It has always grated against my nature to hear of references to the working of longer hours, whether it be a direct increase in hours in the full-time working week or whether it be indirectly through overtime mechanisms.
Now it might come as a surprise to many, especially those to whom such seems a very good thing. After all, most of us would jump at the opportunity to work more and earn more, right? Well yes… but it is a well-to-do person indeed who would settle for such.
Yet a person such as myself likes to think that he can see beyond the immediate implications of such measures and gain an understanding of the big picture. While working an hour longer each day does tend to increase the amount of spending money in one’s pocket it is also ultimately payoff for having less time to the self. Persons with less time to dedicate to the self tend to have less initiative where the self is concerned. Therefore a full-time worker is an individual who is one with the system - plugged in almost as reliably as a battery in a torch. A very large section of the population falls within this category. Such persons are more likely than not “under control” for as far as the economic and political classes are concerned.
On the other hand, the act of pitching in for overtime (and leaving aside the potential for worker-level corruption that such could leave open, especially within the public sector) also reduces the overall number of jobs available. Eight individuals working five hours extra every week is robbing a ninth person of a full time job.
Furthermore this fact inflates the unemployment rate of any given governed location, increasing the need for welfare providence to prevent a revolution of the masses. The money to provide such welfare is paid for by the working population and loans from outside.
Now it may seem that this seems very wasteful but in fact it potentially increases the competitiveness of a Nation. Theoretically if the amount of welfare provided is insufficient then you will have a pool of potential employees willing to offer their services for less wages. The degree of exploitation increases while the clout of the established working population is weakened. Why pay five dollars to one worker if another is willing to do the same job for four dollars?
The winner, as usual, is the merchantilist class - the bourgeois employer for whom all matters economic are his or her cloister. The people, as usual, bear the brunt.
An alternative to the sorry situation is to decrease the number of working hours in a full-time week. Such would seem almost communistic in nature but it makes a lot of sense when one considers that the funds saved in terms of overtime bonuses and welfare could be redistributed in the form of a higher wage per hour.
Now that would be a true win-win situation.
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