The Possibility of a Zero Work Society
There’s a certain instilled belief that spending long hours working is a virtue. This concept is often found enshrined in popular phrases such as “learning the value of a hard day’s work” or the Puritan “work ethic”. On occasion, a few high profile business people can be heard lambasting those who do not live up the their working hours expectations as lazy. Extra-contractual unpaid overtime is an expectation in some industries and anyone who does not accept that is at risk of dismissal. Scant offerings of holidays are framed as time to “recharge” ready for the next day’s work.
Claims of an inextricable link between morality and long working hours are misleading though. There is no virtue to be found purely in work for its own sake. There is no specific ethical number of weekly working hours, there are only social conventions that have changed over the years. These conventions have often arisen as a response to organised labour action and are not consistent from country to country.
The real ethics surrounding any requirement for work are very narrow in scope and limited only to making a contribution equivalent to costs incurred. If you enjoy food, drive a car and live in a house then it’s fair and reasonable for society to request some form of contribution commensurate with what those things cost to produce, but not a penny more. There is no specific reason why five days per week or eight hours per day is the magic number and that particular working schedule is certainly not a definition of moral behaviour. If you can get what you require with only three days of toil, then three days it is and your duty to society has been discharged.
Any enforcement of a work requirement comes with a corresponding catalogue of moral obligations on the society that imposes it. There is the caveat that the individual is reasonably capable of doing enough work to make their contribution in full. If not, then the ethics shift to place the burden on society to make up the work gap for those who cannot deliver enough to pay for their requirements. That shouldn’t be just the bare scraping minimum either, it’s not fair or reasonable that those with a disability should merely subsist. Those who cannot make a full contribution should be offered a fair standard of living as compensation for the incapability of society to fix their medical issues.
Society is morally obliged to ensure all work is safe and not an undue hardship. Work must be able to be conducted with dignity. It’s morally incumbent on society to make work reasonably easily available and not impose an undue burden on access to work. If there is no work to be found, then it’s not reasonable to punish people for failing to avail themselves of what doesn’t exist. If the skill set of the worker does not match the available work, it’s not moral to leave people in poverty. It’s an increasingly common occurrence that a person starts their career trained for an occupation where there are plentiful jobs, only to find halfway through life that their skills have become obsolete. It’s not their fault that they failed to predict the future direction of technology.
The way the unemployed are dealt with in the benefits system can be degrading. The unemployed are berated by elements of the media and sanctimoniously lectured. They are forced to comply with bureaucracy that sometimes does little to deliver a job but merely gives the illusion of progress towards employment. They must apply for an endless conveyor belt of unsuitable and unappealing positions under threat of having their only means of support removed.
The deliberate maintenance of a pool of unemployed labour ready to replace those lucky to be in a job at a moment’s notice is far from moral. It creates an asymmetric power structure that favours the employer and keeps the employee living in fear. Employment should be about the positive benefits the employer can offer the employee and not about the paralysing terror of destitution.
Imagine for a moment a world where the products and services you requested cost nothing to produce. Would it be ethical for society to still demand your toil? That doesn’t seem fair at all. Work is not a moral virtue. If you can somehow get what you consume at no cost, it’s perfectly ethical to do nothing whatsoever if you so choose. People might be encouraged to do something productive with their lives for their own well-being, but in such a society that’s fundamentally a personal choice.
The eventual potential for the production of products you need at zero cost isn’t a fantasy. Humans need heating fuel and biological machines we call trees have been producing firewood at zero cost for millions of years without our intervention, in fact before humans even existed. Trees are solar-powered, gather their own raw materials and automatically produce more trees to replace themselves. Firewood intrinsically costs nothing and for the vast majority of human history did not in fact cost anything. Firewood was being produced before money was invented. Ignoring the abstract concept of the ownership of land for a moment, the main reason you will likely find an above zero price tag in your local shop is that human labour has processed the wood and transported it to a convenient location for you using tools that have cost more human labour to manufacture. What is needed are more kinds of trees that can make a wider range of products of their own accord and some mechanism to bring the items to your front door.
Getting down to zero cost for essential products and services is plausible but difficult in the near future. If something you consume requires even the slightest human input at any stage, then the cost is likely to be above nothing as there is someone who quite understandably expects payment for their efforts. It will take a long time and a lot of advanced technology to drive out the last few elements of human labour from production.
It may be difficult in the short term to eliminate problems of world boundaries restricting access to essential resources. If some other country has a resource your country needs for production they will quite likely not be inclined to give it for free even if it can be extracted for nothing. That places a tax on the products you buy and you may end up working for hours to pay that tax. This is not an insoluble problem in the long term though.
Many resources that seem unavailable in your country are in fact available, just they are very labour (and energy) intensive to extract. This causes the products to not be price competitive on the world market which in turn produces an apparent dependence on foreign imports. No such dependence genuinely exists though other than a dependence on the price. Rare earth metals used in electronics are an example, which are not so rare as the name implies, but just easier to extract in some places than others. The metals can actually be found in many more parts of the world than they are currently mined. Lithium, now in great demand for batteries, can be found in Cornwall UK but is comparatively expensive to mine being located in a high-wage country. To some extent, rare earths are currently under-priced on the world market because the places where they tend to be mined have less care than they should for environmentally damaging byproducts. Lakes of various toxic substances can usually be found near these mines which is a problem that will have to be paid for in the future by someone.
Oil is infamous for being unevenly distributed and repeatedly involved in world conflict but it can actually be easily materialised out of thin air anywhere in any country. Oil can be manufactured from all that CO2 we’ve pumped into the atmosphere plus hydrogen which can be split from water. This type of oil is often known as synthetic fuel. It requires a lot of energy input to manufacture and it’s presently cheaper to dig it out of the ground in some foreign land. Companies are experimenting with synthetic techniques though and it may become economically viable soon with the added benefit of being carbon neutral.
In the future we may be able to mitigate resource-based geopolitical issues through intensive and sophisticated recycling, dramatically reducing the requirement for mining new resources and no country will be in a position to place a resource stranglehold on any other. Ultimately it’s going to be mainly about the amount of human labour needed for production that will be the main driving factor behind the cost of products and consequently the driver for how much work you need to do in exchange.
Work reduction has a strong association with a post-scarcity society. This is the concept that one day we will be able to produce everything in enough abundance to satisfy all human requirements at little cost. The kinds of methods that reduce the requirement for work are for the most part the exact same enablers that increase productivity. If we can get to the point that little work is required to deliver our minimum requirements, it is likely we are also not far from the point when as much can be produced as anyone could want.
A zero work society is for the far future, but if we set a more practical goal of not getting down to precisely zero work, but a very considerable reduction, a major improvement in quality of life could be achieved. Work would be more tolerable to many if it didn’t consume such a vast fraction of our years. The things you need (or want) might not have quite zero cost in a pragmatic utopia, but may instead have extremely low cost due to the negligible amount of human effort required for production and delivery. Therefore your fair and reasonable contribution to society to gain sufficient credit to purchase these items could equally be negligible.
Typically we’re educated five days a week until the age of 18 or 21 and then thrust into forty or more years of five days a week in the workplace. There is no logical reason why work has to start immediately on the cessation of formal education. What if instead it were commonplace to do no work at all from the age of 18 until e.g. 25? It could be conventional to spend your early 20s enjoying life and the world while you have your youth and best health, then join the workforce later to make your fair contribution to society. Perhaps you might work from age 25 for one or two days a week until the age of 40. Then you might retire in advance of failing health as opposed to the current situation of retirement age being more defined by the typical point at which medical problems are likely to start arising. There’s no intrinsic reason why work shouldn’t follow that particular pattern provided everything that is needed can be produced using only the smaller amount of human labour that would be available.
There is increasing evidence many people are becoming less enthused by the concept of long work hours. The Chinese tang ping (lying flat) social movement is rare push-back in an authoritarian state against the “9–9–6” culture of work. This is the idea of working from 9 am to 9 pm for 6 days per week. While the practice is technically discouraged or possibly illegal in Chinese law it is often the unofficial tacit understanding between employer and employee and sometimes official company policy for those wishing to make progress up the corporate ladder. Lying flat is a Chinese counter-cultural phenomenon that calls on people to reject such working practices. It took flight in 2021 and really resonated with many to the extent that Chinese authorities banned any further discussion of it.
Sometimes it is suggested that work is essential for well-being, providing a sense of self-esteem and a sense of purpose. There is an element of truth to this, but there is a tremendous distinction between performing enforced work at someone else’s whim and discretion and performing work that is intrinsically satisfying or work for the benefit of oneself. The psychological benefits that work brings can be provided outside the structure of enforced work.
In the previous decades it was regularly envisaged that the necessity for work would have declined significantly by now. The early 1960s Jetsons cartoon, set a century in the future from then, implied that the requirement levied on the protagonist (George) to work three hours in a day is considered particularly harsh. We’re now well over halfway to the Jetsons’ future (time flies) but we are not yet seeing any signs of the dramatic falls in working time that the futurists of the past predicted. In many countries the pensionable age at which we are able to stop work has actually increased, explained with the questionable excuse that we’re all living longer. Technology is continuously advancing, production efficiency is constantly improving and GDP is increasing year on year. Shouldn’t that mean we can work less? Something seems to be wrong with this picture.
