Newsletter No. 27
APRIL / MAY 2005
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Environmental sustainability, infrastructure & work hours ‘What if the work week had kept getting shorter during the last 50 years?’ asks an article showing weekly work time in USA fell from 72 to 40 hours in 100 years up to 1930, stagnated at 40 hours for more than 50 years, then rose again in the last few decades. ‘Americans today would have less money and more time’, its author argues, but they’d be far from poor. If work hours had kept falling at their 1909-1929 trend the average work week would now be less than 25 hours a week, but US workers would earn as much as they did in the 1960s, when USA was already called ‘the affluent society’. Average Work Week in Manufacturing. Source: US Census Bureau, Historical Stats of US Since the 1930s Great Depression, when US President Roosevelt withdrew his support for a union-sponsored 30-hour work-week bill to back what business was calling “the new gospel of consumption", the norm’s been a 40-hour week and stimulation of growth. But, asks the author, should we keep producing more, endlessly, just to create jobs? Over-consumption and overwork is the problem now (‘Choice of Work Hours’ Preservation Institute) While aspects of the article are debatable, it raises a fundamental question — what is the purpose of our work? How do we measure our wealth? By what we own and consume, or by the time at our disposal and the level of amenity society provides generally? The drive for higher productivity makes society, ‘despite itself’ reduce the labour time needed to produce goods and services. It creates the prospect for people to free up their time for their own development. This productivity is also the basis to develop fixed capital, or infrastructure and services, not directly related to production (that is, of goods for consumption). It too, indicates the ‘degree of development of wealth generally.’ If we are to ‘rationally regulate our interchanges with nature, bringing it under our common control, with least expenditure of energy, under conditions most adequate to and worthy of our human nature’ our productivity must lead us to live in a way, and in a habitat that allows this. We need to allocate the surplus we create appropriately — with least expenditure of energy (that is, sustainably), most adequately (equitably) and most worthily (so it enhances our human and natural relationships). The last few decades of ‘neo-liberal’ privatisation show how irrationally provision of services & infrastructure can be in a system geared primarily to profit. For instance, the US free market health system is also the world’s most expensive. It spends double per head as Canada and the EU, but up to 30 per cent of people under 65 still have no cover. The health ‘industry’ is ‘unique in treating health care as a market commodity distributed according to ability to pay instead of as a social good distributed according to medical need. The excess costs of an American-style payment system represent higher incomes for both the insurance industry & providers of care’ (Third World Traveler). In contrast, Cuba’s health system is ‘very inspiring’ according to Harvard School of Public Health. A poor country, under a long- term embargo, and with severely limited resources, its health markers are ‘essentially the same as those in the United States and other parts of the industrialized world’ and standards the highest in Latin America. It has one of the highest doctor/ population ratios in the world — and doctors (and teachers) are its main form of foreign aid! ‘Cuba's commendable health care system is nevertheless a product of a socialist revolution …What works for Cuba may not work for us’ concludes the review (‘The Cuban Paradox’). Not only won’t it work for USA, but the Bush regime cites Cuba’s pharmaceutical industry as an aid to terrorism! It wants to ‘restructure’ Cuba’s economy, including health, along the lines the World Bank used on Eastern Europe. The Bank questions how a cash poor Cuba could afford a comprehensive, publicly funded system in a ‘more open & free society’, especially one ‘that relies more on the dollar.’ (‘Bush's economic blueprint for Cuba’ Greenleft Weekly 24.11.04) This paradigm appears to apply broadly across infrastructure and services provision. Cities committed to public transport are financially better off and actually spend less of their wealth on transport — 4-5 per cent compared with 17 per cent for cities ‘pouring money into freeways’, despite the myth that public transport is a financial drain ‘Heavy Duty’ Ecos Sept 2004. Privately driven construction of public infrastructure claims to provide otherwise unaffordable services cheaper & more efficiently, but ‘innumerable studies’ show such projects are not led by public benefit, but designed to maximise private profit. Since profits are the highest priority, their service is often worse than their publicly funded equivalents. ‘The experiment keeps failing, but government keeps repeating it’ (‘Road Hogs’ ). Wasteful, inequitable provision of infrastructure and services uses up people’s time because they must work longer to afford to purchase a marketised good; and waste time using systems, modes and spaces designed to serve needs of profit over people. Full-time workers in Sydney average 5.3 hours commuting a week, in addition to working long hours (‘Dads who see more of traffic than their kids’ Sydney Morning Herald 5.5.05); New Yorkers average 76.6 minutes a day and for 11%, more than 3 hours (‘The long & winding road’ New York Times 31.3.05). The very need to prop up an exploitive, profit-driven system is a wasteful diversion. World military spending of one trillion dollars a year literally destroys and impoverishes billions, while being a field for vast profit (Halliburton in Iraq). Forty per cent of global Research & Development expenditure is military, mainly by the United States ($US63billion in 2004). ‘Even a modest shift’ — to enhance access to clean water and sanitation, address climate change & develop clean energy sources could eliminate poverty save lives and build sustainability and security (www.newscientist.com 22.1.05) Current planning & design strategies for infrastructure & built environments are using resources in a ‘counter-sustainable’ way ; ‘smaller scale infrastructure is now emerging as more efficient’, inducing a shift to ‘energy efficiency and smaller scale distributed energy networks’ says CSIRO (‘Heavy duty’ Ecos, Sept’04). CSIRO software to rationally design cities in terms of energy efficiency shows high density cites reliant on public transport are most energy efficient, but an ‘alternative strategy is employment & facilities closer to people in outer suburbs, home based work ..more costly private transport’ to create ‘higher-density outer suburbs ..only marginally less efficient than a more compact city’(‘Sim cities’ Ecos Summer 1996/97). This starts to show how planning & management can be more effectively implemented when people, not profits are the purpose of the socio-enviro-economy. But the work-time-life element — the ‘labour question’ - is central to this. A shorter working day lessens the propensity to commute; it ‘frees’ up time to invest in ‘social capital’ (self-management, community-based work). Suburbs cease to be dormitories for those who work elsewhere, and become creative, productive habitats in their own right. Infrastructure and services provision becomes linked to a growing sense of community. Active participation/management in running our lives clearly becomes an alternative to consumerism: cooperation an obviously more realistic option than competitive individualism. |