Last year,
there was a brief burst of national media coverage around this "save the
world, work less" idea, triggered by a report by the Washington DC-based
Center for Economic and Policy Research, entitled "Reduced Work Hours as a Means of Slowing Climate Change."
"As
productivity grows in high-income countries, as well as in developing
countries, social choices will be made as to how much of the productivity gains
will be taken in the form of higher consumption levels, versus fewer work
hours," author David Rosnick wrote in the introduction of that report.
He notes
that per capita work hours were reduced
by 50% in recent decades in Europe, as compared to US workers who now spend as
much time as ever on the job -- despite our being a world leader in developing
technologies that make us ever more productive. So, for Americans, working more . . primarily
means consuming more, both on and off the job.
"This
choice between fewer work hours versus increased consumption has significant
implications for the rate of climate change," the report said, before
going on to talk about the relationship between various climate change models and
the corresponding levels of economic growth.
It isn't
just global warming that our working less will help fix, but a whole range of
related environmental problems, such as:
a)
loss of biodiversity and natural habitat;
b)
rapid depletion of important natural resources (from fossil fuel to fresh water); and c)
the pollution of our environment with harmful chemicals and obsolete gadgets.
Every day that the global workforce is on
the job, these problems all get worse, mitigated only slightly by the
handful of occupations devoted to cleaning up the associated messes. However, the Rosnick report contemplates only
a small reduction in working hours, gradually shaving a few hours off the average
workweek and offering a little more vacation time.
The paper
estimates that the impact on climate change of reducing work hours over the rest
of the century to be as follows: It would eliminate about one-quarter to
one-half of the global warming that is not already locked in, where "locked in"
refers to warming that will be caused just by the increased 1990 levels of
greenhouse gas concentrations that are already in the atmosphere.
So let's
consider something more radical, a change that squarely meets the daunting and
unaddressed challenge that climate change is presenting to us. Let's start the discussion in the range that
is somewhere between a full day off each week, and cutting our work hours in
half -- and thereby eliminating half
of the wasteful, exploitive, demeaning, make-work jobs that this
economy-on-steroids is perversely creating for us and in many cases forcing us to take if we want to meet even our most basic
needs.
Taking even one
day back for ourselves and our environment will seem like crazy-talk to many
readers. Our bosses would of course remain
inclined to command us to work more days each week than we would be inclined to
work if we had the unfettered choice. But
never forget one thing: The
idea that our machines and other innovations would and should lead us to work
far less than we do now -- and that this is a natural and widely accepted/expected
part of economic evolution -- has a long and esteemed philosophical history.
So perhaps, at
this critical moment in our economic and environmental development, this
forgotten goal is one worth remembering.
History lesson
Author and
historian Chris Carlsson has been beating the "work less" drum since
Jimmy Carter was president, when he (Carlsson) and his fellow anti-capitalist
activists decried the dawning of an age of aggressive business deregulation
that continues to this day.
"What
do we actually do all day and why? That's
the most basic question that you'd think we'd be talking about all the
time," Carlsson stated. "We
live in an incredibly powerful and overarching propaganda-based society that
tells you to get your joy from work and maximized consumption."
But Carlsson
isn't buying it, noting that huge swaths of the economy are based on exploiting
people or the planet, or just creating unproductive economic churn that is a
huge waste of energy. After all, the
Gross Domestic Product measures everything -- the good, the bad, and the ugly. Rebuilding a greatly damaged city or town, after
an altered-climate tornado, hurricane, or flood has wrecked it, adds
significantly to our national GDP. And
think of all the increase in GDP that stems from medically treating people who
have been conned into smoking way too many cigarettes, eating way too much junk
food, getting far too little exercise because of overly long hours of work, or
driving while drunk.
The logic of
unrestrained economic growth that underlies this society is the logic of the
cancer cell -- growth for growth's sake -- it makes no sense.
What makes much
more sense is to be smart about how we're using our nation's energy, to create
an economy that economizes instead of just consuming everything in its path. We should ask, "What work do we need to
do and to what end?"
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