Workers' Liberty

Workers at Volkswagen in Germany face a longer working week. In a deal with the union IG Metall bosses have secured an increase of 15% extra hours without pay. The deal comes as car makers throughout the world are udner pressure with a global overproduction in cars, and increasing production coming from low cost producers in China, Asia, and Eastern Europe.

VW itself has plants all over the world, and sicne the fall of Stalinism has used its location to buy up and invest in new production facilities in Eastern Europe like its takeover of Skoda, and the building of new production facilities in the Czech Republic. The increase in hours is part of a drive by bosses throughout Europe to row back on the gains in working conditions achieved by European workers. In recent weeks the UK has done a deal with Italy, giving the Italians support for protectionist measures against Chinese and Vietnames shoes, in return for the Italians supporting Britian's continued opt out of the Working Time Directive which sets a limit of 48 hours to the working week - hardly a massive boon for workers in itself as Brendan Barber pointed out in a letter to the FT recently. Even that is equivalent of 6 8 hour days in a week.

Despite the growing economic boom in Europe, where eonomic growth now exceeds that in the US, these attacks on conditions are likely to continue as workers face increasing pressure from the massive influx of new labour supply available for capitalist exploitation in China, other parts of Asia, and to a lesser extent in Eastern Europe.

However, to put things in perpsective, the increase in hours at VW shows how far workers in Britain are behind the rest of Europe. The icnrease in hours at VW will mean an increase from a current working week of 28.8 hours worked over a four day work week, up to a working week of 33 hours. Even the company admitted that it could not increase hours to 35 per week at the moment without making huge redundancies - some voluntary redundancies and early retirments have already taken place - because with the current overproduction there simply would not be enough work. They do, however, appear to have their sights set on that for 2008/9 when their next big model launch is due.

As another lesson for British workers, perhaps the reason why workers at VW had been able to negotiate there current 28.8 hour week in the first place, was the fact that 97% of them at the company belong to IG Metall.