Let's all work less

During the six years I lived in the Netherlands I learned that every worker, whether working in a service or professional job, had four weeks of paid vacation and a 36-hour workweek. If they worked 40 hours and banked the extra four hours they could use it to stretch their vacation to nearly two months.

As you can imagine, much of the country shuts down during the summer while everyone takes off from work.

It’s not surprising that, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Dutch workers work 20 percent fewer hours than we do.

This is entirely unknown in the U.S. We have no right to paid vacation and the 40-hour workweek is a promise never fulfilled. U.S. workers work too much.

Free or cheap government-funded housing, health care and higher education in other wealthy countries means they live better with less work.

Instead of spending on these necessities, most U.S. government discretionary government spending goes to the military and subsidies for corporations and the rich. 

In the U.S., we have to pay for everything from health care, housing and higher education. We might get paid more but get far less for it.

It’s no wonder we have a love — (mostly) hate relationship with work.

Work defines our every waking moment. For some, work is the source of self-worth and gives us meaning. For the rest, work dominates our lives and poisons our bodies and the planet.

In capitalism, life is organized around work. The exploitation of our labor is the source of both control and profits.

Because work is central to capitalism, it is up to organized workers to act.

The problem is that since the May 23, 1950, Treaty of Detroit wage-productivity deal between the UAW and General Motors, our unions have abandoned control of our work. We trade slightly higher wages or no concessions for intensive increases in productivity — more work. This means we actually get a pay cut when productivity rises faster than wages.

The 19th century workers I wrote about in my first book, “When Workers Shot Back,” typically worked almost twice as many hours as we do now for dangerous, low-paying work. Their revolt dramatically lowered the amount of work we did each work day, week and during our life.

In the 1930s, the famed economist Maynard Keynes thought we would have 15-hour workweeks by the year 2000. How wrong he was.

For the past 40 years this has gone entirely in the other direction. We now work harder and longer for less pay while corporate profits skyrocket and the rich get richer.

Much of the work most of us do is deadly and destructive. As historian of work Chris Carlsson explained in an email interview, “Every day most of us get up and go to work. And yet work is our biggest public secret. The vast majority of the work we do is a waste of time if it’s not actively destroying the world.” It’s not only the characters in the TV show “Severance” who are unsure of the purpose of their work.

While some of the most ecologically destructive work is the best paid, the most important kinds of work — taking care of people — is the worst paid.

Low wages means many people are working too much while many have too little work. The problem isn’t too little work. It’s too little income. More and more of us have multiple jobs. A growing number of us have only insecure gig work.

I know about working too much for too little pay. I regularly teach seven to nine  classes (gigs) per semester at two to three universities and community colleges spread out over four counties. Although I am untenured, I write books, academic articles and student letters of recommendation for no extra pay. While our pay rises slightly, our workload rises faster. Yes, we are unionized.

I am not alone. In addition to having multiple paid jobs we also have the never-ending unpaid job of house- and care-work.

The U.S. looks increasingly like the Global South, where an estimated 61 percent do not have stable employment. About 86 percent of workers in Africa, the highest level in the world, have only precarious work.

As precarious part-time, contract and gig work spreads, the wealthy countries begin to look more like the rest of the world.

To turn this around we need to demand higher wages for less work if our planet is to survive the rising climate catastrophe.

In his 1917 book, “In Praise of Idleness,” mathematician Bertrand Russell wrote that “a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.”

Russell had a point. Not only would we be much happier if we work less, but the planet would be better off for it. Work is mostly a misery to be avoided, resisted and reduced.

While capitalism is exhausting the supply of natural resources and sending our ecosystem into a death spiral, it is long overdue to focus our organizing on work.

We need to shift our focus to organizing against work, not for more work. Ignoring work only results in a pay increase at the cost of more work.

We need to organize and bargain over how we work and how much of it we do. That means rejecting the boss’s “management rights” that tells us to shut up about our work.

Let’s lower the retirement age.

We need to introduce “work share” so that those with too little work can pick up the work of those of us with too much.

“Flex hours,” so workers can reduce their hours at the same pay, should replace “flex work,”

Instead of the fruits of productivity going to higher profits and to the rich, it needs to be redistributed as both higher wages and less work.

Failing to do so means we will continue to be paid less than the extra value of what we produce.

Imagine all the workers that will flock to form and join unions demanding higher pay and less work.

As Carlsson notes, “The ecological crisis is also a crisis of stupid work done not to produce a good life but to further enrich the already wealthy. Reducing work is an important step towards a thoroughgoing and total reorganization of what we do and how we do it.”

Our health and the planet’s survival depends on us working less.