Mark Steyn hammers home well in his Telegraph opinion piece, touching on things like the difference in social perspectives between adults and adolescents and making good points such as "the idea that the national government can legislate respect is a large part of the reason why there isn't any". And while I agree with him that enforcing a working week of less than 48 hours isn't necessarily the right thing to do, there's certainly an issue around why people do work - or want to work - as much as they do.
Of course, if thinking on this gets no further than "stick an orange suit on community offenders", then this "problem" is going to get a whole lot worse. (Fortunately, such blatantly pap plans are quickly shelved, but that doesn't detract from the fact that our politicians are still sitting in the Westminster Ivory Tower.)
The obvious irony is that ID Cards will be making a return later today... If Tony Blair wants people to respect each other (and, I assume, him) then why is he pushing for yet more draconian controls that move the balance of power away from the people, and into the Government's all-knowing arms? Screw the new-old government, I say. Its head is even further up its own arse than before.
2 comments:
I don't think there's anything wrong with enforcing a less than 48 hour work week. My partner is looking for a job now (out of necessity, not because he wants to work) and has had employment agencies try to bully him into signing those 48 hour waiver forms, saying no one would hire him unless he did. A few flatly refused to put him on their books when he said he wouldn't sign it. I'm therefore inclined to think the waiver is being abused and used to force people to work more than they would like.
While I never work more than 48 hours a week, nor hope I ever want to :) the key word here is "enforcing". Laws seem to be the quick fallback when things go wrong in society these days, meaning that there's much less thought put into why people are working that much anyway, for instance. Values - work-dependent motivation, etc - are responsible for people doing what they do, so should we legislate them?
It's not easy by any means to be in the minority when it comes to these things (and thus being the subject of said "abuse" - "market forces" in other dictionaries...), but if enough people refuse to sign their lives away to corporate interests, the message may slowly get across. But just because something takes a long time doesn't mean it's not worth it.
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