How Long will we be Working?

Karl Marx ends Capital, Volume III with the quote, «the fundamental precondition of liberating the proletariat is to reduce the work performed.» Not everyone today agrees with this summation. On the one hand, technical progress came nowhere near to giving humans the satisfaction of being able to do the same tasks as their predecessors in less time. Instead, it never ceased coming up with new needs and new tasks that were piled on top of the old ones. The legal work week in France was reduced twice, which only served to intensify the focus on the issue of how productivity gains are shared between free time and added buying power.
On the other hand, the working class has to work even harder to pay for the new labour rights created by the welfare state in order to prevent cataclysmic public and social debt. And climate change is only making our to-do list longer. Quantity of work is a
status symbol –the polar opposite of what it was in the last century. Society now focuses its attention on topics like longer work weeks, longer times needed to save for retirement, and working on Sundays. This session was organised to see where things stand in these recent developments, to put a finer point on what our societies want when it comes to work and lay down the social conditions that would give us enough flexibility and opportunities as well as make sense for our companies competing in the global marketplace.