WORKING hours should be slashed to improve safety standards and give workers time with their families, Richard Leonard said yesterday.

Speaking at the Morning Star’s An Industrial Strategy for People conference in Glasgow, the Scottish Labour leader said it was “absolutely right” to explore a “managed reduction in working time” for workers across Scotland amid the march to automation.

“The trade unions were not simply established to fight for a rise in the weekly wage — they were often established to fight for the eight-hour day,” he said.

An EU directive sets a 48-hour limit on the working week, but Britain has been allowed an opt-out clause since the directive was introduced.

Mr Leonard said that agriculture, fishing and construction industries had the highest opt-outs from the directive — and also the highest rates of fatalities and safety breaches.

He said there were “few examples of people who work overtime” when the working week has been reduced in individual workplaces without a loss of pay. “Most people want the extra weekend time,” he said.

Mr Leonard added: “I think this is an idea, comrades, which is popular. It’s part of our roots, it’s where we came from and we should be fighting for it.”

The Scottish Labour leader’s industrial strategy also calls for an expansion of employee ownership. Yesterday he asked: “Why don’t the people who create the wealth own the wealth they create?

“It’s an old socialist idea, but it’s an idea that resonates with working people, because it’s a good example of where we could see a redistribution of power in the economy.”

And he said the SNP’s “defensive rescues” of firms “do not constitute an industrial strategy,” calling instead for “forward planning of the economy.”

He warned: “What we do cannot simply be predicated on a Keynesian-style reflation of the old economy. We need to look at how we can build a new economy, a more democratic and diverse economy.”

Also addressing the conference, Unite Scotland organiser Roz Foyer warned that universal basic income was “not the silver bullet people thought it was” and risked a danger of creating a “complete underclass.”

Warning of the potential for robots to displace jobs across the economy, she said: “The only thing they haven’t taught the machines to do yet is to have empathy.”