The 4-day workweek and the challenge of the rebound
The challenge is to make holistic and value-driven policy, not to calculate rebounds to the decimal point
Hello folks,
Welcome back! A quick recap.
In my earlier newsletter about the rebound effect, I talked about how efficiency gains were lost by new increases in consumption. A new approach looks to couple efficiency to sufficiency to maintain those gains. That is, to couple with behavioural changes that keep that energy demand low and thus actually drive down emissions and resource extraction. Initially, people thought about sufficiency in terms of energy conservation - individual actions that would scale back the time or intensity of using a certain product or service. In Europe, the request to turn down the thermostat to reduce Russian gas in the pipes falls in that category.
But this new approach is different: it’s about putting well-being (rather than economic growth) at the centre of public policy. The idea is that this will wind up scaling back economic hyperactivity, responsible for so much emissions. This approach is different from conservation, because it is not asking people to consume less of something they would otherwise have, but creating more of something else: a good life.
The shorter workweek, as I wrote last edition, is an example of this approach.
💡 Side-note: you might be asking yourself: “Er, fewer working hours = less money than what people otherwise would have. If you didn’t have a lot of it to begin with, how is this going to result in greater well-being?” Indeed, that’s why most (somewhat) concrete plans to move to a shorter working week advocate working less for the same salary. For the bottom half to two thirds that makes sense as a progressive policy, since wages have been by and large stagnant over the last few decades, even though the total money pile has grown. It would be a way to catch up. For those at the top though, from a climate perspective, it would make more sense to take the pay cut in exchange for free time - it’s their large incomes that are disproportionally driving consumption-related emissions. And that, my friends, is actually how we get to the topic of today’s newsletter. Because sure, working less itself could reduce emissions, but now people have time to do other things than work - and these things demand energy too. So… wouldn’t energy use just rebound?
Rebounding from work
To put it formulaically: more efficient technology and logistics free up time and money - time and money that can be spent elsewhere. The shorter workweek does exactly the same: free up time and money to spend elsewhere. So, would it suffer the same fate as efficiency gains?
The report commissioned for the 4-day workweek campaign itself mentions this risk too:
For instance, if people were to use their three-day weekends to take more flights for short holidays, driving far away to do more shopping or even stay at home watching TV with high consumption of heating or air-conditioning, the three day weekend could actually be harmful to the environment.
Similarly, a Swiss study of people who had decided to work less showed that only when they used that time to ‘bind’ themselves to a new activity - parenting or further education - they reduced their footprint. If it was all about that leisure life, they increased their impact.
The risk looms beyond these individual spending decisions too. For instance, if productivity goes up because works needs to get done in fewer hours, then that might lead to higher wages, which could increase the chance of carbon-intensive consumption. Or, people working fewer hours also creates space for the previously unemployed to pick up some of those hours, which would then cancel out the reduction. (Sorrell et al. 2020)
So, in short, there’s all sorts of ways that this could go sideways.
💡 Side-note: ironically, the contemporary 38/40 hours workweek itself is actually a prime example of the rebound effect. From the soot-filled depths of 19th century industrial capitalism, labour movements in Europe and the US emerged to successfully reduce working hours by half. Extrapolating in the 1930s, John Maynard Keynes envisioned a society in we would only have to work 15 hours a week to maintain our standards of living. With every increase in productivity (efficiency), workers could lay down their work for one more hour (sufficiency). But instead working hours stabilized and - especially in the neoliberal era - even increased. Working time rebounded, as it were, as bosses and managers found new things for us to do.
Is there a way out of this?
Silver bullets can’t do all the work
To respond to that question, first remember that the basic mechanism of rebound effects - savings pave the way for more consumption - is a mechanism only in a superficial sense. It’s not like some natural law or anything. The decisions about how to spend that time and energy - let’s call it demand - are intimately tied with supply - with what we can choose to consume. I cited Ray Galvin’s history of the heavy duty sports vehicle that guzzled up the efficiency gains of the previous two decades as an example.
Steve Sorrell and his colleagues also make this point. Consumption patterns are “economically or psychologically ‘locked-in’”:
unavoidable financial commitments (e.g. housing costs, non-income related tax obligations, child support); land-use patterns and physical infrastructures that limit choices in key areas (e.g. travel, heating); the rapid obsolescence of consumer goods (creating a need for regular expenditure on replacement); the search for status through the acquisition of symbolic ‘positional goods and services’ (e.g. designer clothing, expensive cars); and the adaptation of aspirations to higher income levels (e.g. expecting more than one vacation per year).
In other words, consumption greatly depends on (infra)structural constraints.
If we want to make sure reducing working hours actually translate into their environmental benefits, we therefore need to frame this in the bigger picture. We need to think holistically.
A new pursuit of happiness
There’s two degrees to think holistically about this:
The first degree is pragmatic: to embed the shorter workweek in a catalogue of accessible and attractive options for people to do things in their free time that have a positive impact on mitigating climate change. The template lies in those “binding activities”: in care and creativity. That means: communal gardens and food forests, revitalized local arts and crafts, DIY repair economy, and sports. In addition, governments could invest in natural restoration. Not everyone needs to ‘bind’ themselves to these spheres, but those who do will help create a whole ‘infrastructure’ of low-carbon leisure (attending performances, visiting national natural parks and reserves).
The second degree is conceptual: to marry sustainability and the promise of a good life. To recognize that our health, our life satisfaction, our sense of purpose and fulfilment, and the stability of our climate and resilience of our ecosystems are tied up together. That pursuing the one means pursuing the other. Because a good life usually means better, not more - and that can give us permission to slow down.
A final note on rebounds
A holistic approach may mitigate the rebound effect (maybe even result in “negative rebounds”). Still, it’s basically impossible to know what the effect will be. The ripples extend too widely with such a massive transformation. It could even have geopolitical ramifications. To stay with my master metaphor of big swings: we’re sending the balls flying so far afield, we can’t see clearly yet. That’s the nature of the game.
It’s important therefore to keep thinking about and estimating these rebounds. We don’t want good intentions paving roads we don’t actually want to walk. At the same time, thinking in terms of the numbers only (emissions, energy demand) can make us blind, the way the singular dominance of economical thinking has created huge blind spots in our policy making. Having the holistic conceptual vanishing point of the sustainable good life though, should give us a clear enough road map that we won’t veer off track too far, even if decisions still have repercussions we didn’t anticipate.
Let me know what you think!
Take care for now,
Marten