What’s the point of work?

All the talk of strivers and skivers has led me to think about the point of work.

Once a society gets beyond subsistence, work can be considered as a means to both create wealth and, however imperfectly, share it.

Work is not the only way of redistributing wealth: taxes can do that too. But in developed economies and a global market place, taxes are becoming less popular and effective as a distribution mechanism. The ability of countries to raise tax rates is being undermined, both by sophisticated trans-national tax avoidance schemes and by the increasing mobility of high wealth individuals. This was graphically illustrated by the President of formerly communist Russia giving a passport to Gerard Depardieu as he flees higher taxes in France. So much for egalité, fraternité, liberté.

But the western attachment to the protestant work ethic remains strong. Popular and political sentiment seem united on the idea that if you want a share of the national resources, you need to be working, or at least actively looking for work, or perhaps retired, having worked for most of your life.

Green Card: Depardieu traded France for Russia to avoid Hollande’s taxes. Photo by Georges Biard, via Wikimedia Commons

It seems the great majority of the population believe this to be fair and reasonable – but then the great majority of the population has a job.  The problems with these sentiments will increasingly be exposed, however, as the labour force is likely to continue to grow, driven by both net immigration and rising retirement ages. At the same time labour productivity continues to increase meaning fewer workers are needed to generate the same wealth. The challenge of finding work that will provide a living wage for a growing labour force just gets harder.

Just the job

The conventional solution is growth, expanding economic output faster than productivity. But since that requires greater consumption, it raises concerns – familiar to this audience – about resources and unsustainable “three-planet” living patterns. So what are the alternatives?

We could become less hung up on the work ethic. Instead of castigating those without work as skivers, we could regard them as volunteers prepared to accept a lower standard of living, in order to reduce pressure on the labour market. Those who aspire to a higher living standard would then have the opportunity to work to achieve that. In a more tolerant past, the UK was prepared to regard those without jobs as unfortunate, but in the current mood I doubt they would be prepared to class them as selfless rather than selfish.

We could look to create jobs that have a low resource requirement, in say personal services, and encourage people to spend their money on getting a massage rather than a new TV. This model works quite well in the US where they are less abashed at paying skilled workers large salaries so that they can employ others to carry out menial tasks which would otherwise distract them from their work. It is a growing sector here too but it depends on high levels of inequality between the rich purchasers of services and the poorer providers, and in practice few services are resource free so it is hardly a complete solution to the “three planet” problem.

Sharing the available work, so that everyone works but we all work less hard, is another alternative. When the financial crisis struck in 2008, a number of manufacturing companies – especially car-makers – put their staff on part-time working rather than lose skilled workers altogether. This turned out to be quite popular. People in these better paid industries found that they were still earning enough and they enjoyed the opportunity to have more time for themselves, their families and their own interests. But attempts to institutionalise the approach, whether through national legislation, as was tried in France, or internationally with the Working Hours Directive, seem to have been ineffective and unpopular, particularly with those on low hourly rates who see their opportunity to supplement their earnings through lucrative overtime diminished.

Turning circular

No doubt we will see elements of each of these three approaches develop, but there is a fourth option: we can increase growth and the number of jobs, not by sharing the work, but by better sharing the available resources, keeping materials in circulation for longer. If we make our new wealth by turning the things we have finished with into the new goods we want, or want to export to others, then we can begin to square the circle.

A green or circular economy should be attractive to politicians. It means replacing jobs in primary extraction, which mainly happens in other countries and is capital intensive, with jobs in material recovery, which mainly happens here and is labour intensive.

So it’s a bit of a puzzle why the green economy and green growth are so absent from government economic statements. Are jobs based on materials recovered from waste seen as less attractive than, say, extracting gas from shale rock? The Prime Minister told the CBI conference in November that the country is in the equivalent of an economic war, a global race for growth. As the recent BBC4 TV series, The Secret Life of Rubbish, reminded us, resource recovery and reuse was the norm during the Second World War: food waste to pig swill and separation of all other materials at the kerbside. So how about evoking a bit of wartime spirit, extracting more value from of our waste, and generating a few jobs in the process?