Conclusion

Distinguishing between ends and means to an end is an important responsibility of policymakers. In the case of work time regulation, however, the two become fused. Since it promotes a societal transformation, the short-term objective of achieving equitable labor market outcomes through hours redistribution and reduction also brings society closer to the long-term of goal of more autonomous time outside the marketplace. Work time regulation can provide instant relief of working class anxieties; but since it goes to the heart of labor exploitation, it also initiates a process that transforms society. The acknowledgement that work time negotiation is effectively a social effort bargain presents the opportunity to ameliorate labor market inequities while simultaneously placing society on a path to a fuller human existence. Promoting a more democratic management of the social effort bargain offers the very real possibility of fashioning a social system of accumulation that is no longer prostrate to the idolatry of paid work and economic growth. The aim is not just a marginally better world, but a different one, where the values of community, democracy, equality and solidarity, and therefore true freedom, receive greater importance than economic throughput. As industrial economies increasingly struggle with the “progress paradox”

and the challenges of global warming, traditional full-employment policies conceived under a fetish for work and growth will fail to improve socioeconomic participation and human welfare. Not only are such conventional policies unsustainable from a social and environmental standpoint, but their inflationary tendencies will spark significant political opposition to their implementation. Since work time regulation does not depend on greater output to tighten labor markets, it offers distinct advantages over competing full-employment policies that rely on neurotic work and spend behaviors. In addition to increasing socioeconomic participation and, as a consequence, social productivity, work time regulation that links hours reduction to future productivity increases could achieve significant price stability as it represents an incomes policy that prevents both excessive spending and wage claims. The flexibility of work time regulation also creates the possibility to reduce price pressures by increasing average working times in periods of extraordinary economic circumstances. In a climate-constrained world of growing

abundance, it is only logical for wealthy societies to contemplate a redistribution and continual regulation of social labors. Redistributing hours of work and democratically regulating future work time regimes through a social effort bargain is the single most sustainable, non-inflationary and equitable method of achieving greater socioeconomic participation. On par with the many economic benefits, work time regulation offers the

capability for citizens living in an age of abundance to define themselves as something other than paid employees. The redistribution of hours resulting from work time regulation represents a first step in a process of enlightenment in which workers will create an identity through the whole of their relationships at work, home, community, and play. Work time regulation that minimizes the importance of remunerative work for harried workers and expands earned income for underemployed workers can provide the time or money needed to perform more activities in the third sector. Having such an alternative to the private sector is crucial for a social movement intent on abandoning “economic gain” as a guiding social principle. There is certainly a role for government in fostering the pursuit of “loftier ideals” subsequent to a redistribution of work time, but the first precondition for enhanced human development is greater socioeconomic participation, which means more paid work for some and less for others. Modern society, as Veblen averred, is rife with ceremonial adequacies-

activities we partake in for their own sake. It is the challenge of advanced societies to recognize such fanaticism and redirect it in a benevolent manner. Increasingly, post-industrial societies will have to address the deeply engrained veneration of paid work and sever its umbilical connection to socioeconomic involvement. History will judge our ingenuity and capacity to adapt to the winds of technological change in a climate-constrained, postindustrial world. Social scientists and political leaders committed to alleviating unemployment should ask themselves if they want to be remembered by their grandchildren as a proponent of more work, more spending, more ecological damage, and more of the neurosis related to life on the hedonic treadmill. If they are uneasy with such a legacy, they should embrace a social effort bargain that fosters an alternative social distribution of work hours as way of forging a participatory society that is more equitable and rewarding for the vast majority of citizens in the developed world and more sustainable for all inhabitants of the world, present and future.