[A-List] Why Working Less is Better for the Globe

[Bill Totten]

by Dara Colwell

AlterNet (May 21 2007)


Americans are working harder than ever before. The dogged pursuit of the
paycheck coupled with a 24/7 economy has thrust many of us onto a
never-ending treadmill. But of workaholism's growing wounded, its
greatest casualty has been practically ignored - the planet.

"We now seem more determined than ever to work harder and produce more
stuff, which creates a bizarre paradox: We are proudly breaking our
backs to decrease the carrying capacity of the planet", says Conrad
Schmidt, an internationally known social activist and founder of the
Work Less Party, a Vancouver-based initiative aimed at moving to a
32-hour work week - a radical departure from the in early, out late
cycle we've grown accustomed to. "Choosing to work less is the biggest
environmental issue no one's talking about".

A backlash against overwork fatigue, the Work Less Party is one of a
growing number of initiatives aimed at cutting work hours while tackling
unemployment, environmentally unfriendly behavior and boosting leisure
time. According to Schmidt, author of "Workers of the World RELAX",
which examines the economics of reduced industrial work, working less
would allow us to produce less, consume less, pollute less and - no
complaints here - live more.

"As a society, we're working exponentially hard to decrease
sustainability and it's making us miserable - just look at how
antidepressants are on the rise", he says. "In order to reduce our
ecological footprint, we have to take working less very seriously".

Americans work more hours than anyone else in the industrialized world.
According to the United Nations' International Labor Organization, we
work 250 hours, or five weeks, more than the Brits, and a whopping 500
hours, or twelve and a half weeks, more than the Germans. So how does
ecological damage figure in to the forty-plus workweek?

Do the math: Longer hours plus labor-saving technology equals
ever-increasing productivity. Without high annual growth to match
productivity, there's unemployment. Maintaining growth means using more
energy and resources, both in manpower and raw materials, which results
in increased waste and pollution.

Unsurprisingly, the United States is the world's largest polluter.
Housing a mere five percent of the world's population, it accounts for
22 percent of its fossil fuel consumption, fifty percent of its solid
waste, and, on average, each citizen consumes 53 times more goods than a
person in China, according to the environmental nonprofit, Sierra Club.

When people work longer hours, they rely increasingly on convenience
items such as fast food, disposable diapers, or bottled water. Built-in
obsolescence has become standard business practice - just throw it away
and make more - leaving mountainous landfills in its wake. "Earning more
often means spending money in ways that are environmentally detrimental.
We're finding that to compensate for lack of time, you actually need
more money to work those extra hours", says Monique Tilford, acting
executive director of the Centre for a New American Dream, a Maryland
group promoting environmentally and socially responsible consumption.
"When people are time-starved they don't have enough time to be
conscious consumers. The overarching theme of our organization is to
remind Americans that every single dollar they spend has a carbon
impact, to make the connection."

If the world started clocking American hours, then it would be
detrimental to its environmental health. According to a paper issued by
the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in Washington, DC, if
Europe moved towards a US-based economic model, it would consume fifteen
to thirty percent more energy by 2050. This would impact fuel prices
worldwide and boost carbon emissions, resulting in additional global
warming of one to two degrees Celsius. Any reductions in greenhouse gas
emissions made through conservation, cleaner fuels or green technology
would be overwhelmed by increased industrial output.

"Productivity normally increases every year, but we haven't seen massive
productivity gains reflected in our working hours", says Mark Weisbrot,
CEPR's co-director, who also authored the study "Are Shorter Work Hours
Good for the Environment?" "Because there's no limit to what we can
consume, a change of values has to take place if the planet stands a
chance of survival".

The problem is, France has already begun following America's lead by
increasing the workload. In 2005, France effectively abolished its
35-hour workweek to counter high unemployment - the highest in the
European Union, hovering at roughly ten percent - though a subsequent
International Monetary Fund paper examining the impact concluded there
was no significant increase. And this May, the new French
president-elect Nicolas Sarkozy, whose campaign to "work more, earn
more" helped win him the presidential seat, promised to make overtime
largely tax-exempt. His goal: strengthen consumer purchasing power and
galvanize the economy.

Only if Weisbrot's research is correct, France's increased productivity
would create even larger problems, especially considering France's
current productivity is greater than America's, with a GDP (Gross
Domestic Product) per hour of $37.01 versus $33.77. Today's push towards
a heavier workload is in many ways a historical precedent. In both the
United States and Europe, work hours declined steadily from the
beginning of the industrial revolution until World War II, when labor
unions were key in fighting for shorter hours. After the war, the
forty-hour workweek was legally in place, and governments promoted
economic growth in order to match it.

But since the 1970s, with the advent of technological advances and
increased automation, most European governments have continued
shortening work hours whereas the United States has opted instead to let
wages fall. In the late 1960s futurists predicted an Age of Leisure,
hypothesizing that the largest issue facing the country at the end of
the century would be too much leisure. "It was the kind of problem I
thought I could deal with - in fact, I was looking forward to it", says
John de Graaf, producer of the groundbreaking 1997 PBS documentary
"Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic" and a frequent speaker on issues
of overwork and overconsumption. "Of course, I didn't reason we'd put
all our productivity gains into more stuff".

Quoting data from his current campaign, "What's the Economy for Anyway?"
which examines America's economic policies in light of quality of life
issues, de Graaf says the evidence proves we're not better off. "It's
staggering. The USA has declined relative to all other industrial
countries in virtually every quality of life measured - health,
equality, savings, sustainability - though that's not so with the GDP
and certainly not with the number of billionaires", he says. "Yet we're
still constantly being told we're better off".

Yet suggest alternatives to the status quo of GDP worship, like
shortening the work week, and resistance is great. "Here, the business
community fiercely opposes any mandates relating to time", says de
Graaf, noting that by controlling or regulating time, they maintain the
upper hand. "What's happened in Europe is people have discovered it's
nice to have some time in their lives, and in getting some, they've
wanted more. Whereas here, business has kept that door completely shut."

But even many overburdened Americans fear change will signal further
sacrifice - mostly to their paychecks. "But the fact is, we're already
sacrificing our time and our lives right now", says de Graaf. De Graaf
is also the national coordinator of "Take Back Your Time Day", an annual
event scheduled for October 24, the date on which the forty-hour
workweek was first inaugurated in the United States. A national
organization with 10,000 members, Take Back Your Time has launched a
campaign calling for national legislation guaranteeing a minimum of
three weeks of paid vacation, an issue it hopes to make part of the 2008
presidential campaign.

As it stands, America is the only industrial nation that offers no legal
protection for vacations. The average vacation in the United States is
now only a long weekend, and 25 percent of American workers have no paid
vacation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Compare that to
Sweden, which mandates 32 vacation days per year. President Bush,
however, does know the value of vacation time. In 2005, he took five
weeks off to visit his Texas ranch, taking the longest presidential
retreat in at least 36 years.

"We see overwork as a social, legal problem that needs political
legislation", says de Graaf. "We are utterly unique in our dismissal of
the need for time and the environmental costs; not to mention, the costs
to our health and our families have been enormous".

But by shelving time, we continue to suffer from overload, debt, and
anxiety, and are stuck in a fatalistic rat race generated by heightened
consumerism. So what fuels this need to accumulate in the face of time
deprivation? Devoting his career to what drives materialism, Tim Kasser,
associate professor of psychology at Knox College and author of "The
High Price of Materialism", has sought scientific explanations,
examining the relationship between materialism and psychological well-being.

"Materialism is driven by an underlying sense of insecurity", says
Kasser, who conducted a study where subjects were randomly assigned
writing about death or writing about listening to music. The former
experience an increased desire for consumption and were "greedier",
according to Kasser. "Death is the ultimate end of time; it's
interpreted as that feeling of not having enough time. In the last
decade politicians have played off that insecurity. It keeps getting
people elected, but it also drives us to think we need to work harder
and harder", he says, noting the signs of insecurity around us are
numerous: We don't know our neighbors and suffer from high divorce
rates; our social safety nets have been dismantled; we have no mandatory
overtime laws and minimal vacation. "All these work to create an
underlying sense of insecurity, and we need to break out of that cycle",
he says.

Interestingly, Kasser conducted an empirical study comparing 200
adherents of Voluntary Simplicity to a control group of 200 mainstream
Americans and found the Voluntary Simplicity group was "simultaneously
happier while using fewer resources", and that their happiness was
derived from "less materialistic, intrinsic goals, such as personal
growth, family and community". While the Voluntary Simplicity group was
"still awfully far from having a sustainable ecological footprint",
Kasser feels it's a positive start. "The correlation between the
Voluntary Simplicity group being happy was due to those
no-consumeristic, intrinsic values, and the reason they're living in a
more ecologically sustainable fashion is also due to those values".

It's just those kind of values Schmidt has tried to encourage in his
Work Less Party. Schmidt, a former computer programmer, started by
getting rid of his car and cycling to work, then took advantage of the
savings by reducing his workweek, which allowed him enough time to write
his book, make two documentaries, and organize a community theater group
- all in the last three years.

"People spend so many hours working they have no idea of how much
creative potential they have, but you get a taste of mental freedom you
want more of it. It's an explosion of creativity", says Schmidt, quickly
adding, "I'm a workaholic, but it's the type of work that's the problem.
Our society is focused on work that makes stuff that goes directly into
landfills. Essential work such as art, music, creativity, community, the
kind necessary to create a healthy society and planet, is being negated
in favor of that."

If there's any solution to increasing our well-being, as well as the
planet's, Schmidt's advice flies counter to our driven consumerism. "If
you want to protect the environment, you have to consume less, which
means you have to produce less, and you have to work less. We have to
keep the message positive - our standard of living will improve hugely.
I think people are starting to make the connection."

_____

Dara Colwell is a freelance writer based in Amsterdam.

(c) 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

http://www.alternet.org/environment/52077/


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