The following editorial comes from former Target Workers Unite organizer Sal Rojo in response to Adelle Waldman’s and Matt Bruenig’s New York Times article citing the Target Workers Unite platform as Waldman and Bruenig advocate for a 40 hour work week.
Recently, Adelle Waldman and Matt Bruenig published an article in the New York Times advocating full time hours for millions of US workers stuck in precarious, part-time jobs. They even cited our platform, emphasizing our first two demands for more hours and stable scheduling, to further their case.
The demand for higher wages is seen by Waldman and Bruenig as secondary to the demand for hours. This is why they tout their “solution” as mandating full-time hours. While it’s true a wage increase is meaningless without the hours to go with it, the solution isn’t a 140 year old demand for the 40 hour work week.
The amount of caveats within Waldman and Bruenig’s “solution” is an uninspiring nothingburger meant to plead to the bosses with their fabian wishful thinking (mandating full time status to workers after three months of employment for bosses with 50+ workers, unless it creates an “undue burden”). This sort of demand, as argued by Waldman and Bruenig, is meant to be seen as nonthreatening and logical to corporate bosses, that it isn’t radical, and wouldn’t majorly affect their operations if most part-time workers really do want “flexibility” in their schedules. But this line of argumentation has never been more reasonable or realistic to the boss class compared to a more militant approach.
The 40 hour work week, for example, has become a norm only after generations of workers waged class struggle. But with the continuing evolution of automation, intensification of the labor process, and a lack of working class leadership with the will and capacity to raise new demands that meet the times, we are stuck with bourgeois policy wonks pleading for crumbs on behalf of the working class.
The starting point (including our outdated platform) must begin with a reduction of the work week to no more than 30 hours at full time status without a reduction in pay, and higher wages tied to cost-of-living-adjustments (COLA). Anything less than this will only perpetuate the real burden of working class life as we know it. We need a working class offensive with the understanding there is no peace between wage slaves and our corporate overlords. And that only comes from workers getting organized and fighting for it.
The AFLCIO sits on trillions of dollars in assets coming from unionized workers’ dues, yet they will not deploy resources to organize the majority of US workers, especially service sector workers, while their unions function moreso as hedge funds. Unless that can change workers can’t expect much of anything except a continued social decay.
The only reason standards have been raised in the past is because the working class fought for economic and political supremacy, not by trying to reason with the ruling class who’ll never willingly concede to any demand, no matter how small, because ultimately they can’t stand any challenge to their dictatorship and see it as an affront to their “right” to exploit workers. When so many are moved to chant “no kings” we see little challenge to the “divine right” of bosses to do as they please in the workplace.
The Virginia Worker 
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