New Labour is dead... but the evidence that it is alive and well is manifest in the Government's proud repudiation of the European Directive on working time and its current mission to retain its right to opt out of the 48-hour limit on the working week.
The working time directive gives Gordon Brown and Tony Blair the opportunity to handbag Europe and bask in the praises of the Confederation of British Industry - all in defence of our low-pay, low-skill, high- exploitation economy.
It is well known that the longer working week is bad for health and encourages sloth in the entrepreneurial class.
Working time reinforces the under-development of Britain's children's services.
Linda McDowell's research, Living and Labouring in London and Manchester, found that parents are involved in elaborate arrangements across various networks, from nursery to childminder to relatives and friends, to make their childcare match their own working times. And Around the Clock, a report for the Thomas Coram Institute by Ann Mooney and June Statham, found that childcare providers are aware that they're not providing a service for 'atypical times' worked at night and weekends by parents.
Bizarrely, childcare has a young, largely full-time workforce that scarcely matches the lives of the clients - young women who typically leave the sector when they themselves become parents.
Childcare is usually delivered from 8am to 6pm, five days a week. That is the time envisaged by the Government as 'wraparound care'.
But it mirrors men's working time - not the round-the-clock reality of caring for children - just as the working time opt-out perpetuates the polarisation between men's and women's working time.
Women work excessive hours, too, but at least half of their working time is unpaid. Their paid 'part-time' work is organised around an unspoken commandment - thou shalt take care of men and kids.
Equality between men and women demands a new politics of time. Equal pay, we know, is unattainable without equal time.
The Government's unyielding stand on working time borrows the lingo of modernity and flexibility, but it is regressive. It actually reinstates the rigidity of the sexual division of labour, it makes sure that men don't do childcare, and it squanders the synergy between equality and quality that would provide a chance to end the cheap labour culture of childcare.
