A number of sources confirm this Onion-like story.
Sun: Labour Aides Discuss Plans to Combat Climate Change by Cutting Work to Ten Hours.
Metro: Plan for 10-hour working week with 75% paycut under Labour
Those are Tabloids, but even Bloomberg is in on the act with a less controversial but similar idea: Jeremy Corbyn’s Four-Day Week Is Not Such a Bad Idea.
It’s the Labour party shadow chancellor, McDonnell, who supports 10 hours.
Vital Contribution
Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, who has previously backed a four-day working week, said: ‘This is a vital contribution to the growing debate around free time and reducing the working week.’
Leo Murray, adviser to Shadow Treasury minister Clive Lewis, said: ‘I like this take a lot.’
More About McDonnell
From Wikipedia, John McDonnell
Socialism with an iPad
Following Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader in 2015, he appointed McDonnell as his Shadow Chancellor. Alongside Corbyn, McDonnell has been seen as a key figure on the left-wing of the party. As Shadow Chancellor, McDonnell pledged to increase spending on infrastructure and research, describing his vision for the economy as “socialism with an iPad“.
An Honest Marxist
In 2006, McDonnell said that “Marx, Lenin and Trotsky” were his “most significant” intellectual influences. Footage emerged of McDonnell in 2013 talking about the 2008 global financial crisis and stating, “I’ve been waiting for this for a generation! We’ve got to demand systemic change. Look, I’m straight, I’m honest with people: I’m a Marxist.”
Green Revolution
Inspiration
The inspiration for this obviously mad work time limit is a publication by Philipp Frey: The Ecological Limits of Work.
Supposedly, a “1 percent decrease in working hours could lead to a 0.8 percent decrease in GHG emissions.“
That is not enough to save the planet, but a 75% net reduction reduction in hours worked, varying by country, along with other improvements, allegedly will.
Politics of Time
Sweden needs to reduce hours worked by about 70%, Germany by about 86%, and the UK by about 75%.
The study claims “Actual working hours levels vastly exceed the levels that might be considered sustainable.”
Unfortunately, “Working time reduction as an isolated policy by itself will likely be insufficient to combat climate change.”
The report concludes “In addition to shortening the working week quantitatively and pushing for a substantial reconfiguration of the economy, a more qualitative approach to a politics of time might also be needed.“
Just when you thought the global warming madness could not quickly get any nuttier, it quickly got nuttier.
If you support Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn who praises the economic model of Venezuela or McDonnell, a Marxist who embraces a 10-hour work week, your head is not screwed on straight.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
It has nothing to do with global warming. It has to do with reducing inflation. Less wages earned means less money out there to chase up the price of things. It just allows big government to keep their debt Ponzi rolling along a bit longer. Anyone who believes anything from government is a fool
Anyone else that that friend with the annoying sister..?
Speechless…automation may at some point cut the workweek but we are a long way away
No longer being forced to support an ever growing leech army by way of taxes, regulations and debasement, would have cut the workweek for productive people massively already.
As increases in capital stock and productivity allows more to be created for the same effort, people take some of that gain out in the form of increased consumption of stuff; some of it in increased consumption of leisure. The exact split varies by individual, and by time, but increased leisure is always a result of increased productivity/wealth.
That is, unless all productivity increases is confiscated; in order to pay for pumped up cell phone, tennis sock, house, and stock, price “appreciation;” so that idle, but connected, leeches get to enjoy more leisure instead; mindlessly dawdling around doing pointless makework, while pretending to be useful for something other than fishfood.
Mr McDonnell might like to read the archives on the last time this was done in Britain–or at least the 3-day work week imposed on workers in 1972. I remember it: electricity blackouts, trains and buses stopping between stops as drivers walked off . . . How not to get elected?
The shock here is not that nature continues to produce the occasional articulate idiot, but that so many admire articulate idiots.
English are the people who asked for help to defeat National Socialism and promptly voted for socialism after the war.
The entire purpose of financialization and progressivism, is to use money printing and regulation to transfer all power, by way of transferring purchasing power/wealth, away from those competent enough to create wealth; to the dumbest of the dumb: Those whose sole “talent” is connections and closeness to the Regime and it’s money printers. IOW, it’s just One Party communism by another name.
That’s how you end up with health care not ran by doctors, but by “Leaders”, “Managers”, and “Investors.” Who must all pay more attention to ambulance chasers than to patients. Ditto manufacturing, high tech, low tech, even sports. All power to mediocrities (and below) in PE, banking, ambulance chasing, bureaucracies and other zero-value-add, abject wastetivities. With anyone potentially competent, stuck listening to those clueless, but privileged, backmarkers; instead of simply routing around them, as competent people would have if left free to do so.
So, where’s the bill to cut rents, mortgages and food prices by 75%?
There really is no logic to the socialist and marxist mindset.
Except to attain and retain power.
If “global warming” was their total top priority, the massive threat to the world and they wanted the UK to dramatically slash greenhouse emissions, they would be 100% behind:
Stopping all immigration. Cold stop. And kicking out all illegals. Not one more housing development, no one more road, not one more power plant, not one more sewer plant, no one more grocery store, not one more tree cut, not one more pristine field developed, etc. But you need a stable or declining population and not one growing due to 3rd world immigration to do that.
Intimidate construction of dozens of nuclear power plants. Nuclear power has zero green house emissions and is the only power source that could actually power a nation (solar and wind come comes no where close). France, at one time, produced nearly 90% of its power through nuclear power plants. So it can be done. Remember, cost and waste should not matter and this is the TOP threat to mankind.
And if they believed their won hype – none of these socialists should own any beach property (but plenty do in the UK and in the USA). In fact, beach front property should be plummeting in value yet it is skyrocketing instead.
They should all be leading by example. No mansions. No private planes. No travel by planes. No heat in the winter. No meat. No SUVs. Etc. None do. But they will expect YOU to live that way.
Mish you can’t even keep a coherent narrative in your thoughts… on one hand automation is going to be amazing and displace millions of workers and lead to plummeting prices, but on the other hand we all have to just keep working and working, for why exactly? You don’t know, you don’t say, but apparently our heads are not screwed on right, even though you keep telling us how automation will displace millions of workers. Does it offend your sense of capitalist pig to propose that people benefit from automation instead of corporations?
McDonnell should do his bit reducing greenhouse emissions by shutting up.
What I find frightening about all of this is just how many politicians dont even have the first idea about resources and how those resources produce our wealth. Do they really think that all that all those goods and services that we are able to consume are produced for free, falling from from sky like manna from heaven? That if we cut our work down by 75% that we will be just as wealthy?
One has to conclude, that they really do believe this. One just has to hope that enough people who do understand how economies work decide not to vote for this madness. I dont want to suffer whilst these fools learn the hard way.