The Four-Day Work Week and Bernie

Commentary

Some 61 varied British businesses with a total of 2,900 employees over the course of six months recently participated in the largest experiment ever of a four-day work week, effectively providing their workers with a paid day off a week.

Conducted by the British think tank Autonomy, two nonprofits, and researchers at Cambridge and Boston College, the goal was to ascertain whether the increased time off would lessen stress and burnout while maintaining or even increasing productivity and revenue, as well as test the effects on employee health and turnover.

The findings were tremendously positive, with over 90 percent of the businesses favoring the continuation of the practice, 18 of whom intended to make a four-day week permanent.

Quick to weigh in was Vermont’s democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders, writing on Twitter that “With exploding technology and increased worker productivity, it’s time to move toward a four-day work week with no loss of pay. Workers must benefit from technology, not just corporate CEOs.”

You see, it’s an ancient Marxist slander against the free market that private sector employers seek to drain every drop of labor out of their workers, and so it was vital for Sanders to brand the four-day work week with the progressive seal of approval before Republicans began touting the idea. (The senator, however, is actually quite late to the party since all the way back in 1956, one Vice President Richard Nixon was promising that Eisenhower’s economic policies would mean a four-day work week for Americans in the “not too distant future.”)

In chapter 10 of “Das Kapital,” devoted to “The Working Day,” Marx warns that the owner of a private business is “capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital.” And capital seeks to “absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus-labor.”

Marx declared: “Capital is dead labor, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks. The time during which the laborer works, is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labor-power he has purchased of him. If the laborer consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist.”

The notion that the Dracula who pays you the money you use for your family’s livelihood would choose to suck out less of your blood and sweat, and would actually actively promote a shorter work week for his employees, is 180 degrees opposed to what Marx prophesied; capitalists are supposed to want to work you into the ground. Just as business owners deigning to share their profits with grateful workers contradicts Marxist theory that the proletariat would rise up and smash the bourgeoisie. Vast majorities of Americans, spanning party and ideology, it turns out, like receiving a share of the profits.

Curious how those working for Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign were allegedly treated in this regard. One Sanders campaign worker, in the early days of that campaign, actually filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) charging that employees would be punished by Sanders’s campaign if they attempted to organize and seek a collective bargaining agreement. Sanders also cut workers’ hours so he could pay them less (in contrast to the four-day week idea, which maintains 40-hours’ pay). As the Washington Post described it, “Campaign field hires have demanded an annual salary they say would be equivalent to a $15-an-hour wage, which Sanders for years has said should be the federal minimum. The organizers and other employees supporting them have invoked the senator’s words and principles in making their case …”

In the Soviet Union, where Sanders and his wife spent their honeymoon in 1988, its 66 million non-farm workers were required to labor some six days a week until no sooner than 1967, when the Kremlin acceded to a five-day work week. And in communist mainland China, a “996” work culture has long been the de-facto norm, with employees working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week, despite unenforced laws limiting a work day to eight hours, and a work week to 44 hours.

Such labor laws are obviously as valueless as articles 35 and 36 of the People’s Republic of China’s Constitution, which laughably guarantee that “Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration” as well as “freedom of religious belief.” And that “No State organ, public organization or individual may compel citizens to believe in, or not to believe in, any religion; nor may they discriminate against citizens who believe in, or do not believe in, any religion.”

Such preposterous constitutional rights didn’t stop Beijing from convicting and incarcerating 90-year-old Cardinal Joseph Zen for helping those protesting for freedom in Hong Kong.

Despite Sanders’s attempts to take credit for the four-day work week, it’s a capitalist idea; the vampires Marx theorized about, thirsty for slave labor, are turning out to be his own red-handed followers.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.