Newsletter No. 26
JANUARY 2005

Work for all, work hours and sustainability The labour movement is not just one more pressure group in a pluralist society. Trade unions are more than another set of community organisations it may or may not be convenient to win over to a particular agenda. Labour is the living creative force by which society produces the values we need to re-create ourselves. The relations we enter into so we can work, our conditions of work, are how society organises its production and the logic of its development of productive forces. In a society where production is for profit, labour must hire itself out to those most able to exploit it — its value lies in its ability to increase capital. In such a society, labour creates the world’s output but does not control it. To take a pathway to sustainability — to a society interacting with nature in a way most worthy of our human nature — we must emancipate our labour: how we work and live, what we produce and consume and how we share time between work & other activity. Labour — of all classes and sectors in society — has the deepest need to establish a world economy based on cooperation rather than exploitation, and the greatest capacity to confront globally, those who drive such a system. A recent statement to the UN by a number of international trade union bodies asserts that support for action on climate change will remain weak while people fear job loss, lower living standards and threats to infrastructure and services on which they depend. The unions claim strategies must engage workers so they feel their livelihoods are secure. Otherwise, support will be limited, or measures actively resisted, because economic & social restructuring is so often at workers’ expense. Sustainable development must integrate environmental protection and economic and social development; the over-arching objectives must be to eliminate poverty, alter unsustainable patterns of production and consumption and to responsibly manage natural resource bases; and industrial development must generate quality work opportunities. Workers, say the unions, need strengthened rights, including freedom to associate & bargain collectively, if they are to help drive change & ensure employers comply with environmental measures without fear of retaliation. They need a ‘right to know’, a ‘right to participate’, a ‘right to refuse dangerous work’ whistle-blower protection, and a ‘right to refuse work that harms the environment’ (see http://www.global-unions.org/pdf/ohsewpP_8a.EN.pdf) While peak unions indicate the conditions under which they are willing to ‘partner’ with employers and government to make a transition to sustainability, most of humanity, including the global workforce, faces a deeper dilemma in making this transition. The 1987 U.N. report, Our Common Future calculated global sustainability is possible but, to occur, needs a fundamental change in the way nations manage the world economy. In 1989 WorldWatch estimated a shift to sustainable development could start by spending $730bn over 10 years to slow population growth, reforest the earth, protect topsoil, raise energy efficiency, develop renewable energy and retire the developing world’s debt. In comparison, annual world military expenditure at the time was $1 trillion and farm subsidies $300 million. Four days global military expenditure could pay for primary schooling for the world’s 1.1 billion illiterate children and adults. Education is a key component to give girls and women control over their bodies. It is lack of political will, not lack of technologies, knowledge or resources that prevents a shift towards sustainability. An array of key, controlling interests benefit from, and actually come into existence through current exploitive relationships. They resist at all costs efforts to shift control out of their hands. This need to protect and extend their power lies behind the vast arms expenditure and the institution of a global police state via a ‘war against terrorism’, which, we are promised, may last generations. In theory, a more liberal, progressive alliance between sectors of labour and capital could, while still retaining a system based on exploitation, attenuate its effects and share the benefits more broadly. For instance there could be scope for a strategic alliance between ‘progressive’ capital and the ‘middle classes’ (often code for workers in regular, salaried or wage occupations) based round information & environmental technologies and offering a time ‘balance’ between work/family. Yet, what is the scope for such a ‘progressive’ alliance to prosper, even in richer societies, when the most profitable sectors are the most rapacious (arms, oil, drugs, ‘black’ markets) and most determined to protect & promote their interests? Can even ‘progressive’ sectors of capital pass up a chance to exploit & plunder — labour, if not resources — if a state protecting the most ruthless interests also offers them an opportunity? The present system cannot help but create inequality and be wasteful and destructive. Accumulation of wealth and power by the few, side by side with impoverishment and disempowerment for the many; overwork on one hand and unemployment on the other; over consumption alongside starvation — these are outcomes of a system based on exploitation & expropriation. It feeds growing insecurity and social division and justifies creation of a global police state; it expends trillions on armaments as society drifts towards a global social, economic and environmental crisis. The CIA recently reported that the threat of terrorism to security is nothing compared to the threat climate change poses. Labour must be strong and united to even curb capital’s rapaciousness. It needs to defend and use its power to influence events & curb excesses and adventurism. But, to actually attain a non-exploitive society, which is the only guarantee of sustainability, labour must not only be strong and united, but determined to overthrow the social-economic relations that allow exploitation and the edifice of injustice and destruction that rises out of it. Any number of technologies and modes make a sustainable and equitable society possible. Some are to a degree, compatible with the present system (‘”Eco-efficiency” and “cleaner production” tend to be firm-oriented concepts, so Henry Ford’s dictum, “You must get the most out of power, out of material & out of the time” could apply to any eco-efficient factory’ http://www.mcdonough.com/), but many are unlikely to fully realise their potential in existing frameworks (for example, technologies that centre on local communities, ecopolises). To share limited natural resources productivity needs to increase exponentially (see http://www.rmi.org/ on Natural Capitalism and Factor 4: Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource Use), circular systems must replace linear (industry eco-systems: http://www.zeri.org/theory.htm; poly-cultures http://http://www2.essex.ac.uk/ces/) and ‘time’ replace having ‘stuff’. For all that, new jobs created may still only match number of old jobs destroyed (UN predicts only marginal job creation). A cooperative, participatory, self-managing society will generate its own, different work demands from an exploitative, delegatory, consumerist model. This is where shorter work hours and restructuring of our work lives — to empower us and to share the work and free time society has available — becomes a key ‘red-green’ strategy for sustainability, that is, a strategy that unites the interests of both labour & the environment, while cracking the hegemony of interests that block humanity’s turn to sustainability. The work required to create a sustainable & dynamic world economy, needs sharing equally, especially with ongoing enhancement of productivity. A sustainable society will place greater emphasis on growth of ‘social capital’, on people and communities having less time tied up in ‘necessary’ work, that is, work transacted in the labour market; and more time and resources to freely manage their own systems and services. Karl Marx made the connection between sustainability, labour’s emancipation & work hours 150 years ago when he wrote: ‘freedom (for labour) can only exist in socialized humanity, the associated producers, rationally regulating their inter-changes with Nature, bringing it under their common control.. achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most adequate to and worthy of their human nature. But (this work) always remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human power that is its own end, the true realm of freedom. Shortening the working day is its fundamental premise” (Capital III, Ch 48). This insight is as relevant today.

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