Post-Growth Work

Employment and Meaningful Activities within Planetary Boundaries

Irmi Seidl, Angelika Zahrnt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000429138
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economia
• Subtopic: Sviluppo sostenibile

This book argues that society must rethink the notion of formal employment and instead introduce and spread the notion of "meaningful work" so that societies can become independent of economic growth.

The excessive consumption of natural resources and the immense emissions resulting from our growth-oriented economic system surpass the planetary boundaries. Despite this, society and the economy still strive for economic growth in order to generate jobs, to finance the social security system and to assure tax income. However, these expectations are increasingly unrealistic, not least because technological developments such as digitalisation and robotisation will change and limit formal employment opportunities as well. Against this backdrop, the book introduces the notion of meaningful activities that embrace various kinds of work, paid and unpaid, sequential or in parallel, which are meaningful for the worker as well as society as a whole. At the same time, the authors argue in favour of reduced working time in formal employment. Furthermore, the book also describes the necessary transformations in companies and for consumers, for social and tax systems, for social services and agriculture.

Innovative and timely, this book will be a key resource for professionals and scholars interested in sustainability, economics, work, transformation and post-growth studies.

Part 1

The basics

2 On the historical development of work

Andrea Komlosy

DOI: 10.4324/9781003187370-2

Summary

The narrow understanding of work as paid gainful employment, linked to social security, is from a historical point of view a recent phenomenon which emerged in Western Europe with industrial capitalism in the 19th century, became the global norm in the 20th century, and is now showing some signs of breaking down with the deregulation and flexibilisation of global capitalism in the 21st century. In the pre-modern domestic family-based economy, the household was a living and working community. In the industrial system, only paid employment outside the home was considered work, while unpaid household work was devalued. In the course of the globalisation of goods supply chains and of digitalisation, previously secure gainful employment is also being transformed into flexible, precarious, informal employment, even in the centres of the world economy. In order to avoid a split in society, we need counter-models to growthism, extractivism and exploitation. Studying the domestic family-based economy can provide valuable inspiration to that end.

1 Introduction

This chapter looks at the history of work and demonstrates that the narrow understanding of work as paid employment, excluding all other forms of work, is a relatively recent phenomenon: it emerged in the course of the 19th century during the transition from the pre-industrial and family- based economy to an industrial society based on the division of labour, in which only paid employment outside the home was regarded as work. In the process there emerged in the industrialised countries, over several distinct phases during the 20th century, the “standard employment relationship”, with social security. This was – and still is – oriented towards the male wage earner, and does not fit in with the reality of life for women, small business owners, farmers or home workers. In the global South, industrialisation affected only a small part of the population, if at all, and did not provide wage labourers with comparable income, security and social benefits, so these people were and are dependent on subsistence farming and the activities of their family members in the informal sector for their survival (see the chapter by Stoll in this book).

In recent decades, the “standard employment relationship” has come under pressure from rationalisation and digitalisation, the relocation of industrial mass production to emerging economies and neoliberal reforms of labour and social legislation in the old industrialised countries. In order to provide a sound foundation for the discussion of models for the future, it is worth taking a look at how industrial society has evolved and at the narrow concept of work it has produced (Komlosy 2018).

The chapter begins with a comparison: it contrasts the system of employment outside the home, which separates the concept of work from that of the family household, with the domestic family-based economy, in which the household was a working and living community. The transition from the domestic economy to gainful employment under industrial capitalism triggered criticism and resistance and produced numerous alternative projects and societal blueprints in the 19th and 20th centuries. These all addressed the question of how socially necessary and desirable work should be organised, apportioned and evaluated. Finally, in view of the current crisis of the (paid) work society, the chapter asks to what extent the transition to a post-growth society can be guided by the stability of the cycles in the domestic family-based economy, and to what extent the early counter-models to the growth imperative and wage labour compulsion of industrial capitalism can inspire the necessary transformation of the (paid) work society into a society with a comprehensive understanding of meaningful activity.

2 From the “whole house” to the wage labourer-and-housewife household

The domestic family-based economy, which is also referred to as the “whole house” because of the way people live and work together (Komlosy 2011, 252), has been the basis of economic life throughout the history of humankind, across all social groups, since the establishment of settlements and the introduction of agriculture. This chapter reviews its development since its appearance in the European Middle Ages through early modern times up to the 19th century.

The members of the household produced products and services for their own direct consumption (subsistence), for sale on the market and as dues to their landlords and the state. Whether an activity brought in money or not did not determine how it was perceived or whether it was regarded as work. The division of activities was based on gender, marital or family status, age, chance and necessity, and varied according to regional customs. The “whole house” took on different forms, depending on whether the households were based on farming or trades, rural or urban, settled or nomadic. From the 17th century onwards, those without property and those with little or no land were also able to set up households and, by taking on supply work for the manufactories, to combine such work with subsistence farming (Kriedte et al. 1977; Komlosy 2018). The form of enterprise that emerged from this was called the putting-out system: merchants and manufactory entrepreneurs “put out” individual work activities to rural households. From today’s perspective, we can regard such “putting out”, which took place on both a small and a large scale, as home-based work. However, there was no such term at that time, as the counterpart to home-based work – centralised and mechanised factory work – did not yet exist. With the expansion of textile production, it was the spinning hands of women and children that brought in the most money, which is why other family members relieved them of their caring duties so that they could devote their time to textile work. Notwithstanding its clear allocation of tasks, the family economy proved itself to be pragmatic, flexible and adaptable (Duden/Hausen 1979).

When, over the course of the 19th century, massive numbers of jobs were created outside the home in factories, mines, construction sites and offices, a clear division was drawn between the work done outside the home and that which remained inside. The former – the external activity – was paid for and was henceforth considered work. The latter – unpaid work in the household – was denied the character of work, even though the specific tasks did not change. The economic driving force behind the transition from the domestic family economy to industrial manufacturing was the demand for wage labourers who were willing to make their labour available on a permanent basis. The prerequisite for this transition was a series of legislative changes that removed the workforce from the family economy. Feudal bondage, corvée work and restrictions in geographical mobility were abolished. The flip side of this development was the loss of one’s economic basis, income and essential supplies from within the structures of the family, the household and the village, so that wage labour became the only alternative for more and more people. A particularly stark form of the separation of the rural population from their means of subsistence was the appropriation in England of land used for farming by agricultural entrepreneurs, the so-called enclosures. This was accompanied by the privatisation of communal land (the commons), which drove people to the cities in search of paid work. Since neither the social order of pre-industrial society nor the regulations of the guilds applied in the world of industry, there was no form of protection for wage earners. The result was the unregulated exploitation of early industrial capitalism, the drastic dimensions of which were vividly described by contemporaries such as Charles Dickens and Gerhard Hauptmann.

The ideological accessory to the separation of paid gainful employment from unpaid work in the house was the bourgeois concept of the male breadwinner who brings home the money while the housework is carried out unpaid by the women on account of their role as spouse and mother; indeed, from then on unpaid housework was no longer even regarded as work. It was women’s business, and thus devalued on gender grounds – even in situations where men also worked unpaid, such as in subsistence farming, or construction and repairs in the household or in the neighbourhood. As industrial wage labour only became established gradually and unevenly across regions, the domestic family economy by no means disappeared. But in the perspective of political economy, both in its conservative and socialist forms, it was considered backward, unproductive, and in the final analysis not “real work”. It is still not reflected today in the gross domestic product (GDP), a measure of economic performance invented later. This also affected – in varying degrees – home-based work, which was paid for but was “worth less” because it was embedded in the household.

The family breadwinner model was only able to establish itself among the propertied middle classes, although here it was not the ladies who did the housework but rather servants. In the families of the industrial workers, women were also forced to take up paid work. The fact that women’s wages – even today – are lower than men’s is mainly due to the fact that their work was and is regarded as an – often temporary – “additional income”, one incapable of providing a foundation for an individual independent existence, because women are primarily assigned to the house. As a result, entire fields of employment and professions associated with women are still paid less today.

When women moved into new fields due to recruitment drives or shifts in demand, they took the wage gap with them in their luggage, so to speak. Modern industrial society thus not only draws a line between paid work and unpaid “non-work”, but also extends this line as a gender boundary into the sphere of gainful employment by means of the unequal treatment of women and men (Bock/Duden 1977; Komlosy 2018). In this respect, nothing has fundamentally changed up until the present day.

In several waves – towards the end of the 19th century, in the inter- war period and after the Second World War – the concept of work based on gainful employment and the devaluation of the family economy and unpaid work in the home established itself as the norm in Western industrialised countries. The “standard employment relationship” was then secured by the introduction of the employment contract and social security systems for ill health and accidents, old age and unemployment (and, after a long delay, for maternity as well). The commodification of care work increased in parallel as more women entered the labour market in several waves over the 20th century and received correspondingly more education and training. In other words, activities formerly performed unpaid in the household (cleaning, nursing and personal care, bringing up children) became care jobs, which at the lower levels were (and still are) almost exclusively carried out by women.

The involvement of women in formal employment was particularly driven forward during the two world wars, although the jobs were taken up again by men after they returned from the war. Conversely, it was often only the post-war “economic miracle” that enabled women from the lower social strata to live the ideal of the non-working housewife. However, because of the demand for labour but also as a result of emancipation from the old role models, the trend was now towards the nuclear family with two working partners. The increasing use of technology in the household also helped enable women to take up jobs outside the home.

As a result of having their own income, women in employment became more independent from their husbands. The fact that their work was now recognised as “work” again, and offered opportunities for advancement and communication, strengthened their self-esteem. In the 1960s and 1970s, this led to changes in the laws governing marriage and child custody, and in some countries to the legalisation of abortion. However, women remain disadvantaged in terms of pay and career opportunities, as well as by the difficulty of reconciling family and work. Although women were moving into new areas of work, the shadow of “additional income” accompanied them. The “standard employment relationship”, subject to proper regulation and eligible for social security, was thus still generally limited to men, whereas female life histories were characterised by shifts between work and the household, by interruptions due to pregnancy, bringing up children and caring for family members at home, and by part-time employment. In domestic and subsistence work, which remained primarily the responsibility of women, the focus shifted from ensuring survival to the intangible areas of care, education and emotional support for husbands and children. Subsistence farming and self-provisioning came into play only when the family income was insufficient. However, even if women earned less than men, women’s earned income increased the purchasing power of the household and made it possible for poorer families too to enjoy a relatively high level of consumption.

Since the 1980s, typical employment biographies – differentiated by gender but brought together...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part 1 The basics
• Part 2 Employment and meaningful activities: actors
• Part 3 Employment and meaningful activities: sectors
• Part 4 The socio-economic context
• Conclusion
• Index