Degrowth Starts at Work
Workers of the World aren’t exactly uniting. Or necessarily even rising up. But lots of them are raising a ruckus, in lots of different places and ways. It’s early days in the weaving of a complex fabric of change, and some strands will doubtless break off without leading anywhere. But looked at together, these new attitudes and practices related to how people work are starting to look like a potentially powerful social shift — one that could reinforce the degrowth movement.
Lying Flat
Think broadly here. Of related phenomena such as “quiet quitting” in the US, where people keep their jobs but don’t work like crazy the way they used to in hopes of climbing the professional ladder. And of the “lying flat” philosophy among young Chinese who choose “low material desire, low consumption and refusing to work, marry and have children” over joining the rat race. And of people in their 50s and early 60s retiring rather than working years longer to get more cash in their retirement accounts. Or of a pickup in the number of men leaving jobs to act as caregivers for children and also for their parents
Or think at the other end of the spectrum, of unionizing efforts and strikes, reversing decades of decreasing power for labor across the Global West. Of oil refinery workers in Europe, walking off jobs even as Europe struggles with energy shortages — part of a list of strikes affecting everything from railroads and subways to post offices. Of South Korean truckers refusing to drive, snapping already fragile supply chains, at an estimated cost to the economy of over $1.2 billion before the government forced them back to work.
Or in the US, of railroad workers in four of 12 affected unions turning down a pay-and-benefits package mediated by the US government because it does not provide for any of the unpaid sick leave President Joe Biden says everyone should have — a strike made illegal by Biden and a Democratic Party-controlled Congress.
Standing Up
People across China more recently are not merely lying flat, but also standing up, demanding basic human rights and openly criticizing a government that had grown used to being automatically obeyed. The round of nationwide, apparently spontaneous demonstrations across China reportedly were focused to a considerable degree on the severe lockdowns that came with the government’s Zero-Covid policy, and there, it worked: Zero-Covid is no more.
But what about the bigger issues some of the demonstrators raised? As The Nation recalled: “This round of collective anger began with worker unrest at a Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou, Henan province, where labor conditions are abysmal in normal times and, with the recently implemented ‘closed loop’ system, have become intolerable.” Foxconn is the Taiwan-based manufacturer-for-hire who makes most of Apple’s consumer products, including at that particular factory the latest IPhone.
In the UK, even nurses are threatening to strike on Dec. 15 and 20, if the government does not increase their pay by more than inflation in order to help stop an exodus from a profession that has ceased to provide many with a basic living, leading to acute shortages of personnel that hurt patients. “Nursing is standing up for the profession and their patients. We’ve had enough of being taken for granted and being unable to provide the care patients deserve,” a union leader was quoted as saying by a UK television network.
A woman working the cash register at a small grocery store in my New England town said she had recently quit nursing for reasons strikingly similar to those cited by UK nurses, and she wished them luck.
The UK nurses’ stance is also reminiscent of that taken in the US by teachers’ unions — and even non-unionized teachers who managed to organize strikes in 2018–19 in several states, starting with heavily Republican West Virginia. The teachers demanded not just more pay for themselves but more for other workers at their schools and for their students, who the teachers felt weren’t getting the education they deserved because of public spending cuts.
Change the World
Teachers and nurses aren’t alone in seeing potential for using industrial action to change more than their terms of employment. “Stop the distribution, change the world,” is what Bloomberg News referred to as the marquee slogan of the South Korean union that led the truckers strike in that country. Governments of all stripes will continue fighting such citizen-led efforts at fundamental change, though.
What would change the world the most, I would argue, would simply be if more people stepped off the ever-accelerating treadmill: If they decided to spend more time doing what they want to do and less time and energy doing what somebody will pay them to do. If they decided not to give up their lives to get more money in order to buy more stuff made by other exhausted runners on the treadmill.
Possibilities for Our Grandchildren
An essay entitled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” by British economist — and member of the literary and artistic Bloomsbury Group — John Maynard Keynes in 1930 mused on the notion that technological progress was proceeding so rapidly that, within 100 years, people would need to work little if any to meet basic human needs and would probably choose to work around 15 hours a week just to make themselves feel industrious and useful.
At this (then) future point, Keynes — that’s the Keynes of “Keynesian economics” — suggested: “We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value.” That value being very low, by Keynes’s reckoning.
Tragically for the Earth and most of its inhabitants, people haven’t been following Keynes’s prescription. Rather than working less, they have kept up the grind in order to accumulate more stuff. But is it possible that is belatedly changing, now that Keynes’100 year mark is nearly upon us? That the labor strikes, the lying down, and the standing up for rights — especially rights related to work-life balance — are tentative steps in that direction?
Economists and social analysts have long assumed that the world was moving towards too few jobs, not too few workers. A 15-hour work week became the stuff of left- and right-wing speculation, based on the notion that robotics and other forms of automation would take over repetitive work, from tightening bolts in factories to writing corporate earnings and sports reports for news services.
Not Too Little Work
However, for this immediate post-pandemic period, at least, the opposite seems to be true. Labor in in short supply everywhere. This gives workers more power to demand higher pay and better working conditions. That in turn probably will, given time, encourage more automation. But it is possible to imagine an end to the cycle different from the standard assumption of public panic as jobs disappear, leading to a return of bargaining power to the management side, lower real wages, higher corporate profits and more ecology- and soul-destroying stuff.
Imagine instead that in the face of automation, workers seek and get shorter working hours, so remaining jobs are spread around more. Just as they shifted their attitudes toward work, people shift their attitude towards consumption and start buying less stuff, more of it made closer to home by workers paid decent wages.
GDP growth numbers would weaken. We would have degrowth! Everything and most everybody would benefit, except perhaps for those few who would have pocketed the higher corporate profits that didn’t materialize. But then again, maybe they would benefit, too. After all, they can’t spend all the money they have now, and perhaps they too would work a bit less — and discover they enjoyed it.
