“Caring about the concrete effects of work on health and the environment means starting to break with productivism”

Tribune. The reduction in working time (RTT) continues to divide society. While the CGT launches its national campaign for the 32 hours and all the left-wing candidates are in favor of a new step forward in the matter, Emmanuel Macron affirms as a preventive measure that “we are a country which works less than the others” and the President of Medef proposes to “Work longer”.

The available statistical data show that people work less in France than in the United States or Mexico, but at least as much as in Germany. However, this classic and somewhat repetitive debate between left and right should not mask a profound renewal of the way in which the left now sees RTT.

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Brochure published on October 14 by the CGT gives a very striking illustration. Union arguments are no longer limited to sharing work and saving free time: equality between women and men (the RTT allowing employees to switch from full-time to part-time undergone), ecology (productivity gains serving to freeing up time instead of increasing consumption), but also – this is the point we would like to emphasize here – health and democracy at work, are becoming central arguments.

The dead end of a dynamic of perpetual accumulation

From a fairly reductive and largely quantitative vision, which the intensification of work did not succeed in limiting during the Aubry laws (1998-2000), the union moved to an approach where health and democracy at work became central. Faced with permanent and imposed reorganizations, which instill a feeling of chronic insecurity in companies and weaken the mental health of employees, it is affirmed that “Freeing up time to think and organize oneself is also a way of allowing more collective interventions in the workplace”.

The reduction in working time will also be an opportunity to affirm that “Those who produce wealth are legitimate to question the current purposes and methods of the organization of work, otherwise we will not be able to avoid social and ecological disasters which could well become irreversible”. The health crisis has shown the impasse of a dynamic of perpetual accumulation, destructive of social and natural balances and of health. Aspirations have been asserted more than ever for recognition of activities essential to life and for meaningful work.

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