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Call to work less to save the planet
Post Date: 03 September 2010
Juliet Schor: Plenitude from toddboyle on Vimeo.
Increased productivity in Europe has allowed us to work fewer hours while ensuring rising salaries. In the United States, however, households have been increasing their working hours for some time. There, annual hours of work rose more than 200 from 1973 to 2006.
Juliet Schor, professor of sociology at Boston College and author of a new book, Plenitude, thinks so. She was speaking on the subject at a Brussels debate on the links between working time and climate change.
And research by Jörgen Larsson at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden shows that shortening working time by 1% reduces environmental impact by 0.8%. "This indicates that reduced work time would limit energy use," he said.
There are two reasons for this, he believes: it reduces the energy use of individuals while changing their consumption patterns by reducing their income; and having more time means that they might use public transport or cycle more.
Shorter working hours could also create more jobs and deal with high unemployment figures during the recession, Schor pointed out.
She believes that the standard approach of increasing GDP is a discredited one that is unsustainable. It requires increased energy use and correspondingly higher greenhouse gas emissions.
Shorter working hours, by contrast, increase happiness and wellbeing.
"We need to reduce the rate of GDP growth or we won't be able to reach climate targets," she said. "The other way to think about it is that we're pulling some of this demand out of the system."
This would be justifiable as people would not be getting lower incomes – instead they would simply be receiving some or all of their productivity gains in free time instead of higher salaries, Schor explained. "People are far less attached emotionally to income they haven't yet gotten than to income they have," she added.
Having increased spend time also allows people to fulfil their needs more sustainably, perhaps by growing vegetables, generating renewable energy, or crafts, she argues.
"Shifting to slow, small-scale, low impact ways of living and producing can yield dramatic reductions in footprint, even without new technological systems," she concludes.
