The MCW is calling for a campaign to reclaim control over our time and is set against the backdrop of socio-economic, political and policy changes over recent decades, which have sought to advance ‘flexibility' as a necessity for a dynamic and free market as well as a creator of jobs.  However the cost of ‘flexibility' in the labour market is that more and more of us have to work "all the hours God sends".

The MCW has identified workers experiencing long and intense hours of work within their employment. Within this intensification of work comes the need for services to be available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. The UK is noted for its greater variety of work-time arrangements in comparison with most other EU countries.

The consequence is that work-life and home-life encroach on each other's territory making greater demands and creating more anxiety and stress as we seek to accommodate them both equally. Our ‘flexible' jobs and roles are uncompromising and unyielding. In order to cope we sacrifice our friends, leisure, interests and activities. Paradoxically, these are the very activities that would release us from our stress and promote our well-being and mental health.

The MCW report confirms various research findings that:

• Employers can ‘fudge' the actual amount of hours which employees work which therefore undermines the national minimum wage level.
• There is an expectation to work unpaid hours or to work Sundays. To reject these conditions can mean working in an atmosphere of greater job insecurity or no job at all.
• Demands to stay after hours without warning can mean workers face real dilemmas. This can cause ill feeling or even animosity between colleagues whilst such requests for parents and particularly women with childcare responsibilities creates real anxiety.
• Employers attempt to lower their fixed costs by employing the minimum of staff.
• It is the least powerful and most vulnerable workers who have the minimum control over their hours of work.
• Suggests legal breaks are not being taken by workers:
  • Tea Breaks - A National Opinion Poll survey says 68% of Britain's 28 million workers never take all their daily breaks.
  • Lunch / Dinner breaks - Research studies say average lunch breaks are now only 27 minutes long.
  • Public Holidays - On Monday 28^th August 2005 a high street bank broke with a 130 year old tradition by opening branches on a Bank Holiday.
  • Many service sector employees work on Bank Holidays but a survey also found that 2/3rds of professional and managerial workers had gone to work on a Bank Holiday.

For many, the opportunity for sharing of ideas, developing analysis and critical thinking which would help to understand our situation about what is going on around us is itself destroyed by lack of time. It is lack of time to take stock that prevents us from finding solutions to our time problems.

The Judaeo-Christian tradition acts as a challenge and a call to be engaged in the here and now. Looking back is part and parcel of informing our understanding and knowledge. Thus it is the past as well as the present and our experiences locally as well as globally that prompts the MCW to promote and encourage initiatives and to campaign to take back control over time for ourselves and others. In the process we may create an environment of decent work and a balanced lifestyle for all. Therefore the MCW calls on its members and people of good will to:

• Take regulation breaks to which we are legally entitled.

• Work for the recognition and adherence to the TUC's ‘Work Your Hours' Day to help promote a positive attitude to this situation.
• Raise awareness about the hours we work in Britain and encourage workers to control their time more consciously.
• Support campaigns to regulate the working week in the UK through firm adherence to the European Working Time Directive.
• Support measures to encourage job sharing and wider economic participation by the long-term unemployed.
• Seek Government legislation to support policy initiatives around a more ‘family friendly' work-life balance because current entitlement does not mean all workers in practice have access to them.
• Understand more fully the global context in which we live.
• Promote and develop practical expressions of international solidarity particularly around issues relating to time.
• Promote and contribute to the WMCW's programme ‘Decent Work in a New Society'.

We believe that as a Movement of Christian Workers, the stories of life we tell in our groups and especially as we gather around the Eucharistic table are always potentially subversive and transformative events in time and history.  They help us to see our times with new eyes and enable us to engage our world with a clearer vision.