuerle, economist at Dekabank in Frankfurt.
Stefan Wolf, the employers’ chief negotiator, described the deal as a “burden which will be hard to bear for many firms”.
Gary Reber Comments:
This is the classic labor union movement demand: pay us more for same labor input or pay us the same but for less labor input.
The labor union movement and their union representatives are facing tremendous challenges as increasingly Americans and other workers throughout the world, who are solely dependent on their labor worker wages to live, are up against the controlling “greedy” wealthy capital ownership class who they are essentially slaves to. Sadly, the present reality is the vast majority of Americans and other workers throughout the world have become dependent on producer corporations that are narrowly owned for jobs as their ONLY means to earn an income.
The fight to unify the working class in the United States and elsewhere should be a fight to gain ownership stakes in the corporations who employ them. Yet, the fight is always the same –– “pay us more wages.”
Americans need to understand the anger and developing turmoil as it relates to job losses and the devaluation of labor value amongst auto workers and all other workers who feel taken advantage of by the owners of businesses who rely on both labor and the non-human factor –– productive capital “automated” and “machine” assets –– to produce goods, products, and services. Increasingly, and at a rapid rate, workers are being dismissed as tectonic shifts in the technologies of product replace them and devalue labor’s worth.
This reality has been shaping since the Industrial Revolution. Over the past century there has been an ever-accelerating shift to productive capital — which reflects tectonic shifts in the technologies of production. The mixture of labor “worker” input and physical capital “worker” input has been rapidly changing at an exponential rate of increase for over 240 years in step with the Industrial Revolution (starting in 1776) and had even been changing long before that with man’s discovery of the first tools, but at a much slower rate. Up until the close of the nineteenth century, the United States remained a working democracy, with the production of products and services dependent on labor worker input. When the American Industrial Revolution began and subsequent technological advances amplified the productive power of non-human capital, as it has to this day, plutocratic finance channeled its ownership into fewer and fewer hands, as we continue to witness today with government by the wealthy evidenced at all levels. While historically, the expansion of productive technology had created jobs, today the trend is that the new jobs being created are increasingly being filled by a “machine” at inception, while the jobs remaining still rest in the crosshairs of technological development and application.
Practically all of our manufacturing corporations have chosen to outsource their parts and finished product manufacturing, to varying degrees, to slave wage labor and non-regulated countries. As a consequence, American corporations have become (and increasingly are becoming) no longer dependent on American workers or consumers as they seek lower production costs and expanded consumer markets in other countries. Currently, any time corporations feel their operations are “threatened” vis-à-vis less profitability, they shut down factories and jobs in our homeland, and move their manufacturing out of the United States, investing in the development of slave wage labor countries and creating jobs there, sharing American technological innovations and inventions that enable efficient production.
Such overseas operations have the advantage of “sweat-shop” slave labor rates relative to American standards, low or no taxation, State subsidies, supportive infrastructure provisions, currency manipulation, and few if any environmental regulations — which translate to lower-cost production. Thus, producing the same product or service in the United States would be more expensive. For most people, economic globalization means a growing gap between rich and poor, technological alienation of the labor worker from the means of production, and the phenomenon of global corporations and strategic alliances forcing labor workers in high-cost wage markets, such as the United States, to compete with labor-saving capital tools and lower-paid foreign workers.
The unions should reassess their role of bargaining for more and more income for the same work or less and less work, and embrace a cooperative approach to survival, whereby they redefine “more” income for their workers in terms of the combined wages of labor and capital on the part of the workforce. They should continue to represent the workers as labor workers in all the aspects that are represented today –– wages, hours, and working conditions –– and, in addition, represent workers as full voting stockowners as capital ownership is built into the workforce. What is needed is leadership to define “more” as two ways to earn income.
Everyone in union negotiating positions should be advocating for a union movement transformation to a producers’ ownership union movement and embrace and fight for economic democracy. They should play the part that they have always aspired to, that is, a better and easier life through participation in the nation’s economic growth and progress. As a result, labor unions will be able to broaden their functions, revitalize their constituency, and reverse their decline.
Unions are the only group of people in the whole world who can demand a real, justice managed, equal allocation Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), who can demand the right to participate in the expansion of their employer by asserting their constitutional preferential rights to become capital owners, be productive, and succeed. The ESOP can give employees access to capital credit so that they can purchase the employer’s stock, pay for it in pre-tax dollars out of the earnings generated by the new assets that underlie that stock, and after the stock is paid for earn and collect the capital earnings income from it, and accumulate it in a tax haven until they retire, whereby they continue to be productive capital earners receiving income from their capital asset ownership stakes. This is a viable route to individual self-sufficiency needing significantly less or no government redistributive assistance. See https://www.cesj.org/…/employee-stock-ownership-plans-esops/.
We live in a world driven through the one-factor lens of workers and demands for more pay for the same work input (or less) as automation and “machine” inputs continue to out-produce labor’s input. Yet there is never a focus on the necessity for workers to gain ownership stakes in the non-human productive capital assets that are replacing them in the production of good, products, and services. Instead, it is the same old fight for more wages and benefits, which is an added cost to production, and a fight against automation and “machines” that replace workers. These “old” ways will no longer work in the advancing age of all-encompassing non-human “automation” of the means of production.
We must recognize that human life, dignity, and liberty require that each person has the power and independent means to support and sustain one’s own life, dignity, and liberty –– i.e. through one’s own private property rights (personal or shared control) and rights to the full fruits or “profits” in what one owns. Thus, we, as a society need to aim to structurally diffuse economic power by democratizing access to capital ownership for each person.
Historically and in its present form, the labor movement is destructive in that it agrees with the idea that propertyless people should exist to serve those who own property. In other words, keep the working class in the servitude to the wealthy capital ownership class. The labor movement doesn’t seek to end wage slavery; it merely seeks to improve the condition of the wage slave. If it actually cared about human rights and freedom, it wouldn’t call itself the “labor movement.”
The unions should reassess their role of bargaining for more and more income for the same work or less and less work, and embrace a cooperative approach to survival, whereby they redefine “more” income for their workers in terms of the combined wages of labor and capital on the part of the workforce. They should continue to represent the workers as labor workers in all the aspects that are represented today –– wages, hours, and working conditions –– and, in addition, represent workers as full voting stockowners as capital ownership is built into the workforce. What is needed is leadership to define “more” as two ways to earn income.
Everyone in union negotiating positions should be advocating for a union movement transformation to a producers’ ownership union movement and embrace and fight for economic democracy. They should play the part that they have always aspired to, that is, a better and easier life through participation in the nation’s economic growth and progress. As a result, labor unions will be able to broaden their functions, revitalize their constituency, and reverse their decline.
When labor unions transform to producers’ ownership unions, opportunity will be created for the unions to reach out to all shareholders (stock owners) who are not adequately represented on corporate boards, and eventually all labor workers will want to join an ownership union in order to be effectively represented as an aspiring capital owner. The overall strategy should assure that the labor compensation of the union’s members does not exceed the labor costs of the employer’s competitors, and that capital earnings of its members are built up to a level that optimizes their combined labor-capital worker earnings. A producers’ ownership union would work collaboratively with management to secure financing of advanced technologies and other new capital investments and broaden ownership. This will enable American companies to become more cost-competitive in global markets and to reduce the outsourcing of jobs to workers willing or forced to take lower wages.
The cause and effect of wage slavery is rooted in the Keynesian paradigm. Economist John Maynard Keynes, whose Keynesian model is widely taught, falsely presumed that the only way to balance mass productive power with mass purchasing power is through a wage system — ignoring the possibility of democratizing future ownership of labor-displacing productive capital technologies and rising ownership incomes as a market-generated means of eliminating wage slavery, welfare slavery, debt slavery and charity slavery for the 99 percent of humanity. Binary economist (human and non-human productive inputs), corporate tax attorney, investment banker and author Louis O. Kelso argued that the Keynesian model fails to recognize that “when capital workers [owners] replace labor workers as the major suppliers of goods and services, labor employment alone becomes inadequate because labor’s share of the income arising from production cannot provide the progressively better standard of living that technology is making possible. Labor produces subsistence at best. Capital can produce affluence. To enjoy affluence, all households must engage to an increasing extent in capital work.”
It is imperative that leaders seeking new solutions cease the opportunity presented in presidential and congressional elections to implement effective programs for expanded ownership of productive capital, and address the problem of education on this subject.
At one point in 1976, the discussion led to The Joint Economic Committee of Congress endorsing a policy to broaden capital ownership as an economic goal for America. The 1976 Joint Economic Report stated: “To provide a realistic opportunity for more U.S. citizens to become owners of capital, and to provide an expanded source of equity financing for corporations, it should be made national policy to pursue the goal of broadened capital ownership. Congress also should request from the Administration a quadrennial report on the ownership of wealth in this country, which would assist in evaluating how successfully the base of wealth was being broadened over time.”
Unfortunately the Congress and no past or present President have never paid any attention to this policy, and the goal has subsequently been unacknowledged and unheeded by our plutocratic political leaders.
Instead, the American people have been promised that if the wealthy ownership class could gain even more earnings through low taxes and deregulation, the savings would be reinvested to grow the economy and create more and better jobs and higher wages. The focus has always been on job creation and wage growth, while the rich get richer by invisibly accumulating more capital asset ownership.Of course, there is always some truth to the idea that new jobs will be created through reinvestment, but jobs are eliminated as well, as the reinvestment is increasingly directed to the formation of new, highly-efficient non-human technological means of production, requiring far less workers and/or to extensions to other countries with lower labor costs and no or few regulations.
Americans should be smarter and realize that this is an underhanded scheme for the already wealthy and their heirs to OWN America and further concentrate and monopolize ownership of ALL productive capital, present and future. Such “trickle-down” thinking does not work. As a result of such unworkable policies, fewer and fewer people remain good “customers with money” to buy what the economy is capable of producing. And even then, as consumers, the vast majority of Americans have gone into consumption debt in order to provide for themselves and their families. Americans increasingly do not feel secure and are being challenged as to how to survive, faced with mounting over-extended consumer credit as well as less and less job security to earn sufficient income to pay off their debt. Unnecessarily, millions of Americans are faced with losing their savings and homes, and their jobs –– and their dreams for a better life –– with no way to earn through owning the wealth-creating, income-producing productive capital now formed and that which will be formed in the future.
As history has confirmed, better earnings and better job prospects did not and will not trickle down by lowering taxes on the wealthy and the corporations they own or deregulating the rules of responsible production. Responsibly growing the economy simultaneously with creating new capital owners, and thus “customers with money,” is the ONLY way to achieve inclusive prosperity and economic justice.
On the basic issue of economic empowerment of each individual, the essential goal needs to be economic democracy, which will finally make political democracy a meaningful reality.
The emphasis on the systemic injustices of monopoly capitalism can only be addressed by comprehensive reforms to the tax, monetary and inheritance policies favoring the top 1 percent at the expense of the 99 percent. The current system perpetuates budget deficits and unsustainable government debt, underutilized workers, a lack of financing for financing advanced energy and green technologies, and outsourcing of U.S. industrial jobs to slave-wage labor countries, trade deficits, shrinking consumption incomes among the poor and middle class, and conventional methods for financing productive growth (with past savings requirements) that increase the ownership and power gaps between the top 1 percent and the 90 percent whose combined ownership accumulations are already less than the elite whose money power is widely known as the source of political corruption and the breakdown of political democracy.
The fact is that political democracy is impossible without economic democracy. Those who control money control the laws that foster wage slavery, welfare slavery, debt slavery and charity slavery. These laws can and should be changed by the 99 percent and those among the 1 percent who are committed to a just and economically classless market economy, true equality of opportunity, and a level playing field in the future for 100 percent of Americans. By adopting economic policies and programs that acknowledge every citizen’s right to contribute productively to the economy as a capital owner as well as a labor worker, the result will be an end to perpetual labor servitude and the liberation of people from progressive increments of subsistence toil and compulsive poverty as the 99 percent benefits from the rewards of productive capital-sourced income.
The question that requires an answer is now timely before us. It was first posed by Kelso in the 1950s but has never been thoroughly discussed on the national stage. Nor has there been the proper education of our citizenry that addresses what economic justice is and what capital ownership is. Therefore, by ignoring such issues of economic justice and capital ownership, our leaders are ignoring the concentration of power through concentrated ownership of productive capital, with the result of denying the 99 percent equal opportunity to become capital owners.
The question, as posed by Kelso is: “how are all individuals to be adequately productive when a tiny minority (capital owners) produce a major share and the vast majority (labor workers), a minor share of total goods and services,” and thus, “how do we get from a world in which the most productive factor — physical capital — is owned by a handful of people, to a world where the same factor is owned by a majority — and ultimately 100 percent — of the consumers, while respecting all the constitutional rights of present capital owners?”
For an in-depth overview of solutions to economic inequality, see my article “Economic Democracy And Binary Economics: Solutions For A Troubled Nation and Economy” at http://www.foreconomicjustice.org/?p=11.
For even more in-depth reading about solution to bring about a new economic paradigm:
Support the Agenda of The JUST Third WAY Movement (also known as “Economic Personalism”) at http://foreconomicjustice.org/?p=5797, http://www.cesj.org/resources/articles-index/the-just-third-way-basic-principles-of-economic-and-social-justice-by-norman-g-kurland/ and http://www.cesj.org/resources/articles-index/the-just-third-way-a-new-vision-for-providing-hope-justice-and-economic-empowerment/.
