Starmer’s plan provides for concentrating weekly working hours but not cutting them
Keir Starmer’s Labour government is considering granting Britons the right to request to work four days a week instead of five in order to facilitate flexible employment, British local media reported on Friday.
Employees, however, must work a full weekly workday to receive their full salary, but would have the option of compressing their workweek into four days.
Photo: A. Internacional.
The plan is expected to be unveiled in detail after parliamentary session begins next week and is expected to be contained in a draft law on workers’ rights. A spokesman for the Department of Trade and Business stressed that “any changes to labour legislation will be consulted on, working in partnership with businesses.”
Under current legislation, employees have the right to request flexible working, which can include part-time work, flexible start and end times or working from home, but employers can refuse this in certain circumstances, such as if it is an additional cost to the company.
This proposal for labour flexibility without business costs is included in the package of strategies that the Labour Party intends to implement to improve economic growth, which is faltering after Brexit. Starmer announced this week that the Budget for the next year, which will be presented on 31 October, will be “painful” due to the “unpopular” decisions that the Executive will have to adopt to make the economy grow.
Photo: A. Internacional.
Labour’s solutions to fixing the economy are far from a progressive agenda, but rather one marked by liberal economic orthodoxy. In a speech delivered in the gardens of Downing Street, the seat of the government, Starmer promised that he would focus on wealth creation and national economic growth, although to do so he would have to take “tough measures.”
The Labour leader said his government would take “decisions that are not popular if it is in the long-term interest of the country” and warned that the country’s financial situation “will have to get worse before it gets better”.
While in Spain, for example, the effective reduction of the working day with the same salary is being negotiated, in the United Kingdom greater flexibility is being proposed from the perspective that the employer does not suffer more salary costs or the obligation to increase productivity through new investments in means of production.
