Prometheus unwound: shorter hours for sustainable degrowth

14 Prometheus unwound: shorter hours for sustainable degrowth Andrea Levy Growth thy name is suffering. (Maxim of Foxconn CEO Terry Gou that hangs on the company’s factory walls; Heffernan 2013) In the factory and in the street, at the office and on the road, the wretchedness of the world reveals itself. The ideology of growth at any price and the dogma of work as an answer to everything rest uneasily on foundations that are as shaky as they are suspect, as duplicitous as they are dangerous. (Michel 2009, my translation) With tedious predictability, governments throughout the global North trumpet job creation as their priority; Canadian political leaders, whether in power or in opposition, are no exception: ‘Our Government will continue to create the conditions for new and better jobs for Canadians across all sectors of our economy’, pledged former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper in his 2013 Throne Speech, where he used the word ‘jobs’ no fewer than 30 times. In the voiceover accompanying her television advertisement campaign the same year, Ontario’s Liberal premier declared: ‘whether it’s on the farm or the factory floor and whether it’s a starting point or your dream, it’s a job. I’m Kathleen Wynne, and it’s my job to create more of them’ (cited in Benzie 2013) ‘The NDP’s recipe is job creation’, New Democratic Party leader Tom Mulcair proclaimed at the party’s 2013 convention: ‘It is the first priority in a sustainable economy’ (cited in Thompson 2013) What kind of jobs? To produce what goods or meet which needs? Under what conditions? With what social impact? At what ecological cost? These questions go largely unasked and unexamined. ‘There is no bad job’, declared the late federal finance minister Jim Flaherty (Canadian Press 2012) in a piece of patently false ideology that is everywhere given the lie, from the Foxconn factories in China to the Amazon warehouses in the United States. And all the undisputable evidence of the precarious state of Quebec’s migratory woodland caribou did not inhibit the province’s premier Philippe Couillard from vowing never to sacrifice a single job in the forestry sector for the sake of the caribou (La Presse 2014). 303 Peter A. Victor and Brett Dolter - 9781783473557 Downloaded from Elgar Online at 10/06/2017 03:11:28PM by [email protected] via Material in Copyright strictly NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, SHARING or POSTING 304 Handbook on growth and sustainability With such an apparently fervent commitment on the part of elected officials to deliver jobs of any kind to voters, it is curious to learn that, according to research by the Canadian Labour Congress (2013), the importation of migrant workers accounted for a majority of the new jobs created in Canada from 2008 to 2011 and about 75 per cent of all the new jobs created in 2010 and 2011 – at a time when 1.4 million Canadian residents were unemployed. While those estimates may be exaggerated – economist Jim Stanford (2012) pegs it at closer to 30 per cent for the period from 2007 to 2011 – there is ample evidence of a steady increase of reliance in Canada on temporary migrant labour, as shown for example by Salimah Valiani (2010). This is mostly a policy choice. Notwithstanding reforms to the Temporary Foreign Worker programme (seen by many critics as mostly window-dressing; Keung 2013), it clearly has less to do now with its original purpose of remedying a dearth of qualified Canadian residents and more to do with paying low wages, as suggested by the various allegations of resident workers being outright replaced by cheaper temporary foreign workers – from information technology staff at the Royal Bank of Canada in Toronto to pipefitters and welders at the Alberta Tar Sands to fast-food workers in British Columbia. The programme has shifted over the years toward lowskill occupations and the creation of an expellable workforce deprived of rights, in a trend Jason Foster (2012) compares to Europe’s guest-worker phenomenon. The growth of a migrant labour force is one example of a broader shift toward nonstandard employment since the 1980s. ‘Canada’s shift to a nation of temporary workers’; ‘Experts fret Canada becoming a “nation of part-time workers”’ – the headlines appear with ever greater frequency. The tally of all those working part-time, on contract, in temporary positions, seasonally or as freelancers adds up, by some estimates, to roughly 40 per cent of the working population.1 Some people seek work outside the contours of the standard labour relationship in pursuit of greater autonomy and control over their time, but for others it is simply what is available. Many of the jobs emerging from the quest, driven by employers, and to a lesser extent employees, for greater flexibility are low wage and do not offer job security or the social benefits, such as pension plans and sick leave, associated with the traditional full-time job; nor are they likely to be unionized.2 As hip-hop artist Mohammad Ali Aumeer declaims in his song ‘Precarious Work’ (2014): Oh you work at Mickey Dees, what’s it like there? You work at Starbucks, how’s the childcare? Is she babysat? Where ya wages at? Rent, food, utilities, are you making that? Peter A. Victor and Brett Dolter - 9781783473557 Downloaded from Elgar Online at 10/06/2017 03:11:28PM by [email protected] via Material in Copyright strictly NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, SHARING or POSTING Shorter hours for sustainable degrowth 305 The song speaks to the ranks of the precariously employed, within which women, youth and immigrants are decidedly overrepresented, as shown in the Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity’s 2013 study ‘Untapped potential: creating a better future for service workers’. A 2013 article in the Globe and Mail reported that just half of the people working in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton areas have permanent, fulltime jobs that provide benefits and stability: ‘Everyone else’, write Susan McIsaac and Charlotte Yates, ‘is working in situations that are part-time, vulnerable or insecure in some way’. We are witnessing nothing short of the transmutation of the labour market, according to a study published this year by researchers at York University on the structural transformation of work in Canada (Drache et al. 2014). While the trend is pronounced in Canada, it is discernible throughout the global North. In the United States, for instance, epithets like ‘free agent nation’ and ‘gig economy’ have gained currency for good reason: according to the 2014 study ‘Freelancing in America’ (Edelman Berland 2014), 53 million people – just over a third of the workforce – are now freelance (that figure includes 14.3 million moonlighters who may also occupy traditional full-time jobs). Using various indicators such as employer attachment, perceived job insecurity and nonstandard work arrangements, Kalleberg (2009) has found evidence of significant growth in precarious employment in the US, while the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) study In It Together (2015, pp. 188–9) found that nonstandard employment (temporary, part-time and own-account selfemployment) accounts for 33 per cent of total employment in OECD countries (with significant variations among countries) and that 40 per cent of younger workers, aged 15 to 29, were in nonstandard employment situations (OECD 2015, pp. 141–2). Most importantly the study showed that nonstandard employment correlates with lower annual earnings and poorer job quality in many respects. In addition to the expansion of contingent and precarious work, there are many who cannot find work at all. At 7.0 per cent, the official unemployment rate in Canada at August 2015 is still slightly higher than it was before the financial crisis, and that is not counting those job seekers who have given up, or the underemployed and involuntary part-timers. The same is true for the US and the OECD. The average OECD unemployment rate increased by three percentage points from 2007 to 2013 (OECD 2014, p. 102). The proportion of long-term unemployed has almost doubled between 2010 and 2015, a trend, as Julian Beltrame reports (2013), that is consistent throughout the OECD countries which have witnessed an 85 per cent increase in the number of long-term unemployed since the financial crisis. Peter A. Victor and Brett Dolter - 9781783473557 Downloaded from Elgar Online at 10/06/2017 03:11:28PM by [email protected] via Material in Copyright strictly NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, SHARING or POSTING 306 Handbook on growth and sustainability In this context of the ongoing destabilization of work, it is easy for corporations and their political allies to pit the environment against job creation, promoting environmentally disastrous projects as indispensable job generators, and justifying both environmental and labour deregulation on the grounds that nothing must be allowed to interfere with creating a favourable climate for investments, which will purportedly produce jobs. (Bill C-45, the omnibus bill that undercut environmental regulation in Canada at the end of 2012 is officially called the Jobs and Growth Act.) The widespread insecurity surrounding employment helps these allies succeed, however inflated the claims. As Peter Frase (2012) aptly puts it, ‘When work is scarce, political horizons tend to narrow’. Take the Keystone pipeline for example. TransCanada’s trump card in promoting the project was the claim, as relayed by Bill Kaufman of the Toronto Sun (2012), that it would create 20 000 jobs (in the US). However, those figures were soon contested, based on a widely reported study by the Cornell University Global Labor Institute which indicated that the pipeline project would add only 500 to 1400 temporary construction jobs (see, for example, Alan Sherter’s 2012 report for CBS’s Moneywatch). When the company was called out on its dubious methods of estimating the job potential, it revised its figures dramatically downward. Similarly exaggerated claims were made for the Northern Gateway project. Economist Marc Lee of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives showed in a 2012 study that Enbridge’s projections of tens of thousands of jobs for its plans to ship bitumen from the Alberta tar sands to China via a pipeline in British Columbia were highly exaggerated, founded on false assumptions and unreliable conjectures. The mining sector offers yet another example. The Mining Association of Canada vaunts the virtues of the growth of the mining industry, claiming it will hire more than 100 000 additional workers in the next decade (Sankey 2012). Then we hear stories like the one about the Murray River coal mine in British Columbia where HD Mining is bringing in temporary foreign workers – Chinese miners in this instance – to do the work of building and operating the mine for at least five years (Keller 2012). In November 2014, a study by Goodman and Rowan in collaboration with Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Public Policy Research revealed that Kinder Morgan seriously overestimated the number of jobs to be created by the TransMountain pipeline in Alberta and British Columbia. The company had touted the creation of 12 000 short-term jobs over three years, but the study showed the figure to be closer to 4000 jobs. There are other examples, but the pattern seems fairly clear. Moreover, job creation projections in the extractive industries tend to neglect the jobs likely to Peter A. Victor and Brett Dolter - 9781783473557 Downloaded from Elgar Online at 10/06/2017 03:11:28PM by [email protected] via Material in Copyright strictly NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, SHARING or POSTING Shorter hours for sustainable degrowth 307 disappear in other sectors of the economy such as tourism and agriculture as a result of their projects. In general, however much corporations and governments talk about creating jobs, the logic of the capitalist system with its implacable profit motive and competitive markets pulls squarely in the other direction. Capital is driven to reduce labour costs by any available means: introducing productivity-boosting and labour-saving technology, exporting jobs to low-wage countries, paring down payroll costs through reliance on a ‘justin-time labour’ force with little or no claim to social benefits, and impeding union organizing in various ways. This is part of what accounts for the steady decline over the last four decades in labour’s share of national income throughout the global North. In an article for Reuters, Economics correspondent Alan Wheately (2013) discusses an International Labour Organization (ILO) study indicating that in 16 developed countries labour’s share of national income dropped from about 75 per cent on average in the 1970s to 65 per cent just before the financial crisis. In its 2012–13 ‘Global wage report’ (ILO 2013, p. vi.), the ILO also found that average labour productivity in developed economies increased more than twice as much as average wages since 1999. Wheatley underscores the ILO’s explanation for the apparent discrepancy, which is confirmed by analysts like the distinguished American economist Joseph Stiglitz, namely, that the surplus is going to the owners of capital, notably in the form of much higher dividends.3 According to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ report ‘Outrageous fortune’ (MacDonald 2014, p. 9), the richest quintile of Canadians now take away 50 per cent of all income and 70 per cent of all wealth. The reality is that no mechanism exists to ensure an equitable distribution of any economic gains of growth. From the ILO to Stiglitz there are ample sources demonstrating that by far the largest share of those gains has been captured by the economic elite. The mounting evidence of growing inequality across much of the global North was the spark that ignited the Occupy Wall Street movement which helped draw attention to the widening chasm between the 99 per cent and the 1 per cent. This doubtless helps explain the mounting evidence for a disjuncture between growth and well-being more generally. Examining the results of the 2012 Canadian Index of Wellbeing, which looks at a variety of indicators such as standard of living, citizen engagement, and leisure, Wall Street Journal reporter Ben Dummett (2012) observed that, ‘Even during sustained periods of economic growth the report shows Canadian well-being lagging significantly. Between 1994 and 2010, Canada’s gross domestic product grew by almost 29%, compared with a quality of life improvement of just 5.7%’. So the rising tide proverbially said to lift all Peter A. Victor and Brett Dolter - 9781783473557 Downloaded from Elgar Online at 10/06/2017 03:11:28PM by [email protected] via Material in Copyright strictly NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, SHARING or POSTING 308 Handbook on growth and sustainability boats looks increasingly like an ecological tsunami in which most vessels are, in any event, floundering. To return to the main point, in Canada, as elsewhere, the growth of the extractive economy is being marketed as a remedy to a flaccid job market, and the promise of jobs will always win out over the most urgent need for environmental protection, even though that promise is frequently a misleading one and what we are witnessing is an ongoing undermining of the majority of actual and would-be job holders with the erosion of workers’ protections and the repeal of some of the historic gains of labour, as in the recent raising of retirement age, for example. DOWNSCALING FORMAL EMPLOYMENT Governments and corporations all sing the siren song of job creation to wed us to infinite growth at any cost, as if there is no alternative; but there are other options – even without decommodifying labour altogether or displacing wage work as the primary means of access to income, at least in the medium term. There is the reduction of working time, or more precisely, a reduction and redistribution of the time devoted to a particular category of work: the work that we perform for someone else in exchange for a wage, for purposes that are not our own and according to a timetable dictated by someone else. The reduction of time spent in this kind of heteronomous work, to borrow André Gorz’s phrase, is one viable response to the problem of more equitably distributing wage work, and by extension the income and benefits that are today accessible principally through paid employment. This is, of course, no panacea, but a pivotal part of a mix of policy measures and social experiments pointing beyond the reign of the market with its endless proliferation of wants, its elevation of profits over people and its indifference to the health and fate of non-human nature. It is arguably the structural reform poised to translate the concept of degrowth into practice, since by reducing the amount of time people spend in wage work it liberates us for the productive and creative activity essential to a vision of sustainable degrowth. In practice, degrowth has to entail a collective downscaling. It implies consuming less and doing more. It means shortening circuits of production and distribution and reclaiming at least some activities from the realm of the market in a return to some forms of localized informal production and self-provisioning – the very kinds of activities that the fetishization of paid employment in our society has ended up devaluing. It implies a way of life which will require more time than the hours left over from demand- Peter A. Victor and Brett Dolter - 9781783473557 Downloaded from Elgar Online at 10/06/2017 03:11:28PM by [email protected] via Material in Copyright strictly NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, SHARING or POSTING Shorter hours for sustainable degrowth 309 ing wage work. That wealth of time, together with greater individual and collective autonomy and self-reliance, is also arguably the reward that degrowth can offer – time for personal development, for personal relationships, for community involvement. That is, sustainable degrowth will demand more work in the form of producing socially necessary use-values, and less employment in the form of producing commodities for exchange. In a more strategic vein, too, as long as providing paid employment continues to be one of the major justifications for the pursuit of economic growth at any cost, degrowth advocates must offer meaningful responses to the prevailing imperative to generate wage work that underpins the very structure of industrial societies, in which jobs are a primary means of distributing income, however inequitably. However, we should not forget, as Paul Ransome (2005, pp. 24–8) and others have argued, that the pre-eminence among the myriad forms of human activity of work for economic ends is itself deeply entwined with a productivist paradigm that rests on an assumption of limitless human needs and the pursuit of endless accumulation as well as the reduction of nature and labour to factors of commodity production, a theory and practice irreconcilable with ecological sustainability. It is not by accident, then, that worktime reduction figures high up on the list of social policy reforms prescribed by advocates of degrowth, in both what might be referred to as its reformist and radical guises. It is favoured by those who see capitalism as amenable to extensive regulation and culture shifts, to a point where the market-mediated activities of production and consumption could cease to overshoot the planet’s biophysical limits, as well as by those who regard degrowth as ultimately at variance with the logic of capitalism, defined very generally as a system based primarily on the production of goods and services by private enterprises pursuing profit in the marketplace and in which labour and land exist as commodities. As a practical policy measure, work reduction is something upon which everyone from James Speth to Serge Latouche seems to agree.4 In what follows I make three main arguments for worktime reduction as a central component of a strategy for sustainable degrowth: it can have concrete and direct environmental benefits in the short term; it can expand the constituency for a degrowth project through its potential appeal to several key constituencies; and it is a feasible structural reform, notwithstanding predictable objections from the purveyors of the deadly growth paradigm. Peter A. Victor and Brett Dolter - 9781783473557 Downloaded from Elgar Online at 10/06/2017 03:11:28PM by [email protected] via Material in Copyright strictly NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, SHARING or POSTING 310 Handbook on growth and sustainability STUDIES IN THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT OF WORKTIME REDUCTION One of the arguments for worktime reduction as a central element of a degrowth scenario is that it has an empirically demonstrable positive environmental impact, as shown in a number of studies conducted over the past few years. A study by David Rosnick (2013) of the Washingtonbased Center for Economic and Policy Research estimated, remarkably, that reducing working time would eliminate about one-quarter to one-half of the global warming that he refers to as ‘not already locked in’, that is, warming that would be caused by greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations already in the atmosphere. Rosnick found that an annual 0.5 per cent reduction in work hours in the USA would cut every degree of warming by between 8 and 22 per cent, as shorter hours result in lower production. That 0.5 per cent decrease in work hours annually would bring the average work week in the USA down from 40 to 30 hours by 2100, with seven additional weeks of vacation. In an earlier study by two Swedish scholars, Jonas Nässén and Jörgen Larsson (2010) also found that variations in worktime have a clear impact on energy use and GHG emissions, although not as marked an impact as that estimated by Rosnick. According to the study of Swedish households, a 1 per cent decrease in working hours leads on average to a 0.89 per cent reduction in energy use and GHG emissions, whereas longer hours increased those impacts. The likelihood of a favourable environmental impact of reduced working time was more recently analysed by Kyle Knight et al. (2012a) in a paper that considered the impact of shorter hours on ecological footprint, carbon footprint, and carbon dioxide emissions. Looking at data from 29 high-income OECD countries, the study’s authors corroborated their hypothesis (Knight et al. 2012b, p. 2) that ‘a reduction in working hours in developed countries could be a significant contributor to reduced environmental pressures through downward impacts on both the scale of economic activity and the environmental intensity of consumption patterns’. Knight et al. (2012a, 2012b) argue that longer work hours place higher demands on resources by contributing to the expansion of the scale of economic output, and consequently generating more waste and pollution. However, beyond the issue of scale of output, they point out other ways in which longer hours are environmentally detrimental. Confirming the old adage ‘haste makes waste’, they conclude that time pressures lead to consumption choices that are relatively worse for the environment; if you are in a hurry, you are likelier to drive or take a taxi than a bus, likelier Peter A. Victor and Brett Dolter - 9781783473557 Downloaded from Elgar Online at 10/06/2017 03:11:28PM by [email protected] via Material in Copyright strictly NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, SHARING or POSTING Shorter hours for sustainable degrowth 311 to reach for processed food than to cook, likelier to replace something broken than to repair it. Knight et al. (2012a, 2012b), in turn, cite a French study demonstrating an association between longer work hours and greater consumption of environmentally intensive goods. Blogger David Cain (2010) frames the problem in an apposite vein: The 8-hour work day is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours . . . but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work. As Knight et al. acknowledge and as various commentators point out, the extent of the environmental impact of reduced working hours will depend in part on the degree to which any time liberated is in turn expended in resource-intensive consumption, confirming the conviction that to have a significant ecological impact worktime reduction must contribute to transforming the way we live. The hypothesis that shorter hours result in reduced carbon emissions was tested in practice on a small scale in Utah with a 2008 pilot programme that involved shutting down 1000 government buildings on Fridays and shifting about three-quarters of the 17 000 full-time state workers to a four-day, ten-hour work schedule. Instituted primarily as a cost-saving measure, this was a rearrangement rather than a reduction of hours, but the environmental impact was significant, resulting, according to the Working 4 Utah final report (2009), in a 10.5 per cent reduction in energy consumption in the first year owing to savings in heating, air conditioning and lighting, and a reduction of 10 040 metric tons of greenhouse emissions factoring in both the office closure and the one-day decrease in commuting. Tellingly too, the programme was very popular with employees, a vast majority of whom were happy with the new schedule, as indicated in the July 2010 Performance Audit of the Working 4 Utah Initiative, and the affected state workers also saved millions of dollars collectively by not commuting. However, the four-day work week was ultimately scrapped in 2011 because, as The Daily Caller (2011) reported, the government found it was not saving as much money as it had hoped since energy prices had fallen – an unhappy example of the Jevons paradox at work. On an admittedly very small scale, the Utah experiment underscores a point that is too often overlooked in a society that has been shaped by the neoliberal dictum that ‘There is no alternative’: worktime reduction is a viable structural reform that can point us past the logic and strictures of Peter A. Victor and Brett Dolter - 9781783473557 Downloaded from Elgar Online at 10/06/2017 03:11:28PM by [email protected] via Material in Copyright strictly NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, SHARING or POSTING 312 Handbook on growth and sustainability the prevailing system in the direction of sustainable degrowth – whether you view that transition as feasible within the framework of a capitalist system, or whether you believe that convivial and sustainable degrowth necessarily entails economic arrangements incompatible with capitalism and its growth imperative. THE FLUIDITY OF WORKTIME It should not need pointing out that the work week we take for granted today was the product of intense struggle during the industrial capitalist era, which ushered in a lengthening of the working day, and the fight for shorter hours was met with obdurate opposition on the part of employers. In Canada, a particularly fierce opponent of worktime reduction was one of the fathers of Confederation, George Brown, editor of the Globe newspaper, the forerunner of the Globe and Mail, and, by the way, a Liberal, prison-reformer and anti-slavery advocate. As historian Charles Lipton relates (1968, p. 33), during a strike in 1872 by the Toronto Printers’ Union for a nine-hour work day six days a week, Brown called on employers to ‘shut their works and starve the men in[to] submission’. While the protracted battle for the nine-hour day, and later the eighthour day, was eventually won, the struggle for and historic trend towards shorter hours that prevailed during the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century waned for a variety of reasons, as consumption tended to prevail over free time, with the result that worktime began to stagnate in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly in the United States and Canada. As Juliet Schor, Christoph Hermann and others have shown, gains in productivity have not lately translated into reductions in working time (Knight et al. 2012a, 2012b; Hermann 2014). The trend towards declining per capita hours worked ceased in the 1980s and 1990s and in some instances reversed. According to Lawrence Mishel (2013), typical US workers worked 181 hours more in 2007 than they did in 1979, an increase of 10.7 per cent. Christoph Hermann (2014, p. 185) calculates that although productivity and GDP growth slowed in the US in the 1980s and 1990s, they both still increased by 60 per cent between 1979 and 2009, so that in theory Americans would have to work fewer than 20 hours per week to attain the living standard of the 1970s. Mark Thomas (2006) points out that, in Canada, average weekly working hours across industries and occupations have remained in the 35to 40-hour range since the mid-1960s. If average working time in Canada had kept decreasing at the same pace it did in the first decades of the Peter A. Victor and Brett Dolter - 9781783473557 Downloaded from Elgar Online at 10/06/2017 03:11:28PM by [email protected] via Material in Copyright strictly NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, SHARING or POSTING Shorter hours for sustainable degrowth 313 twentieth century, the work week would be considerably shorter than the nearly 40 hours per week on average that full-time employed Canadians currently spend at work.5 As Sangheon Lee et al. (2007) observe, measuring historic trends in working time within and across nations is a complex enterprise. However, the point is that worktime is a moving target. Even if we look at the issue strictly synchronically, there are considerable differences in working time in different parts of the global North, leading Knight et al. (2012a, p. 7) to conclude that ‘worktime is a malleable structural factor that could be adjusted by willing governments in order to reduce the scale of natural resource consumption’. In truth it has been adjusted: the entire move towards flexibilization which has resulted in precariousness and a polarization of working time was undergirded by policy decisions. There is nothing natural or inevitable in this increasingly imbalanced way work is now shared. It is the result of social policies governing the distribution of working time that are primarily designed to accommodate employers who want to maximize output and minimize labour costs. So the question really is not whether there should be a reapportionment of the hours of work, because that is clearly already happening, but rather what form it should take and who it will benefit. It is a question, like so much else, of political will. There have been myriad experiments and initiatives in the area of working time in the global North in the twentieth century, such as the famous Kellogg six-hour day introduced in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1930 during the Great Depression (see, for example, Hunnicutt 1996) followed a few years later by a nearly successful effort in the USA to federally mandate a 30-hour week (see, for example, Hunnicutt 1988). The 1980s and 1990s witnessed the introduction of the French 35-hour week, the short time schemes in the German auto industry (see, for example, Bosch 2009), the Dutch shift to part-time schedules (see, for example, Wielers 2013), the Finnish 6+6 programme (see, for example, Mutari and Figart 2001), among other innovations. A matter of continuing controversy and a target of bitter criticism, especially but not exclusively by the political right in France, the 35-hour week was the object of a December 2014 parliamentary commission on the social, economic, and financial impact of the reduction of working time. Summarizing the findings of the report, French newspapers underscored the commission’s conclusion that the 35-hour legislation, introduced in stages in 1998 and 2000, was ‘the most effective and least costly job creation policy implemented since the 1970s’ (Peillon 2014). The commission of inquiry found, for example, that the reform could be credited with a level of job creation in the period from 1997 to 2001 unprecedented since the 1950s, an accomplishment not Peter A. Victor and Brett Dolter - 9781783473557 Downloaded from Elgar Online at 10/06/2017 03:11:28PM by [email protected] via Material in Copyright strictly NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, SHARING or POSTING 314 Handbook on growth and sustainability attributable to the rate of economic growth alone. The report also contradicted the frequently levelled charge that the worktime reduction had an adverse effect on the competitiveness of French businesses in the ten years following the reform. Not surprisingly, given the polarization of views on the subject, opinion was divided about the validity of the report itself, as Guillaume Guichard (2014) relates. Regardless of what the reform may or may not have achieved in quantifiable terms, what is telling about France’s 35-hour experiment is that despite the initial resistance to it by the French labour movement, there has been staunch resistance to its dismantling over the past ten years, suggesting that the measure actually gained in popularity with its implementation. In fact, as Le Nouvel Observateur reported on 5 February 2015, Philippe Martinez, the newly elected secretary general of the Confédération générale du travail (CGT), one of France’s largest trade unions, is now calling for a 32-hour week (Le Nouvel Observateur 2015). The Netherlands is the country that has done the most to promote shorter hours as an equitable solution to unemployment. During the 1980s, Dutch labour unions agreed to restrain their wage demands to fight inflation and, in exchange, businesses agreed to provide more early retirement plans and part-time jobs with comparable wages and benefits, in order to reduce unemployment by sharing the work. Visser et al. (2004) note that as a result, the proportion of part-time workers increased from 21 per cent in 1983 to 40 per cent by 1999, with 72 per cent of part-timers, and particularly women, choosing this work arrangement. Rudd Lubbers, the Prime Minister at the time these policies were implemented, stressed the benefits of the policy to human well-being (cited by Hayden 2003, p. 202): It is true that the Dutch are not aiming to maximize gross national product per capita. Rather, we are seeking to attain a high quality of life, a just, participatory and sustainable society. While the Dutch economy is very efficient per working hour, the number of working hours per citizen are rather limited. We like it that way. Needless to say, there is more room for all those important aspects of our lives that are not part of our jobs, for which we are not paid and for which there is never enough time. In Finland, the 6+6 experiments in the late 1990s were also a response to recession and ensuing layoffs in the municipal sector. The Finnish government subsidized municipal governments to hire back workers and replace the conventional eight-hour shift with two or three six-hour shifts. In an article on the Finnish experiments, journalists Ellen Mutari and Deborah Figgart (2001) reported that although evaluations of the scheme by both workers and employers were on the whole quite positive, it was Peter A. Victor and Brett Dolter - 9781783473557 Downloaded from Elgar Online at 10/06/2017 03:11:28PM by [email protected] via Material in Copyright strictly NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, SHARING or POSTING Shorter hours for sustainable degrowth 315 abandoned once unemployment levels stabilized and the subsidies dried up. However, the idea of testing worktime reduction at the local level has also been taken up in Sweden. A number of worktime reduction projects have been implemented (misleadingly publicized in the Anglo-American media as Sweden’s move to a six-hour day) and in spite of some mixed results, the experiments continue. In 2014 the City of Gothenburg introduced a year-long trial programme involving two groups of workers, one working a six-hour day and the other an eight-hour day, to ascertain whether shorter hours will yield greater productivity and less absenteeism (Anderssen 2014). Such ventures remind us that we should not let present realities obscure and pre-empt future possibilities. Working time is historically fluid; it is a social and political decision not some unalterable economic fact. Surveying the diversity of worktime arrangements around the world, Paul Blyton (2014, p. 167) observes: ‘There is nothing fixed or immutable about working time patterns – there is no unchallengeable organizational or indeed economic logic . . . which prevents a re-evaluation of the suitability of existing patterns.’ It is on the basis of social, economic and environmental arguments that several scholars at the New Economics Foundation (NEF) in Britain adduced an argument for a 21-hour week (Coote et al. 2010). The 21-hours proposal derives from their calculation of the average amount of time people actually spend in paid employment. Currently, those hours are unevenly distributed between men and women and between various age groups and social categories, but it averages out to about 21. The NEF does not fetishize the idea of a 21-hour work week; what they suggest is exploring various ways of spreading 1092 hours over 12 months. Similarly, in Peter Victor’s (2008) compelling scenario for the feasibility of achieving positive economic, social and environmental outcomes under conditions of low or no growth, Canadians would be working somewhat more than 21 hours – a four-day week, but which would probably diminish over time. Evidently, even if the political will can be mustered, any transition to significantly shorter hours is certain to be fraught with obstacles and challenges. From the vantage point of social justice, some progressive commentators such as Molly Osberg (2014) have assailed worktime reduction as an issue mainly for white-collar workers who are nowadays ‘sleeping with their smartphones’,6 especially in the current context of mounting precarity and assaults on wages and benefits for so many workers. As with the proposals for a guaranteed annual income which span the political spectrum, there are ways of reducing worktime that indeed risk punishing working people who are already struggling. A retail operation that Peter A. Victor and Brett Dolter - 9781783473557 Downloaded from Elgar Online at 10/06/2017 03:11:28PM by [email protected] via Material in Copyright strictly NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, SHARING or POSTING 316 Handbook on growth and sustainability unilaterally cuts the hours of low-wage workers to accommodate ebbs in customer traffic obviously does not constitute a viable form of shorter hours nor does the manoeuvre of reducing hours to reclassify full-time employees as part-time in order to avoid paying for benefits associated with full-time work, as a number of US employers in both the private and public sector have done or threatened to do in response to the introduction of the Affordable Care Act.7 In advocating for shorter hours, the degrowth movement naturally needs to put forward concrete proposals designed to mitigate any adverse effects on the most vulnerable members of society. The NEF proposal is a model in this and many regards. In probing the numerous daunting obstacles to the transition to a 21-hour week, the authors are attentive to the possible impact of worktime reduction on the earnings of lower-income workers and set out a series of conditions for ensuring a fair living income under a 21-hour scenario that essentially entail a redistribution of wealth to narrow the gap between high and low earners (Coote et al. 2010, pp. 26–31). Two of the main strategies for safeguarding the interests of lower wage and precarious workers in a generalized worktime reduction scenario are the introduction of shorter hours with no loss of pay, except perhaps for the top tier of earners, and the uncoupling of social protections and benefits from labour-market participation, a step that also has the virtue of recognizing to some degree the vast amounts of unpaid work – cooking, cleaning, caring, and so on – performed principally by women who are not in the workforce. These are very tall orders, particularly in the current context of the politics of austerity. Nevertheless, some combination of these measures is essential to make worktime reduction a viable component of the transition to sustainable degrowth. WORKTIME REDUCTION AS A RALLYING REFORM What makes worktime reduction particularly attractive as the iconic reform for the degrowth movement is that the desirability and advantages of shorter hours have been recognized by many constituencies at various times. As a central part of a degrowth-orientated social project, this proposition dovetails with the historic demand of the labour movement. As long as jobs remain the principal means, however flawed, of distributing income, the promise of jobs ties labour to the growth imperative. However, worktime reduction can help loosen that bond. Also, the ecological crisis lends a new dimension to the labour movement’s traditional case for shorter hours. Peter A. Victor and Brett Dolter - 9781783473557 Downloaded from Elgar Online at 10/06/2017 03:11:28PM by [email protected] via Material in Copyright strictly NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, SHARING or POSTING Shorter hours for sustainable degrowth 317 While it is true that the trade union movement, which has been contending with a steady onslaught of anti-union and anti-worker initiatives over the last few decades, has postponed the goal of reducing the work week, the aim of shorter hours has not been eclipsed. As Mark Thomas (2006) points out in an essay on union strategies around working time, shorter hours continues to be a central policy objective of the labour movement, although in practice the goal is usually to reduce hours by indirect means such as reduced overtime, early retirement, longer vacations, and by negotiating various types of parental and compassionate leave and so on, rather than aiming for the direct reduction of the work week. Thomas’s observations are borne out by the Collective Bargaining and Political Action Program published in 2012 by the former Canadian Auto Workers union under the title ‘A better world is possible’. The programme contains a section on working time (Canadian Auto Workers 2012, pp. 87–92) that emphasizes the ongoing struggles around reducing and regulating working time, and places the emphasis on bargaining for more vacation and leave time, for example, and on the issue of overtime. In a 2002 paper for the journal Just Labour, Julie White of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union analysed some numbers and concluded that total overtime paid and unpaid amounted to 20 million hours a week, or the equivalent of 500 000 full-time jobs. Also, total overtime has not diminished in the second decade of the new millennium. According to the latest available data, roughly 21 per cent of employed Canadians or 2.9 million workers put in an average of 8.5 hours of overtime each week in 2014, with more than half those hours unpaid.8 That adds up to 12.7 million hours per week of unpaid overtime alone. Unpaid overtime has actually surpassed paid overtime in recent years, and there’s a significant gender disparity here as 2007 Statistics Canada data showed that men’s overtime is typically paid while women’s is typically unpaid. Some years ago, the dollar value of unpaid overtime was estimated by one legal firm at nearly $23 billion annually (Waggott and Rousseau 2010). In championing shorter hours, then, advocates of degrowth can conceivably cultivate a wider audience and build alliances, not only by connecting with this historic demand of the labour movement, but also by mounting a solid case for a meaningful reform that is relevant to other constituencies, such as working women for whom work–life balance tends to be a constant struggle. Young people are yet another group ripe for a rethinking of the employment society. According to Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey, the official unemployment rate for Canadian youth (age 15–24) stood at 13.3 per cent as of October 2015. Although that may seem a paltry rate these Peter A. Victor and Brett Dolter - 9781783473557 Downloaded from Elgar Online at 10/06/2017 03:11:28PM by [email protected] via Material in Copyright strictly NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, SHARING or POSTING 318 Handbook on growth and sustainability days when we consider Spain, Portugal and Greece where youth unemployment has attained unimaginable heights, finding and keeping jobs is a number one preoccupation for young people, whether or not they are armed with university degrees. For growing numbers of young people, the full-time job with benefits for life is a relic of another era; many know that they can look forward to precariousness and what anthropologist David Graeber (2013) has dubbed ‘bullshit jobs’, referring essentially to the expansion of paid employment in administration, surveillance and marketing. ‘A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble’, Graeber suggests, ‘and even one without science fiction writers or ska musicians would clearly be a lesser place’.9 However, he continues, ‘It’s not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish.’ Also, and more to the point, so many of today’s coveted jobs revolve around promoting the overconsumption that underpins so much of what ails us ecologically. For degrowth to make inroads among the upcoming generations, it needs an inspiring vision of the transformation of work and leisure, an entry point to which is the proposal for a general reduction of working time. Is worktime reduction a utopian idea? Perhaps we should start responding to this frequent offhand indictment by dwelling on all the dystopian ideas that pass as propositions worth entertaining, such as dumping vast amounts of iron into the oceans to produce phytoplankton explosions10 or repealing child labour laws, as some elected officials in the United States have urged and as several US states have begun to do (Lafer 2013, p. 32). Meandering online one day, I chanced upon a disturbing scenario that there is reason to fear some mainstream economists may welcome: the prospect of boosting labour productivity by cutting the amount we sleep through the use of drugs such as Modafinil, which could enable people to sleep as little as two and a half hours per night without compromising their mental acuity (Sociological Speculation 2013). As the second largest single use of time after wage work, sleep is the realm one sociology blogger sees as ripe for colonization by the employment society. By his calculations it could increase the number of hours an American worker spends at work annually from about 1800 to 2400, a 34 per cent increase. He suggests it will benefit firms by allowing them to achieve the same output with fewer workers working longer hours. ‘They can hugely reduce costs’, he argues ‘by spreading the fixed cost per worker over more hours of work. More hours worked shouldn’t increase costs of healthcare, training and fringe benefits so the fixed costs fall in line with their reduced workforce’ Peter A. Victor and Brett Dolter - 9781783473557 Downloaded from Elgar Online at 10/06/2017 03:11:28PM by [email protected] via Material in Copyright strictly NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, SHARING or POSTING Shorter hours for sustainable degrowth 319 (Sociological Speculation 2013). By increasing the labour supply, the blogger argues, a rapid introduction of these sleep-saving drugs would cause a fall in hourly wages but people would earn more because they would be working longer hours. He even maintains that it would be an environmentally friendly growth strategy because it would reduce the fixed carbon outputs per work day (primarily through reductions in commuting resulting from the ability of companies to employ fewer workers). The whole scenario bears out the wisdom of an observation by Robert and Edward Skidelsky (2012), proffered in their meditation on Keynes’s famous 1930 essay ‘Economic possibilities for our grandchildren’, that degrowth advocates would do well to dwell less on the ecological downside of limitless growth than on its sheer absurdity. In an essay on climate change, capitalism and limits to growth, John Barry observes that ideas about growth derived from neoclassical economics exercise a cultural hegemony. Rather than being rightly viewed as a convention rooted in a particular historic form of economic organization subject to change, they are seen as the very fabric of reality – just common sense (Barry 2012, p. 135). Just as ideas about the growth model have been naturalized, so have our ideas about work. As Kathi Weeks observes in The Problem with Work, the current arrangements of work and its distribution, which are functional to the development and current stage of capitalism, are normalized and moralized so that we fail to see them as simply one way, and perhaps not the best one, of organizing productive activity and producing social wealth (Weeks 2011, p. 11). The whole notion of convivial degrowth rests on the premise that while it is desirable for ecological, social and ethical reasons, it is also likely inevitable, so the real question becomes how to manage it sustainably and equitably, rather than leaving the market to sort out the after-effects. Similarly, worktime reduction is happening now, through such mechanisms as computerization, the extension of educational requirements that delays the entry of young people into paid employment, and flexibilization policies that have spurred the growth of temporary and part-time employment. That trend is looking even more certain with the rapid advance of technological innovation that is rendering entire categories of workers obsolete, especially those in what are called ‘routine intensive jobs’, and increasingly those in low-skill jobs, to the point that a widely reported Oxford University study, which sought to quantify the impact of computerization on the future of employment, concluded that 47 per cent of US jobs are potentially at risk within two decades (Frey and Osborne 2013, p. 38). There is an extensive, long-running and often acrimonious debate about the extent to which technology is implicated in eroding employment, but it is clear that from self-serve checkout coun- Peter A. Victor and Brett Dolter - 9781783473557 Downloaded from Elgar Online at 10/06/2017 03:11:28PM by [email protected] via Material in Copyright strictly NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, SHARING or POSTING 320 Handbook on growth and sustainability ters to driverless cars and from delivery drones to automated journalists, labour-supplanting technological innovations are coming faster and becoming cheaper. McDonald’s in the US and Foxconn in China have both disclosed plans to replace millions of workers with robots – those statues of Daedalus dreamt of by Aristotle, a vast unpaid labour force with no demands and no complaints. Even if the more dire predictions significantly overstate the problem, in the short term at least, vast swathes of jobs are bound to vanish. Although there is any number of compelling reasons to espouse work reduction beyond its potential value as an antidote to massive unemployment, a substantial cut in working time could serve as a rampart against the tide of technological displacement. For the degrowth movement, work reduction is a small but crucial step away from the productivist paradigm that threatens humanity’s very survival and dooms so many other species. As the NEF puts it, much shorter hours can ‘help break the habit of living to work, working to earn, and earning to consume’ (Coote et al. 2010, p. 3). Envisioning a substantial reduction of working time is thus an essential part of the process of what Serge Latouche calls decolonizing the imaginary; it invites us to challenge conventional ways of thinking about how and why we live and to define the conditions for a transition to sustainable degrowth. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. As Tavia Grant (2014) reports, the part-time employment rate for 2014 was 19.3 per cent, including chosen and involuntary part-time work, while temporary employment (which includes both full-time and part-time temporary employment) stood at 13.6 per cent. The self-employed represent roughly 15 per cent of the total work force, a figure that is on the rise and includes a substantial proportion of ‘own-account’ self-employed or freelancers (see for example the Law Commission of Ontario’s ‘Interim report on vulnerable workers and precarious work’ 2012). Estimates of the total numbers of atypical workers vary depending on definitions and methods of calculation, and while the scope of non-standard employment is not altogether clear, several scholarly efforts at quantification over the past 15 years have placed it in the range of 30 to 50 per cent. At the turn of the millennium, Graham Lowe et al. (1999) estimated that 46.8 per cent of the labour force in Canada was engaged in some type of non-standard employment. Youri Chassin (2013) of the right-wing Montreal Economic Institute provides data pegging the share of non-standard employment in Canada at greater than 50 per cent. There is by now a vast international literature on the subject. For a good recent overview of precarious labour in Canada see Drache et al. (2014) and for a broader more theoretical perspective see Vosko (2010). The trope of the ‘1 per cent’ originated with a 2011 article by Stiglitz for Vanity Fair entitled ‘Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%’. See, for example, Speth (2008, p. 120) and Latouche (2006, pp. 231–6). Canadians worked 36.6 hours per week on average which was down from 38.0 in 1976. But there has been an increase in the amount of available time Canadians spend in wage work. In 2012, they spent 10 per cent of available time on paid work, an increase Peter A. Victor and Brett Dolter - 9781783473557 Downloaded from Elgar Online at 10/06/2017 03:11:28PM by [email protected] via Material in Copyright strictly NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION, SHARING or POSTING Shorter hours for sustainable degrowth 321 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. of about 1.3 percentage points since 1976 when that figure was 8.7 per cent (Human Resources and Skills Development Canada n.d.). Working hours actually declined in Canada in the first decade of the new millennium, according to OECD data, but analysts have attributed that primarily to the expansion of part-time work (Tencer 2012). Sleeping with Your Smartphone is the title of a 2012 book by Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow. See, for example, Pear (2014, p. A12). Based on the 13.838 million persons at work during the survey period (Statistics Canada 2015, Table 282-0082). This impressionistic proposition actually finds support in some research conducted by the New Economics Foundation which found that some high-paying jobs in areas such as banking, advertising and finance destroy far more value than they create. The findings are based on a variety of assumptions about the economic, social and environmental impact of various jobs, for instance, the premise that bankers engage in risky behaviour that precipitated the financial crisis and recession. Advertising executives promote excessive consumption which has quantifiably costly adverse effects in the form of obesity, anxiety disorders and indebtedness, as well as climate change and resource depletion. By contrast, the study found that the value of hospital cleaners is grossly underestimated given that for every £1 they are paid, they generate over £10 in social value. See New Economics Foundation (2009). Called ocean fertilization this geo-engineering scheme is premised on the idea that the phytoplankton will absorb carbon dioxide, bringing it down to the ocean depths when they die. Scientists have warned of potentially catastrophic risks to ecosystems that such a scheme may have owing to the disruption of the cycling of macronutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen. REFERENCES Andersen, E. (2014), ‘The argument for the six-hour workday’, Globe and Mail, 17 April, accessed April–October 2015 at https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/relationships/theargument-for-the-six-hour-work-day/article18052612/. Aumeer, M.A. (2014), ‘Precarious work’, online video, 17 March, accessed April–October 2015 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v5GLB2Y7JAtPE. Barry, J. (2012), ‘Climate change, the “cancer stage of capitalism” and the return of limits to growth’, in M. Pelling, D. Manuel-Navarette and M. Redclift (eds), Climate Change and the Crisis of Capitalism, London: Routledge, pp. 129–43. Beltrame, J. 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