Utopian fantasy - Impact wants 30-hour week

SOMETIMES it takes a friend to tell you that you’re living in cloud cuckoo land. It may just be that that awkward moment has come for the wider trade union movement.

At its conference in Killarney yesterday the union Impact said it would, in the fullness of time, try to secure a 30-hour week for its public service members.

This is indeed a Utopian ideal but it also seems something so far fetched in a society where so many public services underperform as to bring into question the sanity of those who proposed it.

Our public services are under-resourced and stretched to breaking point but such an arrangement — more a parttime job in some cultures — would be the final straw.

Public sector unions make much of benchmarking but are selective in who they choose to be compared with. Would they like to be compared to the, say, self-employed electrician or farmer who would consider a 30-hour week something approaching a holiday or maybe the Tesco workers fighting to hold on to ordinary enough conditions? Impact, get real.