Thomas Coutrot, (Economist, former spokesperson for Attac, France) writes on ‘For a politics of living labor’

French economist Thomas Coutrot makes an argument for a sustainable socio-ecological economic and productive system that benefits labour and society as a whole.

The Fordist compromise between capital and labor traded submission at work for access to consumption and a certain social security, at the cost of the ecoystem. It has been rejected by capital since the neoliberal shift in the 1980s which casualized labor, compressed purchasing power and increased inequalities. Returning to it would be neither desirable for workers and democracy, nor sustainable for nature. We need to move beyond the current treadmill of production.

The search for shareholder value at all costs is indifferent to the impacts of work on the world: as Marx might have said, abstract labor crushes concrete labor. As for the so-called green growth promised by some, it is but a mere illusion: there is no growth without increased consumption of energy and materials, without CO2 emissions and additional pollution. We must aim for the decline in material and energy consumption in order to shift towards a society based on the good life and frugality – something completely incompatible with the capitalist obsession of accumulation. We need to replace the obsession of production and accumulation with the centrality of care – the necessity to take care of others and watch over the world.

Can trade unionism take this turn? It seems more than necessary considering that “without the defection of one of the central actors of the gear [of production], the hope of seriously shaking the status quo is weak” ⁽¹⁾. However, at first glance, things might seem off to a bad start.

Trade unionism and ecology: a painful convergence

It must be admitted that in most cases, trade unions have little interest in the quality and usefulness of work or its effects on the world. They sometimes even defend work at all costs, against citizens’ aspirations for clean production and a healthy environment. In France, trade unions in the nuclear industry are at the forefront of the fight against  the closure of obsolete and dangerous nuclear plants. In the United States, the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) supports the shale gas industry and the construction of pipelines for the transportation of fossil fuels, while German and European unions in the chemical industry have worked with employers to limit the ambition of the REACH regulation over the use of chemicals in Europe.

Nevertheless, things are still moving about. Numerous initiatives are flourishing, thereby renewing aspirations to reclaim control on how and why we work and to bring freedom and democracy to the workplace. The AFL-CIO itself has always been ambivalent. For example, it has supported “the creation of federal laws for the protection and preservation of wilderness […] The AFL-CIO supported the defenders of the most emblematic environmental legislation, such as the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts”. ⁽²⁾ The Blue Green Alliance brings together the main trade union federations and environmental organizations to fight global warming. At the international level, trade unionism is strongly committed to establishing alliances for a “just transition” and “climate jobs”. This is the case of the International Transport Federation (ITF) which advocates for the priority of public transports in order to reduce CO2 emissions ⁽³⁾.

In Belgium, the two major trade unions centers, the Christian Trade Union Confederation and the General Federation of Belgian Labor (also called the FGTB) run the Inter-Trade Union Network for Environmental Awareness ((http://www.rise.be/). The Trades Union Congress (TUC) of Great Britain encourages the creation of “environmental delegates” to reduce the environmental impact of production and lead campaigns for “green workplaces”. In France, the CGT claims the enlargement of the “Committee for Health, Safety and Working Conditions” (CHSCT) to “Committees for Health, Safety, Working Conditions and the Environment” (CHSCTE). The trade union Solidaires is very attentive to these questions and regularly publishes a bulletin of “Solidarity Ecology” which shows the concrete links between work and ecology.

While many national and international union leaders have understood the importance of  embracing the ecological struggle, it is much less the case at the local or sectoral level. This is much easier for peasant unions because of their direct relationship to nature. A few examples include Chico Mendes and the fight of the seringueiros (rubber harvesters) for a sustainable exploitation of the Amazon resources, or the Kerala artisanal fishermen’s union, the KSMTF, which fought against industrial trawlers to preserve the sea and fish. Peasant unions, like those united in La Via Campesina, also fight to protect nature against the predatory agro-industry. However, these struggles concern primarily independent peasants, in other words, it is harder to encounter such examples among wage workers submitted to capitalist management in industry or services.

In the case of France, we can cite the intervention of the CGT of Vinci, the largest French corporation for public utilities, against the construction of an airport in Notre-Dame-des-Landes. Management,  politicians and several local unions did support the project in the name of regional development and employment, against the peasants threatened with expropriation and the autonomous environmental activists of the ZAD (Zone à défendre). Breaking with the productivist consensus, the CGT-Vinci joined forces with the anti-airport struggle, explicitly favouring “the social utility of production”. A few months later, the government abandoned  the project.

However, such examples often remain too isolated. The trade unionist movement cannot only cultivate alliances in order to put health and ecology – the stakes of concrete labor and use value – at the heart of its strategy. It must find the political resources that will revitalize its action in the work activity o itself, as demonstrated by new union practices that are striving to achieve more balanced power relations by mobilizing workers around issues of quality of  work.

To work is to disobey!

Everything stems from the well-known fact in the science of work (ergonomics, psychology, sociology …), that to work is to disobey. Faced with the variability and uncertainty of changing weather, the heavy bag of cement, the restive animal, the broken machinery, the irritated customer, the complicated problem etc., official instructions offer some guidance but  are never enough. Indeed, to get the job done, one has to adapt these instructions, to circumvent them, to invent other rules. Nothing good comes out of strictly following the orders. Quite the contrary, following them can even lead to blocking the entire production process, like during industrial actions known as “work-to-rule”. Ergonomists have long shown that even in the seemingly most physical work – that of handlers for example – the essence of work is about thinking.

The systematic and irreducible gap between ”assigned work” and  “real work” has two major effects. On one hand, it must be filled by the indispensable creativity of the individual in his work, which we can qualify – using Marxist terms – as his/her/their “living labor” ⁽⁴⁾. Faced with unforeseen circumstances that constantly arise, improvisation – based on experience – is always required. A fully routinized task eventually ends up being automated. On the other hand, it makes the collective creation of working rules – resulting from the experience and exchanges between colleagues, transmitted and reworked over time – something indispensable. These rules, often clandestine, support and contribute to the capacity to improvise.

Living labor is the real activity of the person at work: it is what he/she/they deploy(s) with sensitivity, affect, intelligence, inventiveness, empathy, to overcome obstacles and achieve not only the goals assigned by the organization, but also his/her/their own goals. As Marx said:  “the overcoming of obstacles constitutes an affirmation of freedom in itself […] the self-realization, objectification of the subject, hence real freedom, whose action is, precisely, labor”.

By circumventing instructions and orders, workers clandestinely exercise their freedom to defend their own conception of  a “job well done”. While the boss wants “quality for the market” – i.e. quality which maximizes profits – workers seek to make a beautiful object, to satisfy the real needs of the customer, to take care not only of other people but increasingly  of endangered nature. The ethics of care, identified and theorized by feminists, is an intrinsic feature of living labor: whether for women, most often assigned to tasks related to care, or in general for all workers who pay attention to what they produce – which is most often the case. By working, we cannot settle for mechanically executing tasks, we continue – often unconsciously – to be inspired by personal and professional ethics, the need to feel useful and recognized as well as the concern of others and of life. The concern of the quality of work very often implies to struggle against the quantitative targets and the logic of financial abstraction.

Struggle to work well

At Volkswagen, engineers had to lie and rig to invent a software concealing the true level of CO2 emissions from their diesel engines. We know the financial consequences that this scandal had on the firm, but the psychological cost was for the workers involved in this fraud is known: “this affair reveals the civic significance of the work for the whole of humanity, when the quality of manufactured products and services poisons the existence of all ” ⁽⁵⁾.

Workers usually experience these conflicts in isolation and shame, which lead them to frustration, boredom, anger, and often suffering or even depression. However, if trade unions were dedicated to confronting these contradictions, this would not have to be the case. For example, from 2008 to 2010, the CGT, with the help of researchers, conducted a remarkable action research at Renault, particularly at the factory in Le Mans. First, they developed an investigative study with the workers, which helped them understand precisely how their work was being hindered. Then, they brought them together through debates, which helped them assert their own standards of quality and to obtain very concrete adjustments, not only of working conditions but of production methods. After which, they rapidly even started challenging the very purposes of production.

Fabien Gache, the main representative of CGT Renault, summarizes the conclusions of this experiment: “the more we look at real labor in detail, the more we discover how much it  interests workers, and the more we question the meaning of what we do, what we produce, individually and collectively (…) Workers emancipation appears as the constituent element of their own health, capacity to act on the surroundings and therefore to fully be  citizens in society” ⁽⁶⁾. Incidentally, the union has recruited a large number of new members.

It is by taking care of  these conflicts – which most mobilize workers – that trade unionism can both rebuild its power to act in workplaces and forge links with external actors concerned by the concrete results of work . It is by contrasting their conception of a job well done with the one promoted by capital that employees can integrate ethical dimensions into their struggles such as the dignity of peoples and the defense of the health of humans and nature against the greed of the ruling classes.

The new practices of living labor

Even without the interference of trade unions, new practices of work orientated towards taking care of others and of the world are asserting themselves everywhere. Many examples include renewable energy co-operatives, collaborative co-operatives, help for the elderly or home care, amongst others.

In Germany and Denmark, the energy transition was largely based on a citizen and communal movement of renewable energy cooperatives, supported by a public development bank; these cooperatives now produce 30 to 40% of electricity. In France, Atelier Paysan (Peasant Workshop) is a collaborative cooperative, a “farm lab”, which advises and helps farmers to design and build equipment and machinery adapted to the technical and cultural practices of organic farming. The employment cooperative Coopaname organizes hundreds of self-employed workers who pool their resources to finance their own employee status and benefit from its protection. In Catalonia, collaborative cooperatives are booming, especially with the support of the city of Barcelona. The collaborative telecommunication network Guidi.net ensures access to broadband in remote areas of Spain for more than 50,000 users, through radio waves or optical fiber. Etc…

The  aging of populations has fueled a rapidly growing elderly care industry. The irruption of women into the labor force reconfigured these activities, which were assigned to them voluntarily in the domestic sphere by the traditional sexual division of labor. Nevertheless, women remain  a majority in these now salaried activities, which can be organized according to very different models. Most often, like in France, bureaucratized associations or capitalist groups like Orpéa manage huge, expensive and often inhuman institutions because of the pseudo-rationalization of care. In 2018, professionals revolted against the lack of staff in these institutions, which prevents them from truly taking care of the elderly. Their fight for the quality of care has received strong support from public opinion concerned for the well-being of elders. In Japan, on the other hand, the capitalist and/or bureaucratic structures do not dominate this sector: the long-term care insurance scheme, created by the government in 2000, has funded the development of thousands of local eldercare associations, whereby  work can be more easily deployed in a real logic of care.⁽⁷⁾

Professions in the health sector, like those helping the elderly, were subjected to the neo-Taylorist pseudo-rationalization. Everywhere, home-care health services are carried under rigorous time regulations: 10 minutes for an intravenous, 15 minutes for washing a patient … To control the productivity of interventions, a label with a bar code is stuck on the patient’s door, which the nurses must flash after each visit along with the administered product. No more time to take care of people, talk to them, listen to them … it is “rationalized” abuse.

However, in the Netherlands the nurses have rebelled: they have joined en masse a new association, Buurtzorg, organized on the basis of self-managed teams responsible for a geographical area. Nurses developed patient autonomy by taking the time needed to support them and by stimulating peer support. They improved their quality of life and that of patients, and achieved spectacular health and economic results: for example, the rate of re-hospitalization of patients has been reduced by 30%. In just a few years, from 2006 to 2016, Buurtzorg literally drained the home care sector, increasing from 10 to 10,000 nurses, or three-quarters of the profession.

The commons at the service of care

These experiences illustrate the extraordinary potential of hybridization between the commons and care. The logic of commons is not limited to certain categories of resources, whether they are natural or digital: it irrigates any project that makes participation, responsibility and co-decision inseparable. In the same way, the ethics of care has a validity that goes far beyond care activities: it is concerned with shifting from a masculinist logic of domination  to an ecofeminist logic of attention. According to the beautiful definition proposed by Joan Tronto: care is “the generic activity that includes everything we do to maintain, perpetuate and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live there as well as we can. This world includes our body, ourselves and our environment, all the elements we seek to connect in a complex network, in support of life” ⁽⁸⁾. This ecofeminist perspective is relevant for all labor activities which always involve our bodies, ourselves and our environment.

The renewal of the commons and the affirmation of the ethics of care are also observed in the new forms of collaborative and self-governing work that some managerial sectors promote – which should not be neglected. When consultants invent models of work organization where individual autonomy and collective intelligence replace obedience and subordination, and where the mission of the enterprise is not profit but a societal goal, when some small family enterprises start functioning on a daily basis as self-managed utopias, something undoubtedly new is happening ⁽⁹⁾.

These models dispute the conception of profit as an end in itself, even if it is necessary for the survival of the company. They are inspired by the functioning of living systems, where the nested levels of organization operate according to the principle of subsidiarity: the lower levels solve all the problems that do not require  a broader vision of the context. They question the postulate, hitherto undisputed (including in the Left!), of the indispensable character of hierarchy. By reorganizing work according to principles of equality and autonomy, its productive efficiency is not diminished but increased. According to Jean Gadrey’s formula, collaborative work of care allows to “replace productivity by quality”. Quality work requires  attention to the consequences of different production choices and deliberation to decide; it requires organizational structures and governance capable of producing this deliberation and attention. Therefore, it is doubtful that this would be possible for huge companies or bureaucracies: without dismantling these mega-structures, it seems unlikely one can hope to democratize and liberate labor…

In the same vein, these principles are not compatible in the long run with the dictatorship of shareholders. Even if the self-government of labor allows for better quality at the same or even lower cost, it forces capital to give up power to workers and to risk a loss of control. This is why, in enterprises with dispersed shareholders, the experiments of “agile work” or “liberated enterprise” are always deeply disappointing or even depressing for those who believed in it. After often spectacular results in a first stage, due to the initial enthusiasm of workers, shareholders often regain control. The logic of capital is much more that of power than of profit: when confronted with a choice   between more profit but less power, or the opposite, top managers and shareholders almost always prefer power.

Extreme bureaucratization generated by “lean management” and “new public management” has become counter-productive even in the eyes of its promoters. The contradiction between freedom and worker’s initiative – essential to production – and the obsession of shareholder and bureaucratic control, forces management to innovate. However, for political reasons, it is profoundly unable to really let go. This is a particularly challenging field of struggle to regain workers’ power by making the quality of work a truly political issue.

For a politics of living labor

While forces which today seem all-powerful would fiercely resist it, pursuing this agenda would be in the interests of many social actors. By posing the political requirement of quality work, trade unionism could certainly reconquer legitimacy. In alliance with researchers in the sciences of work, it could multiply experiments in companies and demonstrate the political power of the freedom of labor. Workers suffer from “prevented work”, i.e. the impossibility of a job well done. Collectively asking “what matters for us in our work?  What and who do we want to care for and about?” is an efficient way to reconstruct work collectives and their power to act.

This  purpose calls for a deepening of alliances with citizen movements that defend health, ecology and real democracy, organizations of patients, consumers, local communities in transition, health professionals, researchers for citizen science, ecological organizations, actors involved in the solidarity and collaborative economy, hackers and activists, movements of alternative pedagogies, indignant citizens and activists advocating direct democracy, but also humanist managers… There is indeed a long list of social actors potentially interested in promoting living labor, which would undoubtedly be a powerful lever for reviving democracy, as  real democracy in the general society is inconceivable without democracy in the workplace.

The two key players are, of course, trade unions and environmental movements. The former could play a leading role, as long as it gives up its exclusive face-to-face relationship with dead labor – “business unionism” or corporatist collective bargaining – to move towards the construction of an alliance for the sustainability of life. The latter could also play an important role, insofar as it would firmly commit itself against social inequalities and the unlimited accumulation of capital. As Laurent Vogel of the European Trade Union Confederation – an expert on the difficult relations between trade unions and ecology – claims, a double cultural revolution is necessary: ​​”in the trade union movement, a critical vision of the productivist ideology, of the belief that growth  is the condition of social progress; in the ecological movement, the abandonment of naive conceptions on the possible emergence of a green capitalism without upsetting relations of domination” ⁽¹⁰⁾.

Building these alliances for labor, nature and democracy is a difficult task. It would be easier if unions succeeded in experimenting and constructing political strategies centered on freedom at work, liberating labor  from shareholder requirements, to begin valuing the obligation of taking care of one’s self, others and the rest of the world. At the same time, this politics of living labor would be easier if it relied on the expectations of stakeholders outside the company, on the aspirations of citizens for an autonomous, quality work, i.e. the only guarantors of the preservation of the environment and democracy. It is, by and large, through work and inside the workplace that the possibility of a decent human life will be preserved, or will eventually be destroyed faster than we imagine.

This politics of living labor is first a politics of freedom. Conservatives and neoliberals confiscated the theme of freedom without encountering any resistance. The radical Left gave up this struggle and instead, erected equality as the supreme value against economic liberalism. However, equality is not to be pursued per se: it is only a mean for everyone to be free. Neoliberalism, far from promoting freedom, caused incredible inequalities and destroyed  the freedom of the great majority. Liberating work through the social energy of living labor, should be a major contribution to the socio-ecological turning point we need so badly.

Notes

¹Brian Obach (2004). New Labour : Slowing the Treadmill of Production ?. Organization & Environment, Vol 17, issue 3.
²B. Obach, op. cit.
³http://www.itfglobal.org/media/1780093/17fr0920-itf-statement-for-cop23_final.pdf 
⁴Parisa Dashtipour, Bénédicte Vidaillet, « Work as affective experience: The contribution of Christophe Dejours’ ‘psychodynamics of work’ », Organization, vol. 24,1,  Jan. 2017 ; Christophe Dejours, Travail vivant. Tome 2 : Travail et émancipation, Payot, 2009
⁵Yves Clot, « Clinique, travail et politique », in A. Cukier (dir.), Travail vivant et théorie critique, PUF, 2017
⁶Fabien Gache, http://www.comprendre-agir.org/images/fichier-dyn/doc/2013/colloque_travail_evaluation_ugict_cgt_2012_chsct.pdf
⁷Chizuko Ueno, The Modern Family in Japan. Melbourne: Transpacific Press,  2009.
⁸Joan Tronto, Un monde vulnérable. Pour une politique du care, La Découverte, 2009, p. 143.
⁹Like the model of holacracy (Brian J. Robertson, La révolution Holacracy, Alisio) or the self-managed enterprise (Frédéric Laloux, Reinventing organizations, Diateino, 2014). Even if these experiments never question the exclusive power of decision-making of the owners on the division between wages and profits.
¹⁰Laurent Vogel, « Enjeux et incertitudes de la politique européenne en santé au travail », Mouvements, 2 / 58, 2009