Raphael John-Lall

For­mer jour­nal­ist and In­de­pen­dent Sen­a­tor, Suni­ty Ma­haraj be­lieves that the changes in the mod­ern econ­o­my, tech­nol­o­gy and cul­tur­al pat­terns have all ren­dered the tra­di­tion­al eight-hour work day ob­so­lete.

On Wednes­day, Ma­haraj spoke at a sem­i­nar host­ed on the sig­nif­i­cance of May Day for Labour in T&T which in­clud­ed themes like changes in the econ­o­my, the eight-hour work day and con­di­tions for work­ers at the Cipri­ani Col­lege of Labour and Co-op­er­a­tive Stud­ies, Val­sayn.

That dis­cus­sion comes at a time when there is a de­bate about Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar work­ing from home.

On Thurs­day, Per­sad-Bisses­sar told Guardian Me­dia she in­tends to con­duct state busi­ness from mul­ti­ple lo­ca­tions, in­clud­ing the of­fi­cial res­i­dence for T&T’s prime min­is­ter at St Ann’s in Port-of-Spain and Blenheim in To­ba­go, as well as from sites in Cen­tral and South Trinidad and her pri­vate home.

Ma­haraj gave the view that the eight-hour work day is “stress­ful” and suits a pro­duc­tion process that is no longer rel­e­vant in a mod­ern econ­o­my which is in­creas­ing­ly based on au­toma­tion.

“It is a kind of ob­so­lete idea. It worked for fac­to­ry work in the pe­ri­od of the In­dus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion and where you have large num­bers of peo­ple come out, cook­ie-cut­ter op­er­a­tions where they close the build­ings and go, then go in­to dif­fer­ent shifts. But in to­day’s world it is mean­ing­less.

“First of all, it is im­prac­ti­cal giv­en the traf­fic. It was a world where moth­ers were home most­ly, now moth­ers are out work­ing and that is why so many peo­ple are try­ing to delink and we are talk­ing work from home. Tech­nol­o­gy has trans­formed the work day and if you are do­ing eight hours of work, you go home and work the next eight hours be­cause you have a com­put­er and they ex­pect you to an­swer the emails. Those are the is­sues that we are com­ing to. It is putting a lot of pres­sure to say you have eight hours to catch up and do more work be­fore you get out next morn­ing,” she said.

She called for a new eco­nom­ic and so­cial mod­el to be de­vel­oped which will al­low new pat­terns of work to be in­stalled.

“The eight-hour work day is an idea whose time has passed, but is still here un­til we face it up square­ly and re­craft a con­cept of what our life looks like. Tech­nol­o­gy has re­shaped our lives and the world is no longer that world of the in­dus­tri­al age but is tak­ing us a long time to come to terms with tak­ing a blank can­vas say­ing in the con­text of our re­al­i­ty what will be the ide­al way to work. We have those old con­structs and we tried to squeeze peo­ple in­to them and the tech­nol­o­gy is now mess­ing with that.”

She al­so asked why are com­pa­nies and busi­ness­es are still mea­sur­ing per­for­mance by hours as work-from-home op­er­a­tions mean that some of the ex­pens­es and over­head costs have been trans­ferred form the busi­ness own­er to the em­ploy­ee.

“A rea­son­able world would be one in which you quan­ti­fy what you would ex­pect for a cer­tain amount of mon­ey in terms of out­put and the arrange­ments for do­ing so as some jobs that ac­tu­al­ly re­quire for the work­er to be phys­i­cal­ly in the place and there are jobs that do not re­quire it. Many com­pa­nies are now able to cut down in­vest­ment in the big build­ing that once housed every­body and all the things that they pur­chased like the soap, the tis­sue, the wa­ter, the cof­fee and you the work­er stay home and cov­er that cost. Your house is now part of the of­fice rent­ed where the cost has been trans­ferred to you. So now you have to think about what is a fair re­la­tion­ship when we move from work­ing in an of­fice and work­ing from home. So, the busi­ness own­ers’ room for prof­it mar­gins have in­creased. They can even take the of­fice build­ing and rent it out to be­ing in in­come.”

Labour econ­o­mist and al­so leader of the Move­ment for So­cial Jus­tice (MSJ) David Ab­du­lah, who took part in the pan­el dis­cus­sion, al­so gave the view that there needs to be a new way in how the econ­o­my and busi­ness­es lay out the new work day.

“There are com­pa­nies that are now seek­ing to change from an eight-hour day to a 12-hour day al­though they may keep with­in 40 hours a week. So, a num­ber of com­pa­nies that have shift op­er­a­tions in the petro­chem­i­cal sec­tor are try­ing to change the shift arrange­ments to 12-hour days which the unions have al­ways ar­gued is nei­ther safe nor pro­duc­tive be­cause you have peo­ple work­ing long hours, their con­cen­tra­tion span will de­cline and you give rise to the po­ten­tial of ac­ci­dents. So, there are is­sues of around how do we deal with work­ing time.”

He added that some com­pa­nies are in breach of the Min­i­mum Wage Act and this caus­es a drop in pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and af­fects em­ploy­ees’ per­son­al lives neg­a­tive­ly.

“How do we re­struc­ture our so­ci­ety in or­der to make peo­ple’s lives bet­ter. giv­en where we are with tech­nol­o­gy? There is a re­al­i­ty for many work­ers in T&T in­clud­ing many women work­ers for ex­am­ple who are se­cu­ri­ty guards who work twelve hours a day with­out over­time pay and who must get up at 4am in the morn­ing and get out of the morn­ing by 5am or 6am. This is not le­gal as the Min­i­mum wage Act spec­i­fies eight hours a day, 40 hours a week. These women get home very late in the evening; the time you have with your fam­i­ly is ze­ro.”

Col­lec­tive agree­ments

As­sis­tant gen­er­al sec­re­tary, Joint Trade Union Move­ment (JTUM) and Se­nior Fel­low, Cipri­ani Labour Col­lege, Trevor John­son who al­so spoke at the sem­i­nar said in T&T, the eight-hour work day con­tin­ues to be im­por­tant in col­lec­tive agree­ments.

“The re­al­i­ty is that you find most col­lec­tive agree­ments as trade unions have used the strug­gle for May Day and the fight for this eight-hour day and if you look at the av­er­age col­lec­tive agree­ment in T&T, it speaks to an eight-hour work day. The in­ten­tion was that it would be a pro­tec­tive el­e­ment to pro­tect work­ers from the very thing where peo­ple were work­ing 10, 12, 14 hours. So, trade unions have found it nec­es­sary to put that in col­lec­tive agree­ments al­most as a sort of check and bal­ance against the pos­si­bil­i­ty of this in­crease of push­ing to 12 hours.”

He used the ex­am­ple of the en­er­gy sec­tor where some plants need to be op­er­at­ed every day and how new work day mod­els have been de­vel­oped with­in the specifics of those in­dus­tries.

“In most of those 12-hour en­vi­ron­ments which ex­ist now they would work what is called 24-7. They would work, such as in Point Lisas with these plants, they work a 12-hour shift but it would be four days a week and then they get two days off. But those shifts are 24-7 which means you can work on a Sat­ur­day or Sun­day, Christ­mas Day, when they do the sched­ule for those shifts it does not take in­to ac­count pub­lic hol­i­days be­cause the plant has to run. We have fought for this eight-hour work day his­tor­i­cal­ly.”

Fi­nal­ly, he al­so spoke about the im­por­tance of the Gov­ern­ment de­vel­op­ing a pol­i­cy in this area.

“We are now talk­ing about the four-day work week, the short­er work week. I know the last gov­ern­ment and ad­min­is­tra­tion would have been look­ing at the whole is­sue of re­mote work and I do not know what will be­come of that as some re­port was sup­posed to have come out for them to de­ter­mine whether some of the pub­lic ser­vice can go on re­mote work and that is a whole oth­er dis­cus­sion be­cause of what is in­volved in re­mote work.”