Put Work in Its Place

David Bennett is the national director of the Department of Workplace Health, Safety and Environment at the Canadian Labour Congress in Ottawa.

Bruce O’Hara knows how to go about shortening your work time and how
to best use your increased leisure time. In this book, he examines nine
ways to get the best of both worlds: job sharing; permanent part-time
working; taking leaves of absence; V-time (voluntary reduced hours);
banked overtime; phased retirement; flexitime; a compressed work week
(more hours, fewer days at work); and telecommuting (working partly at
home).

The book’s chief drawback is that it addresses every worker,
irrespective of particular employers and particular occupations. A
proposal put, say, to a large law firm with several employees doing the
same specialized word-processing might not be workable when put to an
industrial outfit. O’Hara’s cheerful optimism belies the climate of
fear and insecurity that pervades Canadian workplaces.

Most of the time, the author addresses the individual worker, though he
does consider the context of unionized workplaces with a generally
negative view of unions’ willingness to take up their members’
concerns on most of the items on the nine-point list. He mistakenly
claims that many unions have demanded full benefits for part-time
employees, causing employers to overrely on casual or contingent
workers. This explanation of the destruction of the Canadian full-time
work force is just plain wrong, because it does not account for
nonunionized workplaces (the majority); unions usually demand (like
O’Hara) pro-rated benefits for part-timers, and most employers are far
more interested in reducing payroll costs than they are in equity in pay
and benefits. That is why they employ as many casual workers as
possible, sometimes to their own detriment. O’Hara wants to see
enterprises with predominantly full-time employees, fewer part-time or
job-sharing workers, and even fewer casual workers. The best way of
achieving this is through an effective trade union.