 The TUC just announced that within this century we could all be working a four-day week, which sounds great. It could boost productivity, it would be an enormous boon to the nation's mental and physical health, and of course we could start to claw back some of the time we spend making profit for other people. This kind of thinking has actually been key to union organising over the centuries. Some of the earliest union's first priorities weren't to be paid more, but to work less. It's fair organising which has delivered us the eight hour day, the weekend, statutory holiday time, just one thing here. The next century? That is over eight years away. We don't need to wait around for a century to start redistributing the burdens of work. Maybe, just maybe, when people work 80 hour weeks and still live in poverty, that's a situation that needs to be fixed right now. Workplace automation has people variously terrified and excited. Estimates vary wildly but it's clear that this digital age has brought a whole lot of automation and it promises more to come. Even conservative estimates predict that in the next few decades one in five UK jobs will be automated and that's one in three in the north of England. It's actually sometimes more helpful to think about not jobs being automated, but the tasks that compose them. Recent studies show that although few current jobs face being completely automated, having humans totally booted off the process, the vast majority of jobs, even the more highly paid quote unquote respected professions, like doctors and lawyers, face at least some of their tasks being automated. This could functionally mean that the remaining tasks are repackaged into fewer and fewer actual paid roles. There are a few standard responses to this, that the talk of technological unemployment is a lot of hot air and pundit fear mongering, that new technologies make old jobs obsolete but they also create new ones, right? The industrial revolution put lots of agricultural workers out of a job but it created lots of mining jobs, rinse and repeat. This is Schumpeter's theory of creative destruction but it's not so clear that this is going to be the case here. Firstly because that growth in new jobs didn't spring out of nowhere, it was bolstered by government investment and retraining efforts and things like that, basically the kind of big public spending that this government refuses to do to haul itself out of secular crisis. And more fundamentally, previous rounds of automation have generated more jobs in areas like low skilled and low paid manual work, in service work and in intellectual labour. Now these are the kinds of jobs which are currently being automated and it's not so clear what other profitable ventures will come along and replace them under a capitalist system. Technological unemployment might be here to stay. So the argument goes that in the next few years or decades or centuries we could all be looking at a lot more free time for leisure, for unpaid work, for family time to invent the next iPhone or paint the next Mona Lisa. Just one small problem here. This all sounds incredibly familiar. Back in the 1930s John Maynard Keynes said that by now we would all be working a 15 hour week. The economy is automating more and more so it means that fewer and fewer labour hours are needed to produce all the goods and services necessary to give everyone a good standard of life. So you can reduce everyone's hours and keep everyone's wages the same, socialising the benefits. But there's also a second option. You can fire people meaning that the company owners or investors are paying out less in wages to make the same or greater profit. Under a capitalist system option B is far more common obviously. So Maynard Keynes was right about our technological ability to produce more free time but he was wrong to assume that that would become a shared benefit. The future is just not what it used to be. This has become a key point of tension throughout modern history. It's the point that the Luddites were making back in the 19th century. These were weavers and textile workers who destroyed new technologies that were being used in a fraudulent and deceitful manner to essentially pay people less or make them redundant. They weren't opposed to technology making their jobs easier, they were opposed to people using technology to make them penniless. The truth is that globally and nationally we already produce way more than is necessary to give everyone a decent standard of living yet we have both mass poverty and underemployment plus people working 18 hour days in miserable conditions. We already have the capacity for people to work less than they already do. Just the burden of work is unevenly distributed. It feels almost hack or cliche to point this out but this simple fact is worth remembering because it implies that we have to wait around for some technological or economic features to start restructuring the way we work in society. What's lacking here is not economic possibility, it's political will. Humans have pretty much always produced a surplus since the beginning of agriculture so one person can produce the resources necessary to support multiple people meaning that not everyone has to toil all the time. That was what allowed art and science and basically all of our culture to flourish and it's also what allowed for the class system to emerge and that logic holds true today. It's not just whether we produce the possibility of leisure time, it's about how we produce it, who owns the means of production and who gets to reap its benefits. So let's take a look at that how and why and who. Under capitalism a lot of automation of work is actually driven by union activity. Workers demand more wages and working benefits making it more expensive to employ people so employers are incentivised to invest in machinery which is cheaper sometimes and less troublesome than their unionised workforce in order to protect their bottom line. This by the way is what Marx talked about in the Grand Risa. So over time variable capital that's wages is replaced with fixed capital that's technology or machines in order to preserve the profit margins of particular enterprises. This then generalizes across industries as people try and remain competitive. In the right conditions this can mean an overall cheapening of consumer goods which leads to a lowering in the value of labour because if commodities are cheaper people can survive on lower wages. Also when fewer people are needed to do the work this means that the supply of labour outstrips the demand and there's more competition for jobs meaning employers and states can drive down wages if we let them. So what do we learn here? That capital uses automation to avoid having to keep noisy messy troublesome expensive workers around who keep interfering with their profit margins. But automation isn't the only tactic used to keep wages down a very popular alternative one being smashing union activity. We saw this in the 70s and 80s and we've been seeing this a lot in austerity years under the auspices of keeping Britain competitive aka suppressing wages to notionally attract foreign investment. You also have the spatial fix where union activity means not automation but the company's just up six and move to where labour is cheaper. This is why the sweatshop conditions of garment factories in Bangladesh today look a lot like those in New York in the early 1900s. We don't lack the technological capacity to automate the process of making clothes what we're missing is the political structures to force that technological possibility into reality. So we can't trust capital to use technology to resolve conflicts with workers creating labour saving automation that we can helpfully claw back particularly when we have a global supply of cheap labour that they can use instead. When it does result in automation we can't trust that those benefits will be shared evenly so in short when businesses are privately owned and run for profit we can't rely on an abstract force of automation to deliver us into a post-work utopian future. So how do we do it? This TUC proposal might seem annoyingly unambitious but it is a really promising first step setting our sights on a nearer future where we can all work less actually presents us with a really exciting set of opportunities to radically reshape a society currently organised around privately controlled precarious poorly paid work. So what does this mean in practice? A whole bunch of things a whole set of reforms including working time directives stronger union protections and raising the minimum hourly wage it means redistributing the burden of labour as well as the benefits of automation it means we need to think about how we deliver those benefits not just to people currently on standard five-day-a-week contracts but to the vast and increasing numbers of people who are precariously employed or unemployed this might look like stamping out precarious contracts a universal basic income retraining program something like that it means extending workers rights and entitlements to all migrants so employers can't undercut those provisions by exploiting people who might be excluded from certain entitlements and it also means supporting union struggles abroad so that companies can't avoid these provisions by upping sticks to where labour is cheaper we also need to think about socialising the work that doesn't get paid but still takes up a hell of a lot of time such as the unpaid care work that's mostly done by women most fundamentally we need to think about building that fairness into the economy this isn't only about supporting union activity in privately owned businesses to reclaim profits and the benefits of automation it means reshaping ownership altogether when workers are put in charge of enterprises we're not implicitly obliged to object to technological advances in order to protect our livelihoods we can make sure that tech investment and labour saving automation isn't just driven by profit incentives but how socially valuable it is we're often told that we need to protect private enterprise in order to protect innovation in technology that ultimately saves all of us time according to a trickle down logic but this assumes that workers are naturally automation phobic despite the fact that human history is pretty much marked by an effort to spend less time judging and more time dreaming it just strikes me as weird to think that worker controlled and directed research and investment wouldn't be directed into greater automation because it's their own workload that they're lightning we've seen what publicly funded research can do it's what powers the iphone it's what cures cancels what puts people on the moon and conversely some industries simply won't bother to invest in fairly basic labour saving technology if the profit incentives just aren't there workers not private enterprises are who we can trust with the future we weren't born to spend our lives making money for other people anti-work politics might seem a bit weird but it's actually more familiar than it might at first seem it's why we thank god it's Friday it's why we live for the weekend and save up for holidays and dream of retirement it's why we crave work which is rewarding or fulfilling in some way because we know that the value of our time isn't just what's written on our paychecks and we can start building a society with those values right at its heart and we can start now