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OpEdNews Op Eds    H4'ed 4/25/14

Could a Shorter Workweek Help Save Our Planet and Our Civilization?

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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the top research body on an issue recognized by the United Nations, recently released its fifth report summarizing and analyzing the science and policies around climate change, striking a more urgent tone than in previous reports.

In addition, at a climate conference in Berlin, on April 13th, the panel released a new report noting that greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than ever and that urgent action is needed in the next decade to avert a serious crisis.

"We cannot afford to lose another decade," Ottmar Edenhofer, a German economist and co-chairman of the committee that wrote the report, told The New York Times.  "If we lose another decade, it becomes extremely costly (perhaps impossibly so) to achieve climate stabilization."

The known impacts of climate change will be:  a) displaced populations in poor countries inundated by rising seas, b) significant changes to life-supporting ecosystems (such as less precipitation in California and other regions, thereby creating fresh-water shortages), c) food shortages from loss of agricultural land, and d) ever more extreme and destructive weather events.

Never before have human activities had such an impact on the natural world and its delicate balances, such as in how heat energy circulates through the world's oceans and what horrific results might ensue from altering the prevailing ocean currents, which could very well bring another ice age to Europe in our lifetimes.

Researchers and climate experts have warned that we could be approaching a "global tipping point," in which the impact of climate change affects other systems in the natural world and threatens to spiral out of control toward another mass extinction.  A new report funded partially by the National Science Foundation and NASA's Goodard Space Center combines the environmental data with growing inequities in the distribution of wealth, to warn that modern society as we know it could very well collapse as a result.

"The fall of the Roman Empire, and the equally (if not more) advanced Han, Mauryan, and Gupta Empires, as well as so many advanced Mesopotamian Empires, are all testimony to the fact that advanced, sophisticated, complex, and creative civilizations can be both fragile and impermanent," the report warned.

It cites two critical features that have triggered most major societal collapses in the past, both of which pose increasingly pervasive problems today:  1) "the stretching of resources due to the strain placed on the ecological carrying capacity"; and 2) "the economic stratification of society into Elites [rich] and Masses ('commoners')," which makes it more difficult to deal with environmental problems that arise.

Both of these problems would be addressed by doing less overall work, and distributing the work and the rewards for that work more evenly.

Grassroots justice movements are sweeping the globe, rising up against the global assault on our shared economy, ecology, peace and democracy.  The accelerating climate disaster, which threatens to unravel civilization as soon as 2050, intensifies all of these struggles and creates new urgency for collaboration and unified action.  Earth Day to May Day 2014 (April 22 -- May 1) will be the first in a series of expanding annual actions.

The international workers' rights holiday grew out of the struggle for the eight-hour workday in the United States, so it's appropriate to use the occasion to call for society to slow down and balance the demands of capital with the needs of the people and the planet.

What we're seeing now is an enormous opportunity to link up these movements.  It has put us on the forefront of building a new progressive left in this country that takes on all these issues simultaneously.

Modern technology, in spite of all its labor-saving potential, now has many employees working 60 hours a week.  And where are the main benefits of this technology going?  They're going to the bottom-line, i.e. to ever greater profits, instead of to reducing people's work hours.

"Right now, the problem is that workers aren't getting any of those productivity gains;  it's all going to capital," Schor stated.  "Most people don't yet see the connection between the mal-distribution of hours worked and high unemployment."  She explains that the solution would have to involve the reform of policies that make it easier to work shorter hours yet still be sure that one's basic needs will be met -- and health insurance reform is high on that list of policies that need change.

But here's a major obstacle:  Even the mere suggestion that reducing work hours might be a worthy societal goal makes the heads of conservatives explode.  When the San Francisco Chronicle published an article about how "working a bit less" could help many people qualify for healthcare subsidies under the Affordable Care Act ("Lower 2014 income can net huge health care subsidy," published on 10/12/13), the right-wing blogosphere went nuts decrying what one site called the "toxic essence of the welfare state.

Not too many Democratic politicians have embraced the idea of working less, but maybe they should, if we're really going to attack climate change and other environmental challenges.  Capitalism has given us great abundance, much more than we need and more than we and our fragile environment can safely sustain, so let's talk about slowing things down.

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Several years after receiving my M.A. in social science (interdisciplinary studies) I was an instructor at S.F. State University for a year, but then went back to designing automated machinery, and then tech writing, in Silicon Valley. I've (more...)
 

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