Should We Have a New Human Right to Freedom From Work?
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:04
My research is about a new economic model called the human economy. The human economy is a model that aims to look at how we could use new potential and technology in order for everyone to work less. Work has become so central in our societies that it is even recognized as a human right.
00:24
And obviously it is necessary that everybody has an income in order to live. But the question I'm asking in this research is, couldn't we actually have with the potential and technology that we have today a more ambitious right than a right to work in the form of a right to freedom from work?
00:48
In this research I use a historical approach to work and labour rights or economic fundamental rights. Historically, if we take economists such as Adam Smith, Ricardo or John Stuart Mill, they actually did the same mistake.
01:05
They reduced human beings to a form of productive capital. They reduced human beings as agents of production. Reducing human beings with a single skill and function to produce economic value as an agent of production
01:21
explain why new rights emerged at the same time historically, labour rights, economic fundamental rights, in order to protect not human beings as such but to protect workers as an agent of production. And once we understand that work and labour rights are human inventions, are socially constructed,
01:42
we can start designing a new economic model by not making the same mistake but by looking at how and which potential have actually human beings in the economic framework. The first major finding of this research is that historically there has never been any economic model
02:04
that is looking at how to reduce the need to work. By contrast to past and contemporary economic model, the human economy looks at how to reduce the need to work. So instead of looking at the human being as a form of agent of productive capital, as agent of production,
02:23
the human economy considers that human beings have a human potential to create human benefits. And this is why I call this economic model the human economy. I define human benefits as universally shared values that we actually all have to work for in the first place.
02:40
Human benefits can take the form of food or education or enjoying a clean and safe environment or housing for example. Once we understand how to create these human benefits more efficiently, we call all benefits from all working less in order to secure them. In addition, the human economy looks also at how sometimes work, traditional work in our current economic model,
03:07
makes us work unnecessarily. You maybe have heard about bullshit jobs or useless jobs as David Graeber puts it in his book. But more than only useless jobs, there are actually jobs that are causing human costs.
03:24
And these human costs are making us work more. Take the example of producing food with pesticides. On the one hand, we can consider that pesticide is a technology that hypothetically increase efficiently by creating food more efficiently
03:41
and then making people work less in order to access them. But on the other hand, if the rivers are polluted and the tomatoes that we consume make us sick, we will have to work more in order to remedy these costs. We will have collectively, for example, to work more in order to pay through our taxes for a public administration
04:06
that will then check and clean the water. We will also have collectively through health insurances or individually have to work more in order to pay to remedy our health damages. Once we understand that actually there is a human potential to create these benefits that is wasted,
04:24
and on the other hand, that the work that we are doing today makes us sometimes work unnecessarily, there is room to invent a new future in which we will work. We could work or less and we could all demand more freedom from work as a new fundamental right.
04:47
The human economy questions an activity that everybody does but also many people feel ambivalent about. Today, work is a source of competition between people and it's also a source of pressure.
05:00
People fear of being replaced by younger people. They fear of being maybe replaced in an era of digitalization by new technologies. I think that this competition cannot be the foundation for a peaceful and relaxed society. This is why the human economy looks at how we could actually reduce this competition by making work less and less important in our societies.
05:24
At the policy level, this research is also relevant because governments now face a very challenging issue of how to provide enough work for everyone. Under these human rights to work, for example, they have the obligation to supply enough work.
05:43
The solutions now at the policy level to supply work is very limited. They are the same as for 60 years and they focus mostly on how to increase the demand, on how to stimulate consumption in order to create production and employment.
06:02
But we all know that this solution is not a long-term solution. By looking at how to reduce the need to work, how to reduce the competition between people for work by rethinking what we create and what we destroy through work might be a new direction for governments to look at and to design new policies
06:26
in form maybe of basic income or quarantine new rights to, for example, retire earlier or provide more options for people to choose work that makes sense for them individually
06:41
and for the society at the same time. Well, many questions remain open and I think the first question is obviously how will we define human benefits in this human economy model. In this regard, at the scholarly level, I think there is a need to look closely at the link
07:01
between human benefits and the idea of substantive freedoms in the capability approach by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. The second question that will have to be answered is actually the link between traditional paired work today and the consequences on creating or causing unnecessary work.
07:23
I think this is a question for labour economists to identify in our society today the amount of work and jobs that are actually only available with the purpose of remedying the cost of economic production. Finally, there is room for labour lawyers and human rights lawyers
07:42
to rethink and redesign new rights, new economic human rights beyond this logic of protecting workers as a capital, as a productive capital. In this regard, I think a younger generation maybe will not continue to identify
08:00
with the human right to work in which people have a right to work for eight hours for the next 50 years in sometimes unfulfilling job. As you see, many questions remain open. If you are interested in this research project, please do not hesitate to get in touch at the Centre for Human Rights Studies at the University of Zurich.