7 However, this only applies if polarisation of the income distribution can be avoided. In the USA, where both skill and income within sectors and industries are significantly more broadly dispersed than in Germany, the growing number of low earners are forced to work longer and longer hours, while the increasing wealth at the top of the earnings distribution creates the corresponding demand for labour. It is leading to an increase in average individual working time. Cf.
Freeman/Schettkat (2000).
The basic challenge to future working-time regulation posed by active flexibility is that the underlying model of work organisation relies on harnessing employees’
aspirations for autonomy to serve the interests of the firm. Nobody, least of all those who continue to view working-time regulation as necessary, will be interested in suppressing creative potential and yearning to return to the good old days of Taylorism. Quite the opposite. Thus we have to consider whether working-time regulation can be further developed in such a way as to help employees to take the promises held out by the new forms of management and organisation at face value and to use them to serve their own interests.
Skills and participation might provide suitable starting points for such an attempt to make working-time regulation once again an integral part of the work organisation regime.
Skills play a key role in active flexibility. The more manufacturing and services become knowledge-based, the more likely it is that firms will rely on active flexibility (OECD 1999: 197). At the same time, however, firms become increasingly concerned to extend working times. The greater the value of a firm’s
"intellectual plant" is, the greater the pressure will be to extend "utilisation times", just as with machinery. However, the comparison is a poor one because we are talking about human individuals and not machines: human intelligence and creativity are like "renewable resources". There has to be continuous investment in them and they also have to be given time to reproduce if their value to the company, to say nothing of their value to the individuals involved, is to be sustained.
In fact there are firms that recognise this distinction. The OECD (1999: 210), which has picked over the available English-language literature on the new forms of work organisation in order to glean information on their effects on the labour market, did not, it is true, find many examples that could be interpreted unambiguously, but was able to state nevertheless that, "The most robust relationship discovered was that workplaces with flexible practices tend to train more than those that do not have them". However, it does not really seem realistic to expect the majority of firms to invest repeatedly in upgrading their employees’ skills, and to accept the consequent restrictions on the use they can make of those workers, simply because it is the right thing to do in a competitive environment in which quality is a key factor. The limitations of a purely firm-based approach to the search for compromises on new time arrangements are self-evident. Clearly, investment in training and further training must be seen as a task for the public authorities. Only then will there be a chance of setting in train a virtuous circle in which both the supply of and demand for skilled labour increases (Bosch 1999 : 140).
The greater the supply of skilled labour, the better the chances of establishing a mode of work organisation in which skilled work is not concentrated in a small group of specialists but distributed much more widely throughout the workforce.
In other words, the expansion of training may help to encourage forms of work organisation that do not rely so heavily on readily interchangeable workers but tend to make greater use of workers able to perform more broadly defined and demanding tasks and therefore also capable of covering for each other. In this way, the self-propelling dynamic of longer working hours in jobs with considerable responsibility and high skill demands may not be halted entirely but may at least be slowed down.
This leads us to another possible starting point for more effective working-time regulation, which is to be found in one of the conditions for active flexibility, namely participation. If greater responsibility is devolved to employees, they also require extended competences, powers and resources in order to be able to cope with their new responsibilities. As practical experience shows, this connection cannot be taken for granted. There is frequently a discrepancy between increased responsibilities and the means made available to deal with them. This discrepancy leads to work intensification and stress (and the stress may well be self-generated, since it is the “customer” who now confronts workers, not the “boss”). The more responsibility they bear and the more directly they confront the market, the more urgently employees need to fight for greater control of their own employment conditions, including working time.
This requires employees to use their rights to participation in order to exert greater influence over work organisation. For all their apparent independence, they continue to be dependent employees: the resources they require to cope with their new responsibilities continue to be allocated to them. Ultimately, the competition in which they must outperform their rivals, even internal ones, still takes place under conditions defined by management. The internal market within which employees operate is always to some extent a simulated market
"regulated" by management.
The practical significance of participation for the organisation of working time is evident from the example, already mentioned above, of the tendency in Germany for many company agreements on flexible working-time systems to make no provision for reducing employees' accumulated time credits. The more companies adopt management by objectives, the more important becomes the question of the implicit performance norms on which the agreed objectives are based. Can these objectives be achieved within the contractual working time, with the available resources and within the current system of work organisation and division of labour? Are staffing levels in the relevant organisational unit sufficient to cope with the workload? These questions must be made the object of workplace negotiations if employees operating in flexible working-time systems are to have any chance of enforcing their rights to time off that would otherwise exist merely on paper. However, it is difficult to see how working-time regulation can be made an integral part of active flexibility regimes unless employees are able to exert greater influence on work organisation and the conditions under which they work. The issues that have to be dealt with if the agreed or assigned
tasks are to be performed effectively range from production scheduling via the division and allocation of responsibilities within teams to manpower requirement planning.
These proposals may seem completely unrealistic under current conditions. And yet there are signs that suggest they may well be worth pursuing. The IAT survey of employment structures in Germany, already mentioned above, showed that employees in group work situations enjoy more opportunities than other employees performing similar functions to decide, whether alone or by agreement with colleagues or superiors, when to begin and end work each day and when to take time off. A higher than average share of them also stated that they were able to change their working time at short notice if they so wished.
However, their usual weekly working times are somewhat longer than those of other employees doing similar jobs, although their working time varies just as much with workloads.8
The relatively high degree of control that employees engaged in group working have over their own working time is probably attributable to the fact they are able to provide mutual cover for each other. As a result, variations in manpower requirements can be more easily absorbed within the group and do not impact unbuffered on each individual employee. In turn, the ability to provide mutual cover requires skill: group workers take part in further training measures more frequently than average, and improved ability to cover for colleagues is advanced as a reason for the further training in more than one third of cases (Wagner 2000:
165). This linkage between skill and participation must be why, "in the case of group work, greater individual autonomy in time management is associated not with longer but with shorter working times, which is not the case with employees whose variable working times are determined by their employers" (ibid. 167).
These findings are no more than very early signs that, even in work organisation regimes based on active flexibility, it is at least theoretically possible to give working-time standards greater prominence and to make working-time regulation once again an integral part of the work organisation regime. Here again, however, there is another side to the coin, namely the reform of working-time regulation itself. Employees who gain greater influence over work organisation in order to be able to control their own working time more effectively will also need to be more involved in the application of working-time standards in the workplace and at individual level. At the same time, working-time regulations - and here
8 The working times of employees engaged in group work cannot be compared with those of employees in completely different work organisation regimes but only with the working times of other employees working in cooperative regimes. The usual weekly working time of workers in cooperative regimes (about 42 hours) and of those in group work regimes (slightly more than 41.5 hours) is longer than the average for all full-time employees (around 40 hours). Employees in semi-autonomous group work regimes enjoy the greatest opportunities to influence the scheduling of their own working time: 39% determine their own starting and finishing times, alone or in consultation with colleagues, 70% decide themselves when to take their holidays and 51.6%
are also able to change their working time at short notice at any time (Wagner 2000: 157).
again they would take very different forms in different countries - must increasingly offer not only generally applicable norms but also individual support mechanisms, that is rights and entitlements (e.g. to time off for training) that workers can enforce on an individual basis.
However, even if participation and rising skill levels create better conditions for future working-time regulations and working-time standards take greater account of individual needs, the question of the actual effectiveness of those regulations remains undecided. My concluding remarks will seek to address this problem.
5 The outlook
The basic argument of this paper is that the increasing market orientation of work and the individualisation of working-time organisation may very gradually undermine the very foundations of working-time regulation. This in turn gives rise to the risk of a polarisation of working time and income. If working-time regulation is to maintain or even increase its importance as a buffer between market fluctuations and individual working times, then it must keep pace with the change in labour supply and in work organisation. To pick up on Alaluf, Boulin and Plasman’s reference (1995: 15) to the "tension between collective agreements and individual freedom of choice", the basic philosophy underlying any such reforms might be to develop and entrench general working-time standards in such a way that they are seen to protect individual freedom of choice.
Two starting points for the reform and entrenchment of working-time standards have been proposed here: improving the institutional conditions under which men's and women's employment might acquire equal status and the extension of employees' rights to influence their working conditions and improve their skills.
While the practicability of the first starting point will depend very much on national conditions and traditions (and considerable progress in this direction has already been made in some European countries), the proposed changes in work organisation come up against two even more fundamental difficulties. The first has its roots in the balance of power within firms. The more rigorously a firm pursues a policy of indirect management, the more directly the "dependent self-employed" are confronted with the basic conditions of their work. This is underscored by the management of such companies when they point to their firms' share value and shareholders' dividend expectations in order to justify restrictions. Thus Gadrey (2000: 49) has good reasons for doubting whether the examples of "negotiated flexibility" already in existence will stand much chance of further diffusion unless new forms of "corporate and market governance" can be put in place. In view of the link between social time arrangements and models of growth, this must also include the financial markets.
The second difficulty lies in the contradictory effect of indirect management on employees’ behaviour in respect of their own working time. They run the risk of becoming trapped in a twofold contradiction:
− the contradiction between their aspirations towards greater autonomy and the limitations imposed by their lack of true independence;
− the contradiction between their increased autonomy and consequences this has for employees themselves.
In short, they risk becoming embroiled in a conflict between "identification with the firm " and "identification with oneself". Increasing identification with the firm may well reinforce the dynamic that encourages longer working hours.
Increasing self-confidence, however, may also make employees more aware of the conditions that have to be met if they are to gain control over and limit what they perceive to be excessively long working hours.
And best, therefore, the proposals for reform discussed here might improve the conditions for resolving the problem of working-time regulation. By themselves, they will not solve the problem. In future, working-time regulation will be less able than in the past to provide a temporary solution for working-time disputes.
However, it will be able to indicate how and with the aid of which institutions such disputes might be settled, as well as the form such settlements might take. This will be all the more important since disputes at the working time will no longer erupt primarily between employees and employers but rather between employees themselves (whether within a team or between competing teams) and, ultimately, within each of the individuals involved as well. For this reason, one of the objectives of working-time regulation must be to counter the individualisation of working-time organisation by firms in order that working-time disputes may be resolved publicly through a political process. The hotly disputed legislation on the working time of senior managers in France may be an early example of how general standards may become the seed crystal for the politicisation of working-time disputes in the new work organisation regimes.
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