THE CRISIS OF WORK
1.1. The Ideology of Work
Work for economic ends has not always been the dominant activity of
mankind. It has only been dominant across the whole of society since the
advent of industrial capitalism, about two hundred years ago. Before capitalism,
people in pre-modern societies, in the Middle Ages and the Ancient World,
worked far less than they do nowadays, as they do in the precapitalist
societies that still exist today. In fact, the difference was such that
the first industrialists, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, had
great difficulty getting their workforce to do a full day's work, week
in week out. The first factory bosses went bankrupt precisely for this
reason.
That is to say that what the British and the Germans call `the work
ethic' and the `work-based society' are recent phenomena.
It is a feature of `work-based societies' that they consider work as
at one and the same time a moral duty, a social obligation and the route
to personal success. The ideology of work assumes that,
- the more each individual works, the better off everyone will be;
- those who work little or not at all are acting against the interests
of the community as a whole and do not deserve to be members of it;
- those who work hard achieve social success and those who do not succeed
have only themselves to blame.
This ideology is still deeply ingrained and hardly a day passes without
some politician, be he Right - or left-wing, urging us to work and insisting
that work is the only way to solve the present crisis. If we are to `beat
unemployment', they add, we must work more, not less.
1.2. The Crisis of the Work Ethic
In actual fact the work ethic has become obsolete. It is no longer
true that producing more means working more, or that producing more will
lead to a better way of life.
The connection between more and better has been broken; our needs for
many products and services are already more than adequately met, and many
of our as-yet- unsatisfied needs will be met not by producing more, but
by producing differently, producing other things, or even producing less.
This is especially true as regards our needs for air, water, space, silence,
beauty, time and human contact.
Neither is it true any longer that the more each individual works, the
better off everyone will be. The present crisis has stimulated technological
change of an unprecedented scale and speed: `the micro-chip revolution'.
The object and indeed the effect of this revolution has been to make rapidly
increasing savings in labour, in the industrial, administrative and service
sectors. Increasing production is secured in these sectors by decreasing
amounts of labour. As a result, the social process of production no
longer needs everyone to work in it on a full-time basis. The work ethic
ceases to be viable in such a situation and workbased society is thrown
into crisis.
1.3. The Neo-conservative Ideology of Hard Work
Not everyone is aware of this crisis. Some are aware of it but find
it in their interest to deny its existence. This is true, in particular,
of a large number of `neo-conservatives', bent on upholding the ideology
of work in a context in which paid work is becoming increasingly scarce.
They thus encourage people looking for paid work to enter into increasingly
fierce competition with each other, relying on this competition to bring
down the cost of labour (that is, wages) and allow the `strong' to eliminate
the `weak'. They look to this neoDarwinian process of the `survival of
the fittest' to bring about the rebirth of a dynamic form of capitalism,
with all its blemishes removed together with all or part of its social
legislation.
1.4. Working Less so that Everyone can Work
It is in the common interest of waged workers not to compete with one
other, to organize a united response to their employers and collectively
negotiate their conditions of employment with the latter. This common interest
finds its expression in trade unionism.
In a context in which there is not enough paid full-time work to go
round, abandoning the work ethic becomes a condition of survival for the
trade-union movement. To do so is no betrayal on the movement's part. The
liberation from work and the idea of `working less so everyone can
work' were, after all, at the origin of the struggle of the labour movement.
1.5. Forms of Work
By work we have come to understand a paid activity, performed on behalf
of a third party (the employer), to achieve goals we have not chosen for
ourselves and according to procedures and schedules laid down by the person
paying our wages. There is widespread confusion between `work' and `job'
or `employment', as there is between the `right to work', the `right to
a wage' and the `right to an income'.
Now, in practice, not all activities constitute work, and neither is
all work paid or done with payment in mind. We have to distinguish between
three types of work.
1.5.1. Work for economic ends
This is work done with payment in mind. Here money, that is,
commodity exchange, is the principal goal. One works first of all
to `earn a living', and the satisfaction or pleasure one may possibly derive
from such work is a subordinate consideration. This may be termed -work
for economic ends.
1.5.2. Domestic labour and work-for-oneself
This is work done not with a view to exchange but in order to achieve
a result of which one is, directly, the principal beneficiary. `Reproductive'
work, that is, domestic labour, which guarantees the basic and immediate
necessities of life day after day - preparing food, keeping oneself and
one's home clean, giving birth to children and bringing them up, and so
on - is an example of this kind of work. It was and still is often the
case that women are made to do such work on top of the work they do for
economic ends.
Since the domestic community (the nuclear or extended family) is one
in which life is based on sharing everything rather than on an accounting
calculation and commodity exchange, it is only recently that the idea of
wages for housework has arisen. Previously, by contrast, domestic labour
was seen as work done by and for the domestic community as a whole.
This attitude, it should be stressed, is only justifiable if all the members
of the domestic community share the tasks equitably. A number of activists
have called for women to be given wages for housework in the form of a
public allowance, in recognition of the social utility of such work. But
this will not lead to the equitable sharing of household chores and moreover
it poses the following problems:
- it transforms domestic labour into work for economic ends, that is,
into a domestic (servant's) job;
- it places domestic labour in the same category as socially useful
work, whereas its aim is - and should be - not social utility but the well-being
and personal fulfilment of the members of the community, which is not at
all the same thing. The confusion between the fulfilment of individuals
and their social utility stems from a totalitarian conception of society
in which there is no place for the uniqueness and singularity of the individual
or for the specificity of the private sphere. By nature this sphere
is - and should be - exempt from social control and the criteria of public
utility.
1.5.3. Autonomous activity
Autonomous activities are activities one performs freely and not from
necessity, as ends in themselves. This includes all activities which are
experienced as fulfilling, enriching, sources of meaning and happiness:
artistic, philosophical, scientific, relational, educational, charitable
and mutual-aid activities, activities of auto-production, and so on. All
these activities require `work' in the sense that they require effort and
methodical application but their meaning lies as much in their performance
as in their product: activities such as these are the substance of life
itself. But this always requires there to be no shortage of time. Indeed,
the same activity - bringing up children, preparing a meal or taking care
of our surtoundings, for example - can take the form of a chore in which
one is subject to what seem like oppressive constraints or of a gratifying
activity, depending on whether one is harrassed by lack of time or whether
the activity can be performed at leisure, in co-operation with others and
through the voluntary sharing of the tasks involved.
1.6. The End of Utopia
The progressive domination of work for economic ends was only made possible
by the advent of capitalism and the generalization of commodity exchange.
We owe to it in particular the destruction of a great deal of non-commodity
services and exchanges and domestic production in which work for economic
ends and the pleasure of creating something of beauty were inextricably
linked. This explains why the labour movement originally challenged the
overriding importance industrial capitalism attached to waged work and
economic ends. However, in calling for the abolition of wage labour and
for the government or selfgovernment of society by freely associated workers
in control of the means of production, the demands of the workers ran directly
counter to the developments that were actually taking place. The movement
was utopian in so far as the possibility of giving substance to its demands
had not emerged.
Yet what was utopian in the early nineteenth century has ceased in part
to be so today: the economy and the social process of production require
decreasing quantities of wage labour. The subordination of all other human
activities and goals to waged work, for economic ends is ceasing to be
either necessary or meaningful. Emancipation from economic and commercial
rationality is becoming a possibility, but it can only become reality through
actions which also demonstrate its feasibility. Cultural action and the
development of `alternative activities' take on particular significance
in this context. l shall return to this point below.
CRISIS OF WORK, CRISIS OF SOCIETY
2.1. Giving Meaning to the Changes: The Liberation of Time
Trade unionism cannot continue to exist as a movement with
a future unless it expands its mission beyond the defence of the particular
interests of waged workers. In industry, as in the classical tertiary
sector, we are witnessing an increasingly accelerated reduction in the
amount of labour required. The German trade-union movement has estimated
that, of the new forms of technology which will be available by the year
2000, only 5 per cent are currently being put to use. The reserves of productivity
(that is, foreseeable labour savings) in the industrial and classical tertiary
sectors are immense.
The liberation from work for economic ends, through reductions
in working hours and the development of other types of activities, self-regulated
and self-determined by the individuals involved, is the only way to give
positive meaning to the savings in wage labour brought about by the current
technological revolution. The project for a society of liberated time,
in which everyone will be able to work but will work less and less for
economic ends, is the possible meaning of the current historical
developments. Such a project is able to give cohesion and a unifying perspective
to the different elements that make up the social movement since (1) it
is a logical extension of the experiences and struggles of workers in the
past; (2) it reaches beyond that experience and those struggles towards
objectives which correspond to the interests of both workers and non-workers,
and is thus able to cement bonds of solidarity and common political will
between them; (3) it corresponds to the aspirations of the ever-growing
proportion of men and women who wish to (re)gain control in and of their
own lives.
2.2. Regaining Control Over One's Life
Workplace struggles have not lost any of their significance but
the labour movement cannot afford to ignore the fact that other struggles,
in other areas, are becoming increasingly important as far as the future
of society and our regaining control over our own lives is concerned. In
particular, the labour movement's campaign for a reduction in working hours
cannot ignore the fact that the unpaid work done by women in the private
sphere can be as hard as the labour which men and women have to put up
with to earn their living. The campaign for a shortening of working hours
must, then, go hand in hand with a new and equitable distribution of paid
work amongst all those who wish to work, and for an equitable redistribution
of the unpaid tasks of the domestic sphere. The trade-union movement cannot
be indifferent to the specific women's movement campaigns on these questions
and it must take these into account when determining its own c'ourses of
action, especially with respect to the arrangement and self-management
of work schedules.
Nor can the trade-union movement be indifferent to people's campaigns
against the invasion of their environment by mega-technological systems
which upset or destroy the environment and subject vast regions and their
populations to unchecked technocratic control, so as to meet logistical
or safety requirements.
The right of individuals to sovereign control over their own lives and
ways of cooperating with others suffers no exception. It cannot be gained
in the field of work and work relations at the expense of struggles going
on in other fields, any more than it can be gained in these other fields
at the expense of labour struggles.
2.3. Towards 50 per cent Marginalization
A progressive wide-scale reduction in working hours without loss of
income is the necessary (though not sufficient, as l will go on to explain)
condition for the redistribution of paid work amongst all those who wish
to work; and for an equitable redistribution of the unpaid work in the
private sphere. Everyone must therefore be able to work less so that everyone
can lead a better life and earn their living by working. This is the only
way the trend towards an increasingly deep division of society, the segmentation
of the labour market and the marginalization of a growing percentage of
the population can be checked and then reversed.
According to a study by Wolfgang Lecher, of the WSI (the Institute of
Economic and Social Research of the DGB), the continuation of the present
trend would lead, within the next ten years or so, to the following segmentation
of the active population:
- 25 per cent will be skilled workers with permanent jobs in large
firms protected by collective wage agreements;
- 25 per cent will be peripheral workers with insecure, unskilled and
badly-paid jobs, whose work schedules vary according to the wishes of their
employers and the fluctuations in the market;
- 50 per cent will be semi-unemployed, unemployed, marginalized workers,
doing occasional or seasonal work and `odd jobs'. Already 51 per cent of
the active population in France aged between 18 and 24 fit into this category
(26 per cent unemployed, 25 per cent doing `odd jobs'); and the percentage
is even higher in Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and (especially) Britain.
2.4. The New Domestic Servants
The Right acknowledges and accepts the direction in which these developments
are going. A new employers' ideology, the so-called ideology of `human
resources', is seeking to integrate the stable core of permanent skilled
workers into modern enterprises which are portrayed as `sites of intellectual
and personal fulfilment', whilst advocating `modest jobs' for a `modest
wage' in service enterprises, particularly `person to person' services,
for the rest.
In the United States, which is often taken as a model, of the thirteen
to fifteen million new jobs created in the last ten years, the majority
are in the personal-service sector and are very often insecure, badly paid
and offer no possibilities of achieving professional qualifications or
advancement - jobs as caretakers, nightwatchmen, cleaners, waiters and
waitresses, staff in `fast food' restaurants, nursing assistants, deliverymen/women,
street sellers, shoeshiners, and so on.
These `person-to-person' services are, in reality, the jobs of domestic
or personal servants in their modernized and Socialized guise. A French
minister for social affairs acknowledged this fact when he suggested there
should be tax incentives to encourage people to employ domestic servants.
This shows a striking parallel with the developments which took place
during the last century when the introduction of intensive farming and
the mechanization of the textile industry led to millions of unemployed
people going into domestic service: `personal and domestic servants' represented
14 per cent of the working population in Britain between 1851 and 1911.
It is quite likely that `person-to-person' services - and this includes
jobs in massage and relaxation salons, therapy groups and psychological
counselling bureaux, for example - today represent more than 14 per cent
of the United States' working population.
As in the colonies in the past and many Third World countries today,
a growing mass of people in the industrialized countries has been reduced
to fighting each other for the `privilege' of selling their personal services
to those who still maintain a decent income.
2.5. The Dangers of Trade-Union Neo-corporatism
As a result of all this, a new dividing line is cutting across class
barriers, a fact commented on by Wolfgang Lecher in the study quoted above:
The opposition between labour and capital is increasingly coming to
be overlaid by an antagonism between workers in permanent, wellprotected
jobs on the one hand and on the other. . The trade unions run the risk
of degenerating into a sort of mutual insurance for the relatively restricted
and privileged group of permanent workers.
If they see their sole task as that of defending the interests of those
with stable jobs, the trade unions run the risk of degenerating into a
neocorporatist, conservative force, as has occurred in a number of countries
in Latin America.
The task of the trade-union movement, if it wishes to survive and grow
as a movement promoting individual and social liberation, must, therefore,
be to extend its sphere of action beyond the limited defence of workers
as workers, in their workplaces, much more clearly than it has done in
the past. Trade unions will only avoid becoming a sectionalist, neo-corporatist
force if the segmentation of society and the marginalization of a growing
percentage of the population can be prevented. If this is to happen, an
ambitious policy for a continual, programmed reduction in working hours
is indispensable. Trade unions are incapable of implementing such a policy
on their own. But through their campaigns they can ensure that the necessity
for such a policy is accepted and, more importantly, they can adopt it
as the objective governing their actions and their social project. A project
for a society in which each can work less so that all can work better and
live more becomes, today, one of the principal binding elements of social
cohesion.
It still remains for us to examine: (1) the extent of the reduction
in working hours that can be envisaged; (2) the cultural changes and cultural
tasks which trade unions will have to tackle as a result; (3) the changes
it will bring about in the life of individual people; (4) how it can be
programmed, realized and made compatible with an improvement in our standard
of living.
WORKING LESS SO THAT ALL CAN WORK
3.1. Towards the 1,000-hour Working Year
The current technological revolution is giving rise to savings in labour,
the extent of which are often underestimated. Productivity in industry
has risen between 5 per cent and 6 per cent per year since 1978; in the
economy as a whole it has risen by between 3 per cent and 4 per cent per
year. Production of commercial goods and services has risen by about 2
per cent per year. In other words, though the economy keeps growing, the
amount of labour it requires diminishes every year by approximately 2 per
cent.
This net saving in labour is set to accelerate between now and
the end of the century, thanks, mainly, to the `improvements that can be
predicted in robotics and information technology. Yet even without any
acceleration, the amount of labour required by the economy will have diminished
in the next ten years by about 22 per cent; in the next fifteen years it
will have diminished by about a third.
The prospects from now until the beginning of the next century are therefore
as follows: either current norms of full-time employment will be maintained
and there will be another 35 per cent of the population unemployed on top
of the current 10 per cent to 20 per cent; or else the number of hours
spent in work for economic ends will be reduced in proportion to foreseeable
savings in labour and the number of hours we work will decrease by between
30 per cent and 40 per cent - or even by half if everyone is to be guaranteed
paid work. Evidently intermediate solutions can be envisaged, but the optimum
solution is obviously the one which allows everyone to work but work less,
work better and receive their share of the growing socially produced
wealth in the form of an increasing real income. This presupposes a
staged, programmed reduction in working hours from approximately 1,000
hours per year at present to approximately 1,000 hours per year in fifteen
years' time, without any reduction in people's purchasing power. This calls
for a whole series of specific policies, in particular a social policy
which will make purchasing power dependent not on the amount of working
hours put in but on the amount of social wealth produced. We will return
to this later.
3.2. New Values, New Tasks
For the first time in modern history, we will be able to stop spending
most of our time and our lives doing paid work. The liberation from
work has become, for the first time, a tangible prospect. However, we must
not underestimate the implications this has for each of us. The campaign
for a continual and substantial reduction in the amount of paid work we
do presupposes the latter's gradually ceasing to be the only - or main
- occupation in our lives. It must, then, cease to be our principal source
of identity and social insertion. Values other than economic values, activities
other than the functional, instrumental, waged activities social apparatuses
and institutions compel us to perform, will have to become predominant
in our lives.
The cultural and societal change involved here demands from each of
us a change in attitude which no state, government, political party or
trade union can bring about on our behalf. We shall have to find a meaning
in life other than gainful employment, the work ethic and productivity,
and struggles centred on issues other than those implied in wage relations.
The extent of these cultural changes is such that it would be futile to
propose them were it not for the fact that the changes presently under
way are already heading in this direction.
3.2.1. Liberation in work and liberation from work
Disaffection with waged work has been on the increase over the last
twenty years or so, as shown by surveys conducted periodically by institutes
in Germany and Sweden. Particularly prevalent among young workers, this
attitude finds expression not so much in a lack of interest or a refusal
to work hard but rather in a desire that work should fit into life instead
of life having to fit into or be sacrificed to one's job or career. Workers,
particularly young workers, aspire to (re)gain control of their lives and
this increases their awareness of and openness to movements which have
this specific aim.
This desire to liberate oneself from, or vis-a-vis, work should not
be seen as opposed to the traditional union objectives of achieving liberation
in work. On the contrary, past experience has shown that workers
become more demanding with regard to their working conditions and work
relations when their work leaves them time and energy to have a personal
life. Conversely, personal self-development requires that the nature and
hours of work should not be damaging to the workers' physical and psychic
faculties. The trade-union movement must, therefore, keep campaigning on
two levels simultaneously, just as it did in the past: for the `humanization'
and enrichment of work and for a reduction in working hours, without loss
of income.
The traditional task of the trade unions is as relevant now as ever.
For although the employers' ideology sets great store by the reskilling
and personalizing ofjobs and the policy of giving workers greater responsibility,
in practice this revaluation of labour only affects a small and privileged
elite.
For large sectors of industrial and service workers it entails not only
redundancies, but the deskilling and standardization of numerous previously
skilled jobs and the introduction of a system of constant electronic monitoring
of behaviour and productivity. Instead of being liberating, computerization
often intensifies labour by eliminating `dead time' and forcing an increase
in the pace of work.
Often accompanied by putting workers on short time or the introduction
of flexi-time, this intensification of work masks, as if by design, the
fact that the intensity of human effort is now just a secondary factor
of increased productivity, the main factor being the savings in human labour
due to the high technical performance of the equipment employed. This equipment
could be used to ease the strain and monotony of work, as well as
working hours. This fact makes the arbitrary and oppressive nature of the
intensification of labour all the more acutely felt.
3.2.2. New forms of work, new responsibilities
In general, labour is tending to become a secondary force of production
by comparison with the power, degree of automation and complexity of the
equipment involved. Jobs in which the notion of individual effort and output
still retain some meaning,in which the quantity or quality of the product
depends on the workers' application to their task and in which their pride
in producing something well-made is still a source of personal and social
identity, are becoming increasingly rare.
In robotized factories and process industries in particular, work consists
essentially in monitoring, (re)programming and, should the occasion arise,
correcting and repairing the functioning of automatic systems. Workers
in this situation are on duty rather than at work. Their
work is by nature intermittent. It is as dematerialized and functional
to the system whose smooth running it ensures as that of `functionaries'
or civil servants and, as in the case of the latter, often requires the
worker to respect procedures whose minutest details have been laid down
in advance and which preclude all forms of initiative and creativity. The
control the workers exercise over their `product' and over the purpose
it serves is minimal. Traditional work values and the traditional work
ethic thus seem destined to give way to an ethic of service and, possibly,
of responsibility towards the community, in so far as one's professional
consciousness can now only consist in identifying oneself with the value
of the function one fulfils and no longer with the value of the
product of one's labour.
It thus becomes essential to ask ourselves what purpose we serve by
the function we fulfil at `work'. Professional consciousness must therefore
extend to include an examination of the effects technological, economic
and commercial decisions have on society and civilization, and the issues
that are at stake. ThiI is especially necessary in the case of technical
and scientific workers, whose associations and groups have been known publicly
to question the moral and political aims, values and consequences of the
programmes they are to implement.
This broadening of professional consciousness, this assumption of a
reflexive and critical perspective on the implications of one's professional
activities can obviously occur in associations and discussion groups, but
should also be a central concern of the trade-union movement. In the absence
of such developments, we run the risk of seeing the emergence of a technocratic
caste which uses its expertise, or allows others to use it, to reinforce
the domination of big business and the state over its citizens.
At a time when the economy has less and less need for everyone to be
in full-time employment, the question of why we work and what our work
consists in doing assumes prime importance. Asking this question is our
only way of protecting ourselves from an ethic of `hard work for its own
sake' and `producing for the sake of producing' which in the end lead towards
an acceptance of the war economy and war itself.
3.2.3. The importance of non-economic aims and actions
The capitalist economy is no longer able to guarantee everyone a right
to economically useful and remunerated work. Hence the right to work cannot
be guaranteed for everyone unless, first, the number of hours everyone
works in the economy is reduced and, second, the possibilities of
working outside the economy, in tasks not performed for economic
ends, are developed and opened up to all.
3.2.3.1. The trade union in everyday life: cultural tasks.
As has been shown, we cannot all be guaranteed the possibility of working
within the economy unless working hours are reduced to approximately 1,000
hours per year. Waged work cannot then continue to be the most important
element in our lives. Unless people are to become passive consumers of
amusements, who are fed on and manipulated by a deluge of programmes, messages
and media games, they must be given the possibility of developing interests
and autonomous activities, including productive activities. Their socialization,
that is, their insertion into society and their sense of belonging to a
culture, will derive more from these autonomous activities than from the
work an employer or institution defines for them. (The same remarks would
also apply, should society prefer to have a mass of reasonably well-compensated
people out of work rather than reduce working hours). The labour movement
should not forget here that its origins lie in working-class cultural associations.
It will not be able to survive as a movement unless it takes an interest
in people's self-realization outside their work as well as in it, and helps
or participates in the creation of sites and spaces in which people are
able to develop their ability to take responsibility for their own lives
and self-manage their social relations: open universities, community schools
and community centres; service-exchange co-operatives and mutual-aid groups;
cooperative repair and self-production workshops; discussion, skills-transfer
and art and craft groups, and so on.
These are not tasks to be undertaken at some time in the distant future
but objectives which should be given urgent priority now, for two reasons.
- The tendency of large-scale enterprises to sub-contract the maximum
amount of manufacturing and services out to tiny enterprises employing
an unstable, fluctuating workforce, or even people working from home, means
it is essential that trade unions should exist in towns and suburbs and
that they should be open to all who live in them. They must attract this
floating workforce and the population as a whole, independently of their
ability to organize waged workers at their workplaces.
- More than at any other time, the influence of the trade-union movement
depends on its ability to contend with the cultural industry and the entertainment
or leisure moguls, so as to break the monopoly they are aiming to acquire
over consciousness-formation and our conception of future society, life
and its priorities. The trade-union movement's cultural task is really
a political one, if we give `political' its original meaning of an activity
relating to the organization, future and good of the `city'.
3.2.3.2. Trade unionism as one movement among many The trade union
movement should also not ignore the Struggles which have developed in the
last fifteen years or so in areas outside work. These campaigns, which
are extremely varied in nature, are all characterized by the aspiration
of individuals and communities to regain existential sovereignty and the
power to determine their own lives. These campaigns have a common target:
the dictatorial rule industry and the bureaucracy exercise in alliance
with professions whose aim it is to monopolize knowledge in areas as diverse
as health, education, energy requirements, town planning, the model and
level of consumption, and so on. In all these areas, single-issue movements
- the `new social movements' - are attempting to defend our right
to self determination from forms of mega-technology and scientism which
lead to the concentration of decision-making power in the hands of a technocracy
whose expertise generally serves to legitimate the economic and political
powers-that-be.
These campaigns of resistance to the professionalization, technocratization
and monetarization of our lives are specific forms of a wider, more fundamental
struggle for emancipation. They contain a radical potential which has repercussions
on workplace struggles and they mould the consciousness of a growing number
of people. It is essential for the trade-union movement to be receptive
to the aspirations contained within these movements and to adopt them as
part of its struggle. It is equally essential that it should see itself
as an integral part of a wider, many-sided movement of individual and social
emancipation. The fact that the trade-union movement is - and will remain
- the best-organized force in this broader movement confers on it a particular
responsibility: on it will largely depend the success or failure of all
the other elements in this social movement. According to whether the trade-union
movement opposes them or whether it seeks a common alliance and a common
course of action with them,these other elements will be part of the left
or will break with it, will engage with it in collective action or will
remain minorities tempted to resort to violence.
The attitude of the trade-union movement towards the other social movements
and their objectives will also determine its own evolution. If it divorces
itself from them, if it refuses to be part of a wider movement, if it sees
its mission as being limited to the defence of waged workers as such, it
will inevitably degenerate into a conservative, neo-corporatist force.
3.3. Working Less, Living Better
3.3.1. The field of autonomous activities
A progressive reduction in working time to 1,000 hours or less per year
gives completely new dimensions to disposable time. Non-working time is
no longer necessarily time for the rest, recuperation, amusement and consumption;
it no longer serves to compensate for the strain, constraints and
frustrations of working time. Free time is no longer merely the always
insufficient `time left over' we have to make the most of while we can
and which is never long enough for embarking on a project of any kind.
If the working week were reduced to under twenty-five or thirty hours,
we could fill our disposable time with activities which have no
economic objective and which enrich the life of both individual and group:
cultural and aesthetic activities whose aim is to give and create pleasure
and enhance and `cultivate' our immediate environment; assistance, caring
and mutual-aid activities which create a network of social relations and
forms of solidarity throughout the neighbourhood or locality; the development
of friendships and affective relationships; educational and artistic activities;
the repairing and production of objects and growing food for our own use,
`for the pleasure' of making something ourselves, of preserving things
we can cherish and hand down to our children; service-exchange cooperatives,
and so on. In this way it will be possible for an appreciable proportion
of the services currently provided by professionals, commercial enterprises
or public institutions to be provided on a voluntary basis by individuals
themselves, as members of grassroots communities, according to needs they
themselves have defined. I shall return to this later.
These activities, taken as a whole, should not be viewed as an alternative
economic sector which forms part of a 'dual economy'. These activities
are characterized by an absence of economic rationality and have no place
in the economic sphere. The act of performing them, is not the means
to achieve an end, to achieve satisfaction. It produces that satisfaction
itself; it is an end in itself. The time we devote, for example, to music,
love, education, exchanging of ideas, to creative activities, to looking
after the sick, is time for living, and cannot be bought or sold at any
price. Extending this time for living and reducing the amount of time devoted
to necessary tasks or work for economic ends has been one of humanity's
constant aims.
3.3.2. From the self-management of time to the self-management of
life
There is no reason why we should make this reduction of the amount of
paid work a reduction in daily or weekly working hours. Computerization
and the greater flexibility of decentralized units of production increase
the scope for individual and/or collective self-management of work schedules.
This is already happening in Quebec, where public employees are able to
arrange their monthly quota of 140 hours as best suits them individually.
Factories and administrative bodies have been reorganized so that employees
are no longer obliged to put in a set number of hours per day, with work
stations functioning independently of one another. Such possibilities for
workers themselves to manage their own time should be mobilized against
schemes which introduce flexi-time on the employers' terms.
One thousand hours per year could, for example, be divided into twenty
per week, done in two and a half days, or ten days per month, or twenty-five
weeks per year, or ten months spread out over two years - without any loss
of real income of course (I shall return to this). Working hours could
also be defined as the amount of work performed over a lifetime: for example,
a person could do 20,000 to 30,000 hours over a lifetime, which would be
completed within the fifty years of their potential active working life
and guarantee them - throughout their lifetime - the full income which
their 1,600 hours per year provides at the present time.
A form of self-management such as this which spans an entire lifetime
presents a number of advantages and has been the subject of much debate
in Sweden. By allowing people to work more or less during certain periods
in their lives, this arrangement allows them to be ahead or behind in the
amount of work they have to do per year; to interrupt their professional
activity over a number of months or years without loss of income
in order, for example, to learn a new trade, set up a business, bring up
children, build a house, or undertake an artistic, scientific, humanitarian
or co-operative project.
The possibility of alternating between waged work and autonomous activities,
or doing the two simultaneously, should not be interpreted as a devaluation
of waged work. Personal development through autonomous activities always
has repercussions on one's professional work. It enriches it and makes
it more fruitful. The notion that one must devote oneself and one's time
entirely and exclusively to a single job if one is to succeed or be creative
is erroneous. The creator and the pioneer are generally jacks-of-all-trades
with extremely diverse and changing interests and occupations. Einstein's
theory of relativity came to him during the free time he had while working
full-time job in the patent office in Berne.
In general, innovation and creativity are the result not of continuous,
regular work but of a period of spasmodic effort (for example, twenty hours
or more at a stretch in computer programming; three hundred to five hundred
hours a month, over a period of several months, to set up a business or
perfect a new type of technology or piece of equipment), followed by periods
of reading, thinking, pottering about, travelling and emotional and intellectual
interaction.
Continual hard slog does not make work more creative or more efficient;
it only serves the will to power of those who defend the rank and the position
of strength their work affords them. It is rare for pioneers, creators
or high-level researchers to be at work for more than 1,000 hours
per year on average. Experience has shown that two people, sharing a single
position of responsibility (for example, as a dean of a university, a personnel
manager, a legal adviser, a municipal architect or a doctor) and doing
two and a half days each, do the job better more efficiently than one person
doing the same job full-time.
3.3.3 The democratization of areas of competence
A policy for the reduction of working time limited solely to unskilled
jobs will not avoid the division and segmentation of society it is designed
precisely to prevent. All it will do is displace the split. It will give
rise on one side to professional elites who monopolize the positions of
responsibility and power and on the other to a mass of powerless deskilled,
peripheral workers on short time. If the maximum number of people are to
have access to creative, responsible, skilled jobs, then it is just as
essential for the amount of working hours to be reduced here as elsewhere.
The current scarcity of jobs such as these can be explained less by a lack
of talents and will to develop a career than by the fact that creative,
responsible, skilled jobs are monopolized by professional elites intent
on defending their corporate and class privileges and powers. Reducing
the amount of time work takes up will enable these jobs to be `democratized'
and allow a larger percentage of the working population to have access
to them, since it will create scope for people to acquire new skills and
to study regardless of age.
AN INCOME UNCOUPLED FROM THE QUANTITY OF LABOUR PERFORMED
When the economy requires a decreasing amount of labour and distributes
less and less in the way of wages for an increasing volume of production,
`the purchasing power of the population and their right to an income can
no longer be made to depend on the amount of labour they supply. The purchasing
power distributed must increase despite the reduction in the amount of
labour required. The level of real income distributed and the quantity
of labour supplied must become independent of each other, otherwise he
demand for production will be insufficient and economic depression will
deepen. The key question for all the industrial nations is not the principle
of uncoupling the level a- income from the amount of labour the economy
requires, but the way in which to implement this dissociation. Three formulas
can be envisaged.
4.1. The Social-Democratic Logic
The creation of jobs outside the economy proper is often advocated,
especially by the left, on the grounds that `There is no shortage of work,
since there is virtually no limit to the needs we have to satisfy.' The
question remains, however, as to whether these needs will be best satisfied
through the waged labour of people employed to that end. Two categories
of inherently non-commercializable needs can be distinguished.
- The first group relates to the environment on which our quality
of life depends, and includes our need for space, clean air, silence and
styles of architecture and urban planning which make it easy for us to
meet and interact. These needs cannot be expressed on the market in terms
of effective individual `demand' giving rise to a corresponding supply.
The resources to which these needs relate cannot in fact be produced and
sold, whatever the price offered for them. These needs will be satisfied
not by working and producing more but by working and producing differently.
To this end, a policy of selective public incentives and subsidies is required
so as to express a collective level of demand which would make it possible
to furnish the corresponding supply (especially in the case of re-afforestation,
pollution control, energy conservation, urban development or the prevention
of illnesses, for example). This will create a limited number of jobs.
But part of the jobs thus created will be lost elsewhere because the consumption
of energy, medical services and pharmaceutical products will diminish,
as will the demand for goods and services, since jobs created by public
demand are financed from public, fiscal resources drawn from the economy.
- The second category of non-economic needs which cannot be expressed
in cash terms concerns helping and caring activities (for the aged, the
disturbed, children, the sick, and so on). Industrialization has resulted
in a shortage of time and autonomy, and its growth has been based on compensating
for this by turning activities which were traditionally part of the private,
family or community sphere into professional, commercialized ones. This
has resulted in the impoverishment and depersonalization of human relations,
the disintegration of grassroots communities and the standardization and
technicization of caring and helping services - all things which the new
social movements' are reacting against at different levels. We must consequently
ask ourselves to what extent our need for the care and help provided for
by these services, whether public or private, is generated by our lack
of time; to what extent, therefore, that need would not be better met
if we increased the time we had available rather than employing people
to take care of our children, ageing parents, mixed-up adolescents and
distressed friends in our stead. A reduction in working hours without loss
of income could allow the repatriation to grassroots communities, through
voluntary cooperation and mutual aid on the level of the neighbourhocd
or block, of a growing number of services which will better satisfy our
needs, and be better adapted to them, if we provide them for ourselves
than they are when professionals are paid to administer them according
to norms and procedures laid down by the state. It is not a question of
dismantling the welfare state but of relieving it, as the amount of work
we do for economic ends diminishes, of certain tasks which, apart from
being expensive, also bring the tutelag'e of the state to bear on the beneficiaries.
4.2. The Liberal Logic
The second formula for uncoupling the level of income from the amount
of labour supplied is the institution of a `social minimum' or `social
income' unconditionally guaranteed to all citizens. This formula has its
supporters on the left as well as on the Right. In general, its objective
is to protect an increasing mass of unemployed people from extreme forms
of poverty. In the most generous variants of this scheme, the social income
guaranteed to all citizens is to be fixed above the poverty line.
The neo-liberal variant, however, fixes the guaranteed social income
at or below subsistence level, with the result that the recipients are
practically forced to earn a top-up income by doing `odd jobs', which will
not prevent them receiving the guaranteed minimum income as long as their
earned income does not exceed a certain amount. In this conception of the
scheme, the guaranteed minimum is to allow the price of labour to change
in keeping with the laws of supply and demand and, if necessary, to fall
below subsistence level.
In all of the above cases,the guaranteed social income is essentially
an unemployment allowance adapted to a situation in which a high
percentage of the unemployed have never worked and have little chance of
finding a regular paid job. It amounts to a form of social assistance provided
by the state, which neither stems the tide of unemployment nor arrests
the division of society into a class of active workers in full-time employment
on the one hand and a marginalized mass of the unemployed and semi-employed
on the other.
4.3. The Trade-Union Logic
The third formula for making the level of income independent of the
amount of labour supplied is the reduction of working hours without loss
of income. This proposal reconciles the right of everyone to have a paid
job and the possibility for everyone to have a greater degree of existential
autonomy and for individuals to exercise more control over their private,
family and community lives. This proposal is most closely in keeping with
the trade-union tradition. While the demand for a guaranteed social income
is a social policy demand addressed to the state, and one which
trade unions can neither carry through by direct mass action nor implement
themselves through workers' control, the demand for a reduction in the
working week to thirty-two, twenty-eight, twenty-four or twenty hours,
without loss of real income, can be campaigned for through collective action
and, more importantly, can create solidarity between workers, the unemployed
and those people - a significant number of whom are women and young people
- who wish their jobs to fit into their personal lives instead of requiring
the sacrifice of the latter.
Contrary to the social income, which is a more or less inadequate compensation
for social and economic exclusion, a reduction in working hours meets three
basic requisites of justice:
- the savings in labour which technological development has created
must benefit everyone;
- everyone must be able to work less so that everyone can work;
- the decrease in working hours must not entail a decrease in real
income, since more wealth is being created by less labour.
These are not new aims. There is no shortage of collective agreements,
and sectoral or company agreements which have, in the past, made provision
for a progressive reduction in working hours accompanied by guarantees
of purchasing power and a stabilization, if not indeed an increase, in
the size of the workforce.
What is new is the fact that the technological revolution is now affecting
all fields of activity and bringing about highly differentiated savings
in labour. This will continue over a long period. Trade-union action is
indispensable if we are to achieve reductions in working hours which correspond
to the predictable rise in productivity: indispensable, in particular,
if the reductions in working hours are to lead to employees being able
to self-manage their time and not merely to more flexible-time on
the employers' terms. But trade-union activity is not enough to
effect a planned reduction in working hours by stages across the whole
of society. This calls for specific policies which very much concern the
trade-union movement but which cannot be conducted and implemented by it.
These specific policies must focus on four areas: forecasting and programming;
employment; training; and financing.
4.4. Complementary Policies
4.4.1. Productivity contracts
Increases in productivity are neither unpredictable nor unforeseen.
Enterprises, industrial sectors and administrative bodies generally plan
investment programmes spanning several years which are intended to produce
predictable productivity gains. Social control over the technological revolution
consists in translating these productivity forecasts into for example,
company, sectoral or public-service contracts, which can serve as a framework
for ongoing negotiations e necessary adjustments and means of implementation.
4.4.2. Employment policy
Increases in available productivity are obviously not the same
in all companies, sectors and institutions. Social control over the technological
revolution consists in avoiding a situation in which there are redundancies
and a surplus of labour power in some sectors of the economy, while there
is plenty of overtime and a shortage of labour in others.
It thus becomes essential for labour to be transferred from enterprises
and industrial sectors in which there is rapid growth in available productivity
to those where there is little or no growth. Such transfers are the condition
for an approximately equal reduction in working hours for everyone, proportionate
to the average growth in productivity of the economy as a whole,
in conditions as close as possible to full employment. An employment policy
which offers incentives for professional mobility is therefore necessary.
This evidently presupposes the possibility of learning or relearning a
trade at any age, without loss of income.
4.4.3. Educational reform
Current training methods are often inappropriate and not particularly
stimulating. There is an urgent need at all levels of the education system
for a reform which will focus on the individual's ability to learn by her
or himself, on the acquisition of a range of related skills which will
enable individuals to become polyvalent and develop their capacity to carry
out a range of occupations. Schools also need to reverse their priorities:
instead of giving priority to training `human computers' whose memory capacity,
abilities of analysis and calculation and so on, are surpassed and largely
made redundant by electronic computers, they need to give priority to developing
irreplaceable human capabilities such as manual, artistic, emotional, relational
and moral capabilities, and the ability to ask unforeseen questions, to
search for a meaning, to reject non-sense even when it is logically coherent.
4.4.4. Fiscal reform
From the point where it takes only 1,000 hours per year or 20,000 to
30,000 hours per lifetime to create an amount of wealth equal to or greater
than the amount we create at the present time in 1,600 hours per year or
40,000 to 50,000 hours in a working life, we must all be able to obtain
a real income equal to or higher than our current salaries in exchange
for a greatly reduced quantity of work. In practice, this means that in
the future we must receive our full monthly income every month even if
we work full-time only one month in every two or six months in a year or
even two years out of four, so as to complete a personal, family or community
project, or experiment with different lifestyles, just as we now receive
our full salaries during paid holidays, training courses, possibly during
periods of sabbatical leave, and so forth.
In contrast to the guaranteed social minimum granted by the state to
those unable to find regular paid work, our regular monthly income will
be the normal remuneration we have earned by performing the normal amount
of labour the economy requires each individual to supply. The fact that
the amount of labour required is so low that work can become intermittent
and constitute an activity amongst a number of others, should not be an
obstacle to its being remunerated by a full monthly income throughout one's
life. This income corresponds to the portion of socially produced wealth
to which each individual is entitled by virtue to their participation in
the social process of production. It is, however, no longer a true salary,
since it is not dependent on the amount of labour supplied (in the month
or year) and is not intended to remunerate individuals as workers. It is
therefore practically impossible for this income to be paid and guaranteed
by economic units or enterprises, either in the form of increases in salary
per hour of work or through contributions paid into a social fund. In both
cases, the reduction by half of working hours, without loss of real income,
would raise the hourly cost of labour to double the present level.
Leaving aside problems of competitiveness, the result would be a prohibitive
rise in the relative price of highly labour-intensive services and
forms of production such as building, agriculture, maintenance and repair
work, and cultural and educational activities. This difficulty could be
overcome by implementing the following solution: enterprises would only
pay for the hours of work completed, on a negotiated wage-scale, which
would thus ensure that the real costs of production were known. The loss
of salary resulting from a reduction in working hours would be compensated
from a guarantee fund which would pay for the working hours saved due to
advances in technology, at the rate set for hours of work actually completed.
This guarantee fund would be paid for out of a tax on automated production,
comparable to VAT or the duty on alcohol, cigarettes, fuel or cars, for
example. The rate of taxation of products would rise as their production
costs decreased. The less socially desirable or useful that production,
the higher this tax would be. As these taxes would be deductible from export
costs, competitiveness would not be affected. The real income individuals
receive would be made up of a direct salary and a social income which,
in non-working periods in particular, would itself be sufficient to guarantee
their normal standard of living.
The implementation of a system of political prices, reflecting the choices
society has made, and the creation of a social income indepen ent of the
amount of labour supplied, will in any case become necessary as the cost
of bour in increasingly widespread robotized production is reduced to a
negligible amount. The value of salaries distributed and the price of automated
forms of production can o y be prevented from falling through the floor
by a price-and-incomes policy by means f which society can assert its priorities
and give direction and meaning to the advance of technology. Nevertheless,
there is nothing to guarantee that society will choose the emancipation
and autonomy of individuals as its priority or its intended direction,
rather than seeking to dominate and exert even greater control over them.
What direction the present social changes will take is still an open question;
it is today and wil, for the foreseeable future remain, the central issue
in social conflicts and the key question for social movements.
CONCLUSION
I have attempted to identify the meaning history could have,
and to show what humanity and the trade-union movement could derive from
the technological revolution we are witnessing at present. I have tried
to indicate the direction in which we should advance, the policies we should
follow if we are to bring this about. Events could nevertheless take a
course which would miss the possible meaning of the current technological
revolution. If this happens, I can see no other meaning in that revolution:
our societies will continue to disintegrate, to become segmented, to sink
into violence, injustice and fear |