Could firms reduce working hours to increase employment rates?

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With the trend for flexible working patterns continuing to bring joy to those employees across the UK who prefer to work in their pyjamas, firms could equip their staff with laser fax machines to help them get on with the job at hand.
According to Juliet Schor, professor of sociology at Boston College, we could soon see the rise of a different kind of working day, possibly with reduced working hours.


By cutting employee working hours, firms could find ways of creating new vacancies and therefore lowering unemployment rates, she pointed out.


"We are in situations of chronic unemployment and under-employment and I don't think we are going to be able to get out of it by old fashioned Keynesian pump priming. Austerity economics makes things worse, and so working hour reductions have a long history of successfully leading to lower rates of unemployment."


By using office fax machines installed in their homes, employees may be able to get all their work done in fewer hours than they would if they commuted to the office every day.


"A reasonable way to do it is to progressively reduce hours, starting from today," posited Ms Schor.
"The Dutch did this, beginning in 1980. They set 15 years with relatively stable real wages. They used their productivity growth to reduce hours of work. They ended up with highest labour productivity in Europe, very low unemployment and very high quality of life. That's the way you do it."


Meanwhile, MWR InfoSecurity has highlighted the need for better IT security education, which is something for companies that implement flexible working to think about.


Martyn Ruks of the organisation said there is "a lack of very positive spin" on IT security as a whole, as well as a lack of skills in the online security sector.

Posted: 16 January 2012

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