Sharing the Work, Sparing the Planet: Work Time Reduction, Consumption and the Environment

by Anders Hayden

This book is a comprehensive, up-to-date and thoughtful account of "work time reduction" which is being increasingly discussed and experimented with in many countries, particularly in Western Europe. The idea embraces an innovative range of possibilities, including a shorter working week, early retirement, and parental leave. The author argues that work time reduction can contribute to reducing ecological stress as an environmentally sound response to unemployment (some 35 million people are jobless in OECD countries) and by encouraging new notions of progress based on more free time rather than more material consumption. The author explores the political, economic, and cultural obstacles to be overcome.

256 pages, Paperback

First published November 23, 1999

Reviews

[Margot]

Fewer work hours for each person, more jobs for more people. Let's save the world!

Hayden splits the globe into a different geographical division than I'm used to hearing about: North and South. North, with lots of money, power, and privilege, and the South with not so much. North using up all the Earth's resources and the South will catch up.

For example:
"Another factor is that some service-sector jobs could more accurately be labelled as a return of the 'servant sector,' in which one overworked and overpaid member of the economic elite hires an otherwise unemployed person for some economically marginal activity such as organizing dinner or dog-walking. Wouldn't it be more sensible to have a redistribution of work time so that both parties would have access to good jobs and quality time with their own dogs?"(37)

"Donald Reid fears that rather than a 'postmaterialist' future, we may move into a 'New Dark Age' in which people will be obligated to use their free time to gain new skills that will ostensibly make them more employable. That age may already be upon us, if all the rhetoric about retraining and 'lifelong learning' is any indication. These forms of education are generally not motivated by the value of learning for its own sake, or to create better citizens or expand human capacities, but to produce workers with the narrow skills required to serve capital accumulation."(69)

[lyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author provides excellent coverage of the theoretical and practical issues in effecting work time reduction, working less than the typical 40-hour week. For decades much of the work we do has been an unsustainable drain on finite nonrenewable resources but it continues due to corporate inertia and lack of time people have to contemplate a better way.