Prometheus unwound: shorter hours for sustainable degrowth

Political and business leaders seek to persuade us that the assiduous pursuit of economic growth is the precondition of employment and rising standards of living for all, often cynically pitting the prospect of job creation and preservation against appeals for environmental regulation and protection. Yet in the global North at least, the promise of growth goes increasingly unfulfilled in our neoliberal era, which has witnessed spiralling inequality, the proliferation of precarious work and the swelling of the ranks of the working poor in many Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. Not only is the capitalist growth model ecologically unsustainable, as evidenced by the magnitude of interlocking environmental crises from climate change to the destruction of biodiversity, but its employment model too is proving less and less viable for an ever greater number of people. Using data and examples drawn primarily from Canada, this chapter argues the merits of curtailing the time we spend in waged and salaried employment as a necessary condition of a transition to sustainable degrowth, which entails a significant downscaling of production and consumption. It makes the point that worktime reduction is actually occurring today, but is taking place in a disorganized and unjust fashion as a result of the acceleration of flexibilization and technological displacement – a trend that is likely to intensify in the future. The chapter reviews recent research demonstrating the potential of shorter working hours to yield tangible environmental benefits by reducing the scale of output, reducing carbon emissions and creating conditions that are more conducive to environmentally friendly choices on the part of consumers and communities. Invoking a variety of shorter hours initiatives, it seeks to make the case for the planned and equitable reduction of working time as a feasible structural reform –with potentially broad appeal insofar as it resonates with the historic demands of the labour movement and the contemporary quest for greater work–life balance.