Proposals to restrict the weekly working hours of Australians reflect a confusion of moral principles, a disconnect from reality and a threat to social equity and cohesion.
Proposals of this sort have been around a long time. Current submissions ask government to cap working hours at 48 hours per week. Apparently the need for this has been identified in academic research which reveals that people who work more than 48 hours in a week suffer bad health. Further, a "chronic culture of overwork" is bad for family life and the community.
The intellectual home of this academic argument is Europe. There the prevailing view has been that labour law can be used to structure social behaviour to positive ends. France is the leader with complex labour laws dictating how, when and where work can be done. The law most symbolising French state control of working lives is the limitation on weekly working hours. It's proven a disaster.
The laws have been so impractical that exceptions have been applied for many job types. For example how do you limit the working hours of soldiers in combat? Do you have them stop when under fire because they have reached 48 hours of work? Plainly not! And soldiering is the worst profession that could be thought of that damages personal health and family life. It's perhaps an extreme and even silly example but it demonstrates the extreme and even silliness of the academic proposal.
On more mundane levels if working hours are to be capped does that mean that people who have worked 48 hours in one job must be banned from taking a second job? Do people who are self-employed, now around one fifth of Australian workers, have to be stopped from working the hours they want? Should the Prime Minister be told not to work more than 48 hours?
How would a 48-hour cap on working hours apply to the oil and mining industries? Take a rigger on a gas platform off the north coast of Western Australia. He works twelve hours a day for fourteen days straight then has fourteen days off. That is, for two weeks he works 84 hours a week then for two weeks he does no work. He commutes to Townsville where his family live, shares the parenting with his spouse, coaches a junior footy team on roster with another coach and indulges his passion for fishing with his kids.
Yet the research on "excessive" weekly working hours apparently would declare this lifestyle bad for health and socially "damaging". But this oil rigger loves his lifestyle.
The problem with such research is that it's usually narrow and limited, incapable of taking into account the wide diversity of work/lifestyle blending that occurs in society. Diversity has become everything and it's what makes for vibrant economies and strong communities.
When people have maximum capacity to decide how, when and where they work they invent new ways of doing things. Individuals decide how they want to blend their lives with their work. They make free choices. Society, economies and work changes into forms not thought of before. But this doesn't fit easily with some academic research it appears.
Too often research on work is stuck in a mental framework that assumes all work follows the traditional nine to five, five day a week pattern. But this is only one way work now occurs. And government policy that is built on such a disjoint from new work realities becomes socially dangerous. France has found this out.
Some suburbs of Paris for example have become violent, no-go ghettos, directly as an outcome of massively high unemployment in black Muslim populations. Growing EU and French recognition is that state imposed constraints on work are a primary cause of these social ills. Yet in France the politics of commitment to their labour laws makes a pathway out seem impossible.
At the heart of the problem is a moral question. Societies need rules to function. All rules restrict individual freedom. But we know that maximising freedom leads to happier societies. It's a difficult balancing act.
Working hours fit into a category where maximum freedom will produce the best economic, individual, family and social outcomes. Each individual should be unrestricted in the hours they choose to work. Each person must have the right to mix and match their work-life balance which will change over time and circumstances.
Calls on the state to impose working hour restrictions, assume a moral authority to impose the traditional wage-slave like, work-life mix on everyone. This is not a moral position that can be accepted.
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