 Good afternoon to everyone. I'd like to welcome you to the second panel of our conference on working time reductions and the climate crisis, which is entitled The Place of the Working Time Reduction in a Post-Growth Society. For this panel, we have invited three experts from academia to provide their expertise on the complex relationship between working time reductions and carbon emissions and the importance of shorter working times as one of the key policies driving the socio-ecological transformation towards a more sustainable and fair society. I will be sharing this session. My name is Philip Frey. I'm a scientific employee at the Institute for Technology Assessment and System Analysis in Karlsruhe, and most of my research is focused on the future of work and the age of automation, but also on the ecological limits of work and context. I'm also here to represent the German Center for Emancipatory Technology Studies, a young technical political think tank, which is an institutional member of the European Network for the Fair Sharing of Working Time, which is hosting this conference. Just a quick reminder, like all other sessions, this session will be recorded. Feel free to ask any questions you might have throughout the presentations by the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. If you experience any technical difficulties, we have two people helping out, which is Alexander, which is supporting the moderation for this panel, and Thoril Dua, which is running the tech support throughout the whole conference. And they will be happy to help you with any questions you might raise through the chat. Before I give the floor to our speakers, I will very briefly introduce them. Our first speaker is going to be Julia Chau. Julia is Professor of Sociology at Boston College. Before joining Boston College, she taught at Harvard University for 17 years and the Department of Economics and the Committee on Degrees in Women Studies. Her research focuses on consumption, time use, the relationship between work and family life, and the relation between working hours, inequality, and carbon emissions. Over the years, she has received numerous honors and written some of the defining publications on the issue of working time reductions and ecological sustainability. In her talk, she will introduce us to the relationship between carbon emissions and hours of work, which is central to our conference. Our second speaker will be Will Strong. Will is one of the co-founders of Autonomy and its director of research. Autonomy is an independent progressive think tank that focuses on the future of work and economic planning and has been running a research stream on shorter working times since its inception. Will is also currently writing an introduction to the topic of post-work together with Helen Hester, which is scheduled to be hopefully released next year, and will present on the question how working time reductions might contribute to a healthy relationship between post-growth and post-work approaches. And last but not least will be Beata Zimplmann. Beata is a professor in political science and sustainability studies at the University of Applied Sciences in Grimm. Before moving to academia, she was in charge of energy and environmental policy at the EgeMetal, and later on head of the program on work and the environment of the Senat Administration of Berlin. Beata also serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of ATT&CK. Her research has been focused on issues of sustainable work, both in a national and an international perspective. Transdisciplinary research and of course, working time reduction. She will be discussing the issue to what extent shorter working times are a precondition for societal change and the good life we all see. We will hear all three inputs at once because they are closely connected, and then we will have an around an hour for the Q&A session. So please, Juliet, if you could start, I hand you the floor. Great. Thank you. Well, it's a great pleasure to be here. This is such an important topic. So I want to begin by making a strong claim, which is that for wealthy countries, it's impossible to sufficiently decarbonize without getting onto a path of work time reduction. Why is this true? Well, first, I think when I use the word sufficiently, I mean it both in terms of existing targets for emissions reductions and also global equity issues. So I think we need to be thinking about roughly 10% reductions in wealthy countries in greenhouse gas emissions annually, which is an enormous, enormous task to get that level of reduction. It's a really inordinate amount of reducing, but is fair in terms of historic emissions as well as differentiated capacities for emissions largely due to income inequalities between global north and south. So the first point really is to say that energy system transformation, which is an absolutely, obviously necessary part of decarbonization, energy system transformation that is the shift to clean renewable energy is not enough to achieve these emission reductions if energy demand is growing. And that's been a big part of the problem, which is that we've had a technological approach to energy system transformation, but not an approach to control energy demand. And that's where we really need to focus. And that's where working hours comes in. So the key issue is a series of relationships, the relationship between work hours and GDP, and then the relationship between GDP and emissions. And so I want to go through those separately. Let me start with GDP emissions link. So the first point to make is that the relationship between GDP or output and emissions remains strong, especially in some countries, and especially when we include what we call the offshoring of emissions or the offshoring of carbon through trade. So the fact that Europe and North America have reduced their emissions in part by importing increasingly dirty high carbon embodied products and exporting let lower carbon embodied products. So the national accounts are really not the way to look at this. You need to do what we call consumption accounting, which includes the exports and imports of the countries. So that's the first point. The second point is that this crucial relationship of GDP to emissions is not moving in the direction that the mainstream discourse or the people who are thinking this is primarily a technological or an energy system problem have been arguing for. And that is so-called decoupling. So the delinking of GDP and emissions, all of the sort of mainstream strategies of green growth, for example, or a very technologically centered approach to emissions reductions, which is what we have seen in most countries until recently where that finally begins to open up that sort of stranglehold on policy and the political discourse, that decoupling is not happening to any significant extent. So a recent review of all the decoupling studies just found there's no significant evidence of robust decoupling, meaning that emissions and GDP are still linked. So that if we are in a growing environment of GDP growth, it means we're also in an environment of emissions growth, everything else equal. And so what we have with GDP expansion is basically a factor pulling us in the other direction and eroding or eating away or undermining all the gains that we're making by the energy transformations that are certainly happening and happening at a relatively good rate in a number of countries. So moving off fossil fuels onto non-fossil sources of energy. A recent estimate from 2017 is that we need 2.5 times more GDP per ton of material resources than for each unit of GDP. We still need 2.6 times material resources, which gives us no pathway to even a two degree warming, much less 1.5 via a pure decoupling path. There's another really important point here from the research, which is increasingly renewables are looking like they contribute to increased energy demand rather than just substituting for fossil fuels. There's often an unspoken assumption in the debate that you'll get a one-to-one substitution when you add renewables. But in fact what's happening is you get expansion of energy demand and so renewables are not undermining emissions to the extent that many people had hoped. So this is a bitter pill I know, but we really have to accept that we've got to control the demand for energy period. We cannot grow without emitting yet, so we've really got to slow down that growth and reduce energy demand. Okay, so how do we do that and what does that mean about hours of work? So let's assume that we are able to get a political consensus or for whatever reason, we get to a point of roughly stable GDP. So we're not expanding GDP in real terms. And I'm talking I'm talking only about real terms, not prices. So there will be price changes and so forth. But let's say we're in a slower no growth GDP situation. What does that mean about hours of work? And why am I arguing that it implies we need to reduce hours of work? So the first thing we need to think about is the productivity work time GDP relationship. Economies are typically generating ongoing productivity increases. If GDP is not expanding, then productivity growth can either create unemployment or reduce hours of work. I mean, in fact, both of those are unemployment is a reduced hours of work outcome, but it's just not a good way to do it. So what is happening then is for a given level of output, we can produce it with fewer hours of work, firms will hire those will only employ those fewer hours of work. And so there's going to be reduced work time in one way or another. Now, of course, if we do it in a an intentional way, it's going to be very different than just creating unemployment among a growing number of people. A side point we may want to get into this in the discussion is that robotization, artificial intelligence, etc likely accelerates this trend because it raises labor saving productivity because it creates labor saving productivity growth. And that's something that we have to deal with even outside of the emissions reduction context. So what we want to think about is a kind of forward looking program in which we take productivity increases and translate them into shorter hours of work. So we finance a shorter hour of work program through productivity growth. Now, let me just turn for a minute to the existing research on emissions and working hours. And I've been looking at this for a number of years. My first modeling on this was done in 2013. And what we find, and there's now a pretty growing literature on this, mostly from sociologists, but also economists, what we find is that in virtually all the studies working hours are correlated. They are are positively correlated with carbon emissions. So countries with higher working hours have higher carbon emissions over time as working hours rise, carbon emissions rises, carbon emissions rise, and vice versa. So lower hours are associated with lower emissions. And this is true across countries. I've done analyses for the United States looking across US states where we're also finding that there are some studies at the household level, which also suggests that households who work longer hours have higher carbon emissions holding things constant. And there are sort of two big dimensions of this. One is the one I started talking about, which is the GDP relationship. And I've called this the scale effect. And it has to do with the size of the economy or the scale of the economy. So more higher working hours, all things equal gives you a larger size economy. That additional production creates more emissions. It's a really simple story in that sense. The composition effect occurs at the household level. And what what that argues basically is that households who are more time stressed, who have longer hours of work, all other things equal have higher emissions, because typically the use of carbon, high carbon activities tends to be time saving. So transportation is the most important of these. The faster you want to get somewhere, the more carbon you have to use. Time stressed households tend to want to do things more quickly. And it's also true that certain kinds of sustainable act behaviors and practices are more time consuming than less sustainable versions of them. So more and more research showing this relationship between hours of work and emissions. I just got a couple of minutes left. So I want to make a couple of two more points. The first one is another way of thinking about this is if you want to control emissions, if you want to get those robust emissions reductions that I started with at 10% a year say you're going to have to keep purchasing power out of the economy. Because if you give people money, they will spend it. There are strong social pressures for upscaling consumption. Consumption is something that people value. And much of the sort of sustainable consumption community in some countries, my own, especially the United States, I think has approached people with a sort of moralistic approach saying save the planet, consume less. And I think this is not a successful strategy. Appealing to people's environmental sense or their moral sense and just asking them not to spend money that they have. It just doesn't accord with a lot of evidence we have about the way our economies work. I think if we want to move households and individuals to lower consumption, which ultimately lower material consumption, or even just stable consumption, we've got to do it through a different kind of configuration. And that is by giving people time rather than money. And if we do that, Will or Beata may talk about this. There's a strong quality of life argument for doing that. But asking people to sacrifice by spending less doesn't work. So what we want to do is kind of reconfigure the way the economy works. And rather than have what I call the work and spend cycle in which productivity growth gets more or less automatically translated into more income, more hours of work, hours of work, income spending, we want to break that link between productivity growth and output expansion. And so you want to build in mechanisms that take that productivity growth and translate it into hours, shorter hours of work. That's really key. In the post war period, there were labor contracts which explicitly tied wages to productivity growth. What we could do now is explicitly tie shorter hours to productivity growth so that we get a structural mechanism, a kind of automatic mechanism for driving down hours of work rather than expanding output. So how do we do it? I think that Will and Beata will may talk about this more. The four day work week, of course, is a very popular option. But I also would argue that we need a kind of diverse approach that gives people more choice in how to take shorter hours of work. In contrast to what we had historically, which was a common schedule, moving through reduced hours of work. So first reduced Sunday work, then reduced Saturday work, then reduced nighttime work. I also think there are important legal protections, new time rights that states can grant to people. As for example, the Netherlands has done with a right to work less within the job that you have. One of the important findings of economic research in the United States is that if people want to work less, typically they have to change jobs and they'll typically have to go to less desirable jobs. So giving people a right to work less within the job that they have, which is something that's enshrined in Dutch law now, is really important. And finally, high income professionals are one group that does desire trade-offs between money and time. And we want to design policies that give people that right. So last point here, because I've run out of time. There's another really important connection that I've worked on in my own modeling and my students and colleagues are also doing more work on this. And that is to bring in the role of inequality, because one of the things we find is that, number one, more unequal societies have longer hours of work, all other things equal. And number two, at higher levels of inequality, the work-time emissions connection turns out to actually be stronger. So a robust policy of work-time reduction should also include robust policies to reduce inequality. And that will actually have all-on effects for reducing hours of work. So thank you. Yeah, thank you so much. First for presenting us with bitter pills and giving us an idea how big the challenges actually are. And also for providing this perspective that simply telling people to consume less is maybe not good enough, but that you have to offer them at least the well, leisure in return. And I will give over now directly to Will Strong. And yeah, you have the floor, Will. Awesome. Thank you very much. I'm going to share my screen. We'll just start this. Great. Yeah, thanks for having me. And I'm very proud to say that autonomy is part of the network for the fair share of working time, the European network. I'm sure it's been said a lot, but we're interested in having new members, new discussions, so please join the network and get involved. So autonomy is a research organization based in the UK, I'm the director of research. And we produce policy and research on all sorts of things to do with the future of work. So we've been looking at welfare, commuting, the platform economy, but also the shorter working week. And the shorter working week has been the focus of us since the beginning, as Philip said. I haven't been introduced as an academic for many months, so it was nice to hear, I suppose, but I don't really do that anymore. I'm mainly focused on working time policy. Okay, so I thought for my talk, I think just looking at what we arranged for this conference, I thought it would make sense to step back from policy for a second. And I would advise people go and see the session tomorrow with the four-day week campaign and other campaigns. But I thought I'd step back and talk about post-growth and in conversation with an emergent kind of discourse that's been coming around for the last five years that I've been engaging with for post-work. And I think there's a way in which these two different discourses parallel each other. And I think they have various strategic and theoretical implications. I mean, first off, both of them have names which are fighting an uphill battle as it were. It's hard to disagree with work in a work-centered society, and it's hard to disagree with growth in a growth-centered society. So both of them have these kind of uphill battles, which I think are necessary and important, but does put them on the back foot. And I think there's ways in which both can learn from each other. So what do I mean by post-work? Well, I suppose the motto for something like post-work is revalue, redistribute, and reduce. It's more of a provocation than anything else. It's not really a detailed program. It's more a set of family resemblances between texts and authors. I'm talking about people like Kathy Weeks, I'm talking about Nick Cernichek, Helen Hester, authors who have to take an unromantic view of the world of work, who have kind of a historical perspective, or a gender kind of studies perspective, or a kind of much more futurist perspective. And the point of post-work is to really provoke desire and estrangement from the present. So thinking not just in terms of jobs and employment, but also beyond that. So the work of the home, the unpaid work of the home, often very gendered, shadow work like commuting, or kind of consumer work that we do in order to buy our products and so on. And normally post-work is premised on precarity, overwork, climate change, all these different crises. It's a very crisis-based discourse, much like post-growth is, to some extent, it's much less established than post-growth, but it's something which is kind of gaining traction in certain ways. It's normally clustered around a few policies or demands, so things like a basic income, how to manage things like automation, Julia mentioned AI and machine learning and so on. So a lot of the post-work literature and research is around kind of how to repurpose different technologies. But also, I'd say almost primarily the shorter working weekend, reducing working time, not just in the workplace, but also working time at home, is perhaps its tea loss, its purpose, its main goal. And I think, although not in name, no one's really heard of post-work, I think in terms of practicalities, post-work is getting traction in political and public sphere. So I would count autonomy being part of that discussion. So whether it's creating missed policies or whether campaigns at the four-day week campaign in the UK, but also abroad in Spain and Ireland and so on, these are getting real traction and they're kind of capturing some of the public imagination. So that's kind of an interesting point I want to return to later around how post-growth can kind of work with kind of post-work kind of elements. I think just some obvious points of contact between post-growth and post-work is, of course, that reducing working time is key to both. I think just considering the fact, for example, that Juliet's work's being created purely influential on my own work and others as well. I think an interesting shared nexus is around productivity. It's a dangerous frame from a post-work perspective because it's a stick to beat workers with, to be more productive. That's the aim of the economy, to be more productive and who gets the sharp end of that, it's those who are working in the workplace. Politically, from a post-growth perspective, it's an environmentally catastrophic direction. So I think there's a confluence there around the idea that maybe post-work should be abandoned as the final aim of an economy basically. Productivity and also growth as well. And Will, you have 11 minutes left. You can slow down a little bit. Yes, I have to realize that as a, I'm a very fast native English speaker, so I will slow down, although I have a fair bit to get to. Okay. And then finally, of course, there is also a convergence around revaluing, revaluing certain forms of work. And I'll return to COVID at the very end of the presentation. But of course, both post-growth perspectives and post-work perspectives want to revalue work and certain kinds of work, which is basically become either naturalized, kind of denigrated, or kind of, yeah, not valid half as much as they should have been, for example, care work. That's not very carbon intensive, but also it's something which we should emphasize is basically the foundation of our economies. Okay, so I think a key shared message, and this is really, you know, Juliet's previous presentation underlined this very well, is basically that work and consumption intersect. Now, I think there's obviously an interesting point to be made about offshoring energy. But of course, I'm just going to point to some of our research from earlier this year, where Dinesh Sala, who's an energy specialist based in the north of England, an interesting study we carried out just as COVID was hitting, was looking at daily consumption of electricity, when was the peak times for electricity consumption? And we compared weekends, bank holidays, and weekdays. And we looked at, you know, effectively the demand on an energy system and to show the kind of contrast between non-working days in terms of employment, non-employment days, and employment days, and bank holidays. And what we found is there was a huge reduction of electricity consumption on weekends. And so we started running some hypothetical tests, you know, with regards to what if we had a four-day week, or if you had another day of the weekend, how much electricity would we save, or how much would be, how much less would we consume electricity over a year? And effectively, what we found was that there would be a 24% reduction in the carbon emissions based on electricity consumption in the UK every year. It's quite a huge difference and a reduction of 5% across the whole sector, simply just from adding another weekend day to the week. And that's not including all the other consumption that Juliet's research has shown, so things like carbon intensive goods, commuting, and so on. This is simply just the amount of electricity that we use on weekends versus weekdays. So I think there's something to be said there, where we kind of, this kind of research brings together a kind of working time reduction perspective and a post growth perspective. Okay, and so I want to kind of run through a few ways in which both movements can kind of inform each other, basically. So on the one hand, post-work perspectives can inform a post-growth movement in a number of ways. I think post-work authors are very keen to avoid a return to nature narrative. The idea that basically, you know, to some extent humankind or modern civilization is somehow done, kind of erred against nature in some way, and all we need to do is return back to a kind of natural or kind of, yeah, a return in some sense. I think that's quite dangerous. And I think the post-work perspective driven by a feminist concern for gender roles, so things such as, you know, naturalizing women's work as reproductive work, for example. I think there's a way in which post-work can steer some of those slightly more naturalist perspectives that sometimes infiltrate post-growth perspectives. I think this is to pick up what Juliet was talking about earlier around desirability and not just telling people to not consume more. I think post-work can offer a vision of hope to a project, essentially a project of scaling back. If we do need to scale back our consumption and our production, we also need to give people hope to kind of buy into that. And so I think when Philip said something like sustainable and fair world, we also need a fun one, basically. We need one where we can have a, to use Kate Soper's term, kind of alternative hedonism in some sense. Something which a kind of a leisure beyond consumption kind of model, I think post-work is and the kind of literature around that is kind of can inject that into a post-growth discourse, which can sometimes sound quite austere. We need to kind of steer away from that. And that's what Juliet was saying as well. I think importantly, and I think this can be said also, the same can be said of green new deal perspectives. I think it's important to avoid a mass work narrative. So sometimes, you know, for example, in Ann Petterpool's new book on the Green New Deal, there's the idea of like of an arm, there's a phrase, an army of labour. It's used again and again. In fact, you know, I think Ed Miliband, an MP in the UK, talked about there needs to be a kind of an army of labour, of labourers. And so I think although, you know, mass employment is something which right now, in particular, with a lot of people are demanding, it's important to remember that work perhaps isn't the final goal of us of our society. It's a means to an end. So I think post-work can add that kind of caution. And what can post-growth add to post-work? So I think post-growth for me is potentially a useful wider frame, like post scarcity. Post-growth is perhaps a wider frame for direction of national economies that post-work can plug into. So often, you know, post-work is really focused on working time, you know, different forms of work and so on, but it hasn't really got a wider kind of framework or trajectory. I think post-growth can provide that. I think it's useful for post-growth perspectives to define green jobs and green work. That's something which that's a kind of initiative that needs to happen. I think post-growth can do that. I think post-growth can kind of put some important cautions to some of the technological optimism or aspirations that come out of post-work discourse. I think it's important to keep an environmental frame and a post-growth frame on top of some of that kind of sometimes techno-futurism. I think as Juliet and Philip also picked up on thinking through leisure, that's not carbon intensive. So post-work is really about free time and then what does that free time look like and how do we make it not carbon-consumptive? And finally, a final note on COVID. COVID, as far as I'm aware and from the research seems to show, it's not going away anytime soon. We have perhaps one, at least one or two years on a similar, unless you find a vaccine. It's going to be around for a long time, perhaps forever, but not quite as intensive as this. So I think it's an opportunity to rethink work because this really is a crisis of work. This is not quite different to 2008 in that sense. That's a subprime mortgage crisis and so on. This is really a crisis of work, of what kind of work we value and what kind of work we don't value, basically. And in terms of working time, there's an interesting, there are a few interesting dynamics, right? There's some people who, working from home, they tend to be working longer, work and life bleed into each other. And those who are in industries that are really tanking and they can't get enough work. This is an opportune moment to think about redistribution of hours, right? And I think if you look back in history, and this is some of the research I've been doing recently around the history of working time reduction in the UK, the most significant moments of this reduction have been after the first and second World War, led by trade unions, led by the workers movement, but really after absolute crises of economic crises effectively. Now, so I think it's important to note, and I think it's a slight, maybe I'm speaking slightly differently in slightly different terms as Juliet here, that although some, you know, some, particularly when the working term reduction initiative gets attacked, I think basically some people say we can't have working term reduction without a very productive economy, or we need to have a more prosperous economy to have working term reduction. But I think it's important to note that after World War I and World War II, it's not as if our economies were in a huge decent shape. And we should note that actually the greatest reductions of working time have happened in times of economic hardship. So in those particular scenarios, I think we should avoid the idea of the kind of being cornered into saying that actually you can only have working term reduction when we have economic prosperity, because I think I'm not sure how, you know, when that's going to be basically. And finally, in the short term, you know, working time demands have to be made in the context of COVID. I think that's really important and having some success in doing that. But I think also, you know, if we established working term reduction coming out of COVID or coming out of this intense period of COVID, then I think it should be there for, should be established for the longer term transition that we require basically. Cool. I'll leave it there. Yeah, it was quite fine in the second half. And thank you so much for, I found this encounter of post-work thinking and post-growth thinking very inspiring. And I just wanted to remind everyone that you are invited to use the Q&A button to head in questions through the talks already, because we have three talks in a row. So it might be good to just note them down already now instead of waiting until the very end. Okay. Finally, I give the floor to Beata. Did anyone... So, thank you. I hope you can understand me now. Okay. I want to share my screen now. I will try it. I hope it will function. Can you see the presentation? Please say yes. Yes, you can. Not yet in full screen, but as soon as you start. Okay. So I will start now. And we will speak about the place of working time reduction in post-course society. And I will put the question, is it a precondition for change and an expression of good life? And to answer that, I have divided my presentation into three parts. First part, working time and gender. Second part, working time and sustainability. And third part, working time, transformation and post-course. So we will begin with the comparison of working hours of men and women in Germany. And I will show you a survey of the Hans-Böckler-Stiftung and you see the working time of men is mostly 40 hours and more. The blue square is the part-time working and it is very slow. So we have 90% of working time in the full-time job when you look at the men. And when you look at the women, you have a completely other picture. You see most of the time is part-time. More than 50% are part-time. And the violet area, which is over 40 hours, is very small. And compared to the men, it was much more. So this leads to the gender time gap. And Germany has a very big gender time gap of 7.7 hours. And it is very high in comparison to the others of the EU, which have 5.4. And you see, for example, there are less countries which have more. But we all in the EU have this gender time gap. I think this, everybody knows this, but it is necessary, I think, to show it in this extreme form. And then when you look on, then you see that paid and unpaid work is, it's not surprising, women do the most of the unpaid work and men do most of the paid work. With all the consequences this has on money they get and on insurance and all of that. So I come to my first thesis. I have a shortening of working time is needed in the context of gender justice. And my second thesis is a shortening of working time in a full-time employment is demanded by both gender. And to prove that I show you a survey of the VSE of the Hans-Böckler Stiftung. And there you can see that men who work in full-time, they want to work less hours. And women who work in full-time the same. They also want to work less hours. And part-time, part-time employees, they want to work more. The men and the women, it's very similar. It differs a little bit between the gender. So what has this to do with sustainability? Perhaps you ask yourselves, we will see later. Working time and sustainability. I want to go a little bit to history. The limits of growth in 1972 was the beginning of the debate with the Survey of Meadows, the limits to growth. And he said, our model of industrial development is not sustainable. Then we came to the Bundland definition, to the Bundland Report, Sustainable Development. And with this sentence, development that meets the needs of the present is out compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The next step is the Declaration of Rio. Principle one, human beings are at the center of concerns for sustainable development. They are entitled to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature. And there we see, we have nature, we have human beings, and we have the economy, the productive life. And this leads to the circle, to the triangle of sustainability. Together, economy and environmental justice and social justice. And there is a competition between the three. And we have some who say, okay, it only can do economic efforts if the economy is running. And we have others who say, oh, it's too late. We have just environmental borders. And this is the point. This is the limiting point. And everything which we can do with economy, we have to do beyond these borders. We remember the famous sentence of Greta Trumbach, she says, how you dare it? How can you dare it? So this is one theoretical point, which is the caring economy. In Germany, for example, Adelaide Biseker, she is a very famous one, which has this theory. And she says caring economy emphasizes that nature shows absolute shortage and that some resources are not substitutable. That's the point of strong sustainability. And this means it is a cooperative approach, which takes natural and social conditions as a basis. And the analysis focus on the relation between nature and humans. It's in German, you say, it's the gesellschaftlichen Naturverhältnisse. It's very close together, the social and the natural point. So what does it mean for work? There are two points, which are important. I think Julie Chau said it already. One is approximately 80% of the carbon dioxide emissions of human activities come into existence by gainful employment. And this means that the gainful employment is not ecological. We need a change. And this means a change of work, of the ecology of work. We need a change of the working hours, but we also need a change of the kind of work I become later to that point. And the second is that there is a link between economic growth, volume of work and productivity. It was already also safe of Julia Chau. And because of that, the economists say that we need economic growth to safeguard employment. And this is in contrast to the ecological demand to save resources and the climate. You can see this connection on this grave. And that's the point, the volume of work got less beginning for 1970. And the productivity becomes bigger and bigger. It's increasing more than the increasing of the GDP. And because of that, we have to share, we have to share the volume of work. And working time reduction is a change for fair distribution of the societal available work. And therefore, is it a precondition for sustainable development? This is my main thesis. We have to distribute the work because we can't get more working volume. The working volume is limited. And we have the ecological crisis. And because of the electrical ecological crisis, it will get lower. And of course of that, we have to distribute the available work. I think it was no other thing. In other words, Sophie Yannick said in the panel before, when she said the material is now thinking about reducing the working time in four days, because they see that it is not possible in the crisis to get more work. And they have now the crisis in several sectors like the automobile industry. And so they see that there is a need to reduce the working time. Post-co-society, working time, transformation and post-co-society. Several authors mean different things when they talk about post-co-society. I will talk about post-co-society and in this sense to say post-co-society focuses on the arrangement of a good life for current generations and future generations. Growth can be necessary in some cases, but in general, that we grow and we can't get more growth anymore. I agree with that. And new ideas and sufficient lifestyles are developing also beyond the market in a post-co-society. And the post-co-society means a change of work and it means a change of production. And this means inclusion of the reproduction, not only the production, also the reproduction is necessary to see when we look at work. Some authors of post-co-society they speak about 20 hours per week. When we speak about working hours, for example, Nico Pech, I will see that. But the focus of my presentation is the idea of the whole work. There are different kinds of work. I don't even speak about work, we speak about the paid work, about the gainful employment, the normal employment, part-time employment, atypical work, everything included. But there are also other kinds of work. There's the care work. There's the societal work and there's the own work. The own work means the work I am doing for myself, the work I am doing for my own education, for example, the work I am doing for culture. I want to do a course for singing or if I want to mix parts on this, is work on my own, for my own proceeding, for my own education. And the societal work is the political work, the work I do in groups I do to participate in organizations and the care work is the work I do in the family, for example, to look for the children I do to look for the elder ones. And when we look at that and we see that all these four sectors will have the same time, then figure out, for example, she says, we have only the time for four hours of work, the day and the other time we have to invest in the other forms of work. And this is a complete other definition of work. All kinds of work are important and necessary, the paid and the unpaid work. This shifts the perspective. That's the main point of this. And it sees that the societal work, the own work and the care work are necessary and they need time. And now I come to the gender perspective. And these kinds of work are mostly done by women. And central is also in this, this point of the care economy, working times must be life processes. And all kinds of work have to be done by every gender. This is the point of working time and post-course society and post-work. And this can only mean a radical reduction of paid work. A shortening of working time means a consequent shift of perspective. Work is considered as a whole work and thus changes the term of work and welfare in general. And we also have another definition of welfare. The welfare of time is important in this model of whole work. I come to my conclusion. The central and initiating role of reduction of working time for a transformation to a post-course society is underestimated by political actors. It's underestimated because it's the blue condition. And the working time reduction changes the perspective on work and the distribution of work between men and women. And this is also a part of a post-course society. And last but not least, it could disprove the argument that economic growth is needed to safeguard employment because we must stop with the economic growth. And the consequent reduction of working time is a civil and ecological project. It is necessary, but it is not enough for the transformation into a post-course society. Thank you very much for your intention. And I'm glad to answer your questions. Yeah. Thank you so much for your presentation, Beata. I found it really important to also hide the additional dimensions of work besides wage labor and also that you will reinforce the importance of the demand to redistribute working times, particularly if you keep the gender time gap in mind and also now the corona crisis. So thanks a lot. I would also like to thank all three presenters for keeping the time so well. We really have a full hour now to discuss. So everyone, please add your questions to the Q&A segment. Ahja, Juliette needs to be unblocked for you. Could you take care of that? Ahja, okay. Good. I would like to start out with one question for each of you. And this first round also presents you with the opportunity to react to one another. And I would like to start with Juliette. Would you like to all get your question and then have some time to think about it while one of you is talking? Okay, then I will present all three questions at once. So Juliette, I was wondering, you said we have to drain our purchasing power out of the economy. And you clearly showed that, well, simply this level of consumption is not sustainable in the long run. But on the other hand, obviously, the trade unions are always campaigning for shorter working times for the full compensation and pay. So no loss in pay. And I wanted to ask whether you could discuss this point a little bit more in detail, maybe also concerning the fact that emissions are very unevenly distributed also within developed countries. So maybe, and how social and ecological justice could maybe be reconciled in that respect. And the other thing I wanted to ask to Will, was the question which I oftentimes also get is if you argue, okay, shorter working times lead to less reductions, then you are confronted with sentiments like, well, if people have more free time, they will always fly to London to go shopping or something like that. And you mentioned that obviously it's of key importance that we also keep the carbon intensity of the additional leisure time we get low. So I was wondering, do you think that's mostly a thing of a cultural change that people freely pick other activities in their free time off? Or would you say there are certain key policies that would need to be introduced that frame the leisure time of individuals? So I was wondering whether you could comment on this whole issue which is called temporal rebound effect. And lastly, to Beata, I know that you're also involved with research on sustainability in a global context and perspective. And I was wondering when Juliet mentioned that the decoupling is simply not happening as quickly as we need so that the connection between GDP growth and carbon emissions remains too strong. What that means for global development and whether you would like to comment in that respect, but also whether working time reduction is a sensible policy also in the global south, or whether you would say the discussion we are having here is mostly centered on the global north. Okay. Juliet, would you like to start? Yes. Okay. Thank you. That's a great question. So I think that I sort of couched my conversation in a sort of almost more of a modeling frame. So now we need to enhance it with some more realism and so forth. So you're right that we really need to focus on inequality of wealth and emissions for two reasons. I mean, one is that you have this very unequal distribution of emissions with people at the top contributing very disproportionately to emissions. This is particularly true on a global scale, but it's also true within nations. And then you have another finding which we have from our, my colleagues and I have that where you have a lot of income and wealth concentration at the very top, so top 1%, 5% or 10% concentration, you actually have higher emissions, other things held equal. That was that point I made at the very end. So I think that in part, you can have reductions in inequality that may help offset some of the demand from trade unions for income increases in income. But ultimately, if you have already, if you're starting from a fairly equal society like many of the northern European countries already are, that doing too much downward redistribution can actually lead to more demand and higher emissions because you're moving money from people with low propensity to spend to higher propensity to spend. So you've got to think about that. I think that the way I would think about this is it's not about reducing incomes. It's about leveling out incomes on average and then taking productivity growth in the form of shorter hours of work. The Netherlands did this for 15 years from roughly the recession of 1980-82, which was a very severe recession, very high unemployment in Europe until the late 90s. So real wages almost didn't rise at all. Productivity increased a lot and their working hours went down a lot. They went to a four-day work week in the finance sector. The government hired all new employees on four-day schedules. So that's kind of the way to do it, especially where you get the new workers entering the labor force if they go on to shorter schedules. They're never experiencing those five-day work weeks. Obviously, this doesn't work for the very lowest paid, and that's where you do want to bring the bottom up. So if you combine these policies with either welfare policies, minimum wage, or other things which basically compress the income distribution, they can be successful to deal with some of those issues that we're talking about, which is the purchasing power. But ultimately, drain more purchasing power out of the top, yes, but the point is that we're going to have to really make deals with unions, which allow them to take shorter work time rather than increases, at least a portion of the productivity increase that way if we're going to meet those emissions targets. I don't see another way around it unless we get a phenomenal Hail Mary technology. That may be. The more you do on the technological side, the more you do on the shifting the mix of services, the more you do the kinds of things Bayada is talking about where you're shifting to more care work and low carbon activities, then the less purchasing power you have to kind of pull out of the system. You always have those trade-offs. Yeah, thank you. On the other hand, the good thing is that in comparison to warp reactor for free energy without emissions or something like that, working time reductions already exist as a policy option basically, but it's true. Will, would you like to go next? Sure, yeah. I think in terms of well, non-carbon intensive leisure, I would, and responding to the question, would we not just be increasing our kind of carbon use or whatever in our leisure time? I mean, I would also just point back to Juliet's work on, you know, I think it was 27 OECD countries. They looked at the correlation between working time and carbon emissions and there's a positive correlation there. So although, although yes, it's not, I'm not saying that leisure can't be carbon consumptive. I think, you know, the point is that work, the more we work, the less leisure time we have, the more time stress we are, the more we use carbon intensive goods. And I think, but that's not to say that we need to, we don't need to change leisure. And I think ultimately what we've been thinking about a lot of autonomy is a kind of leisure, a new leisure infrastructure. Because again, not to refer back to Juliet's work, the work spend cycle, which I think is a really useful phrase, it's actually reflected in space as well. So, you know, our town centers, particularly in the UK, it's, I'm sure elsewhere in the US, of course, the places to go when you have more free time are often places to spend, right? And that we're the kind of infrastructure and architecture of our leisure life is a place where it's places for consumption. And so I think we need to think about decommodified leisure spaces where, you know, people can on bank holidays, national holidays and on their extended free time off, go to places in enjoy life and have that whatever I call, you know, the alternative hedonism without having to kind of like, you know, basically like pay for high carbon goods. I think this points to a question I see in the chat really when someone says, why, what's the explanation for higher carbon consumption on weekdays versus weekends? And I think, you know, we can only really speculate there. The data we're looking at was looking at the kind of the peak times. The peak time was a weekday at about 7pm. So basically once you're home from work, and you've got all, you know, your electrical goods going basically, and why is that not the same on the weekend? Well, maybe just speculating, maybe it's because on the weekend you're out more, you're going around, you're not using your electrical goods as much because you're actually more active. Who knows? But ultimately, the peak was 7pm on weekdays, and that wasn't the case on weekends or on bank holidays. So I think there's something telling about a 7pm weekday time. I think that tells us that's basically the end of the working day. So employment is not good for those electrical consumptions. Anyway. Of course, we will also hear Beata with her question, but I was just wondering whether the two of you might also want to comment on the link between energy usage and what might actually explain that on weekdays at 7pm, the energy consumption is highest. But maybe we'll already address that. Well, remember now you're adding all of these locations that are active. So if you think about on the weekends, that's just basically home-based activity, and then you add all the business-based activity in the retail. But there is one thing. So I think we can't just assume that if we shift there, it'll be an absolutely proportionate decline because one of the things that we've seen in the United States when you shift to the four-day work week is you have people who pick up additional work on that day. And so some of that will generate activity, and it will generate electricity and so forth. So you need to figure out what that, how much of it, it's a sort of a rebound kind of effect, how much of it you'll get that the shift will cause some new activity. Okay, Beata, we didn't reach your question yet, but yeah. Yes, Philipp, you asked me if working-time production is only a concept for the global North. I'm very often asked this question. I think we have to look firstly at post-course economy, and post-course economy is a concept which is we have to look for economist concepts which are locally orientated, which are regional orientated, and we have to establish an economy which suits, which fits through the local situation. And when we look at that, and for example, look to India, look to Bangladesh, what is happening there in the textile industry. You have very, very hard working conditions. You have very, very less wages. You have working hours which are long, which are in the night and end-to-end. So I think we have other problems. We have problems to do with the working condition, with the kind of work, with the condition of work. And for that, certain unions are important in this country, and we have to fight for fair wages. For example, in the textile sector in India, this is a field where I'm in research with, and the working time reduction is so, not a concept which we can say this fits for every country, this fits for every region, because we have to look very exactly what is happening and what are the conditions there. And so working time reduction is a concept, yes, primarily for the global north, for the European Union, and we look in other countries, which in the global south, then we have to look a little bit more in detail, and we have to look at the work, and at the condition of work, and of the kind of work. And I think when we talk about working time reduction and post-co-society and sustainable development, I say that it's not the only thing to say we reduce the working time, and then we have to get less emissions. We have to look at the kind of production we have, and we have to change the kind of production we have, and this is also so important then to change, to reduce the working times. We have to think these both things together. Yeah, thank you. I would start to take questions now from the audience, if that's fine with you, or if you can still react to one another's input, but since you didn't choose to do so, I would suggest I start with questions from the audience. The first one I'd like to highlight is from Katie Giese, and she's asking about the experience that they oftentimes, when talking about working time reductions, they get comments from policymakers on how to finance working time reductions in the long term, and I think actually that refers to the financing also of the welfare state, because much of the expenses of the welfare state today are linked to gainful employment and the taxation of that, and the question would be if you maybe also say, okay, we have to drain out purchasing power from the economy, how do you make sure that not in the end, you basically leave no money left for public services and these kind of things? I think the question could be taken up by any of you, and all. One thing I did want to pick up on Juliet's presentation, but I thought I'd already picked up on a question from the audience I didn't want to keep picking up on stuff, was linked to this question basically, so I've been doing some work recently on maximum wages and the redistributed power of maximum wages, and I feel more and more that we basically need to talk about redistribution as a way of discussing working time reduction, and I say that in contrast to the idea perhaps to what Juliet was saying around tying it to productivity gains, just so in some ways the question I had is in lieu of productivity gains in light of economies which are basically stalling, how do we make this case, and I think to some extent it's pointing to particularly in the global north, very unequal pies basically, and really pushing that inequality angle, and so I think my question is how do you feel about that as a redistribution rather kind of like growing the pie, and I think for me the maximum wage we've done and we're going to include more of this in our calculations around what could a maximum wage, a redistributive maximum wage or pay ratio, what could it finance in terms of time as well as money basically, and so I think it's a really good question, and I think as I mean Juliet already did mention the kind of squeeze that might be necessary, which I think is a good way of putting it minimum and a maximum, so I just wondered what her thoughts were because I kind of concur with Katie in a way that some of those proposals are good ideas. Yeah, there are a lot of the questions in the chat actually relate to the question of productivity and this is a place where Will and I put out different points of view to a certain extent, I think it's really important. It's very important to distinguish between two things, one is work intensification and the other is productivity growth. Now in the conventional economics approaches and in the statistics those two are not differentiated, so if people work harder it will show up as productivity growth, but it's not true productivity growth, it's just working harder, it's because we measure productivity in terms of time rather than intensity of work. This is a really fundamental point, it's very key to all of the you know Marxian theories of labor process where you know with wage-based work or time work that's paid by time not by piece, the intensity of work varies and so especially in the UK I think there's this very anti there's this kind of sentiment of and one of my friends I think has been you know at the forefront on this Tim Jackson of productivity growth is bad and I think that's really really wrong headed so you do want to distinguish work intensification is bad but true productivity increase is actually really really important and I think it's I just I don't see how we're going to get to this post-growth or post-work society without it so I mean we could but I just politically doesn't seem feasible so the the so that's the first thing because it allows us to produce more with a given level of input and I'm not sure why that is a bad thing I mean yes there are work reorganizations that are bad and so forth but the that's not sort of the productivity itself is not I think is not a problem and you know a lot of this AI can be really really helpful we also have to have robust critiques of AI and of automation and so forth but not on grounds of employment not on grounds that they substitute for employment I think that's a that's a bad direction to go someone in the chat asked or in the Q&A asked about service sector and the idea that we don't have productivity growth in the service sector and I think that's also really not correct we don't know how to measure productivity growth in the service sector but I mean certainly as a service sector worker I can tell you there are many tools that I have gotten that have dramatically increased my productivity there are also things that I've learned over my career that have dramatically increased my productivity I am a much better teacher today than I used to be I'm a much better advisor today than I used to be we don't know how to measure it but it's in fact happening so I think this is really important I think that to to be a movement that is against productivity growth really will impede us we have to we really need to I think we need to unpack productivity growth something I obviously didn't do in my first 15 minutes but come to a more sophisticated and kind of differentiated point of view about it and one I'd like to interject just very briefly to comment I mean the the German trade unions have been doing a lot of research also on intensification of service work and for example how many nurses you have per patient and so on and although it's difficult I would agree to to evaluate the productivity increases certainly something has changed compared to 30 years ago or something like that so I would agree with that yeah I just I did let me say I want to be clear I started my career working on work intensifications so it I am not an advocate of work intensification but that's where you know the whole point was to differentiate true productivity growth from work intensification yeah yeah thank you and Beata one question you talked about the four in one perspective of Frieger Hauk very shortly also or you mentioned it and I mean sometimes in the debate you also have this position particularly from from post growth or deep growth proponents that if we have way more free time because we don't have as much wage labor time anymore a lot of services could also be provided privately because people take have more time to take care of their family members for instance would you say that could be related to this question of we might have well there might be an issue with providing high quality public services if we drain out wage labor also partly yes okay firstly I have one demand on on all three of you if you can speak a little bit slower it would be very fine for me because I know native speaker in English and so it's very difficult for me to follow all the arguments in this quick speed and four in one perspective yes Frieger Hauk it's the same it's similar and this point Niko Pech is arguing and it's it's that that we say yes it is possible that we can do work which is done by foreign people by our own and this means also this point own work yes in German eigenarbeit because we have a lot of things for example repairing my bicycle I bring my bicycle to the store and then they repair my bicycle society it is possible that I do more things by my own which I have led to do from others because I don't have time everything is stressing I'm working the whole time so I have don't have the time to repair my bicycle I don't have the time to repair my closest I don't have the time to do the garden by myself and for this activities I agree they can be done by their own but if you look for care work for example then you have to look very close which can be done by their own and which can be done by by others by organizations because it can't be that you say all the care work has to be done by your own and all you have to do with a older people to care about older people to care about children and so on everything has to do by your own then you are in the old argument that you see the women this day at home the care for the children and the men go outside for work that can't be the solution and because of that we say I say we because a lot of other people argument in the same way for example Adelaide Bezika we say it is necessary and it is important that the men will do that care work and that a societal work too that it is done by both gender that's important and if that is not going then we have to see that this is no approach which is looking into the future it's a approach which is looking into the past yeah I very much agree and that perfectly lines up with one of the questions of one of our entities which actually was about the risk that working time reductions might actually reinforce gender roles and which is a process that might be driven by a mix of socioeconomic attributes and he was wondering how do we attribute this how do we prevent that actually shorter working time reinforces gender roles yes me yes I think first of all it is necessary that the men work shorter too and not only the women work shorter I think and I think this we have a development which is going in this direction that the men they want to work less and they want to participate in caring about the children for example and this is the condition that it will be for both gender it will be injustice of both gender and it can't be that all the unpaid work is done by the woman that is the point but when we have for example I will speak about 20 hours because we go out the support of we go out she says 20 hours working time is enough if all have working time of 20 hours a week all this is the full-time job than you then you have automatically an orientation towards the other kinds of work towards societal work towards own work and towards care work and so this is the precondition that you have a radical reduction of working time for both gender that is the point will do it would you like to expand or on the question of gender roles is it enough to reduce working time for both genders or I mean do you want to go no go ahead no no I just think it's it's for me it's a similar question to not similar question sorry about the response is similar to the one I gave you about leisure which is basically yes working time needs to be reduced but also we need an infrastructure of care which can share that unpaid workout and this is what Beata was saying right that you know it's it's not just about saying okay you reduced the working weeks good luck with gender good luck with gendered work it's about saying okay we now have an infrastructure where for example childcare elderly care can be shared around so so I think a useful concept here is discretionary time right because free time often is is a broad concept which basically means non-employment but discretionary time is time you know for our discretion and so I wouldn't say that childcare and elderly care is necessarily discretionary time and so I would just reiterate what Beata said basically which is that it's not just about working time reduction it's about tackling some of the material and obstacles to realizing free time as well as the cultural stuff around what what's you know men male and female roles but I think I think ultimately it's a question of organization as well as reduction in time yeah I would I mean I I agree very much with Beata's point of view I think the you know that one of the things about the gender distributions is that here you need additional policy to to make that transformation in terms of getting men to do more uptake of care work and so forth and I do think one of the ways to do that I love the point about the eigenautobytes which is the own work and the fact that we can't just think of care work as own work and the the I mean I I am a believer in the payment for a lot of this care work and I think that also makes it more likely that we see more men doing it so for example in nursing which became the RNs the top of the nursing hierarchy pay really went up a lot in the United States and you see a lot of men moving into that into that field so paying and valuing care work more is also part of a gender transformation but I think the key point is it doesn't it won't happen automatically that that to really make a big change in the gender distribution of work you need very deliberate policies to kind of force getting that momentum going but do you mind if I pick up just on something Julia no no yeah okay yeah yeah just it's just that I mean the more you're speaking Julia the more I realize that like this is this is I think this is what I my down the line common sense says which is that we shouldn't intensify work but we should you know use new technologies to kind of boost productivity and then share that around so we can have more time for ourselves and so I'm just more and more I'm just thinking we're kind of chasing a solution to a productivity puzzle particularly in I mean the UK we have a real productivity puzzle and it's partly with all sorts of reasons you know unproductive firms in the middle section of the economy or it's low paid work so we don't have we don't invest in new technologies and so on but I'm actually for I guess for a few reasons wondering whether we're actually never mind the covid crisis we're actually chasing a productivity solution which we won't necessarily find and then we'll be tied to the idea that we can't get working time reductions and because we can't grow that pie with new new productivity and I'm just slightly wary of that I mean one example the communication workers union in in the UK who are we collaborate autonomy collaborates with a lot they're campaigning for shorter working hours and they've won one hour and they they they basically are campaigning for a few hours over a period of years and that's because of mechanization in in the workplace so sorting of letters and stuff you know this and and so to some extent they're campaigning on work intensification and use of technology in the workplace less around productivity gains although that's obviously kind of part of it I just wonder if the angle on technology is less about should should we solve productivity as an issue everyone should do better and rather everyone should be having reduced working time anyway because we live in an incredibly unequal society and actually the distribution of that wealth of the redistribution should come in a form of time and so whether I'm just I'm just worried about productivity as an angle because it doesn't seem to be happening basically and I feel like we're going to get trapped in a in a demand that which won't come through sorry maybe I'm going to be at the same point yeah no well I do think I mean in the UK I mean that you you have a problem that other places don't have which is that low productivity trap I mean one could say probably the nature you know the high levels of inequality and class problems that you have or you know might well be at the root of your productivity problems and that you really need to kind of have inequality in reducing policies very core to whatever you whatever you do because that's that's a big structural problem that you have as an economy but I also think that that sort of tendency to think okay we have low productivity we're just going to be against productivity and we're all going to decline more gracefully and more equally which is you know that's a big theme in British culture I wouldn't go I wouldn't say I'm not saying you are but that's there that's for sure there in the British discourse right no you're right no you're right totally and I don't want to fall into the trap of being like we can't have nice things because we're declining and I'm just saying we can have nice things because we they may because basically there are nice things but only a few people have them that's what I'm saying and if I may interject just a quick note there has been excellent research by the ILO in the past showing that actually shorter working hours also induce productivity growth so I think it would be kind of sad to say okay we're not going for shorter working times because we're waiting for productivity to increase at some point but rather you could also think about how can working time reductions be designed to actually facilitate productivity growth and then I think it's you can combine these two debates rather neatly I would suggest and if I may I'd like to ask another question which relates I think also to the gender time gap that we are to mentioned and the question is the following the question is whether the presenters believe working time reductions would reduce the number of workers in involuntary part-time contracts I mean that's the hope to redistribute work right or whether to the contrary might actually lead to a further precarious job for example self-employment because instead of hiring people which you then have to pay full time for only four days of work you instead try to get rid of your workers all in all and then just to have them as private contractors so to speak which has been a strong tendency in a lot of European labor markets so redistribution or further involuntary self-employment what do you think I talked a lot I was thinking of the other actually yes you have this tendency in in that the contracts in involuntary employment the tendency is there and I don't think that it builds ranks and when we have the reduction of working time because when we have the reduction of working time we have this tendency by for we for example in Germany you have a lot of self-contractors and you have less normal jobs which are paid very good with the normal tariff contract of the Ege Metall and this is the problem we are looking with which we have in the moment and if you reduce the working time I think this wouldn't change anything if we reduce the working time we have other conditions for the normally employed people and then I think and I want to stretch in this once more there is much more music inside this more model than often the people see because if we have a radical we don't speak about one hour or two we have a radical reduction of working time it's 30 hours per week or less it's in the direction of 20 hours per week then we will get a completely other society that's it and we will get a completely other distribution of paid and unpaid work between men and women that this is the key and I think most of the people don't see that this is the key if we have only 25 hours per week which is a normal job a normal full-time job let's speak about how it is paid and if we have a full wage which or not this can be discussed later but we discuss first if you have 25 hours it's a full-time job for example then you have a complete other distribution and we will get women in full-time jobs because the full-time job is completely other defined and we get men in full-time jobs with a completely other defined level of full-time job and so in this we will have another distribution of the unpaid work and we will have another distribution of insurance and another distribution of payment and everything and so it's a completely change and if we say oh this will come to more self-employment this will come to worse conditions and then I will say no this is another point there's another problem and this problem we have to solve with other instruments and I think the good units may have instruments in Germany I can speak for Germany to solve that and that they have to sync together with the force with the event now to go into the working time debate as Sophie Yannick has said from the Iggy Metall I think that's that's very good that the Iggy Metall is now looking and thinking about to reinforce the working time debate again and yes I think this will be the societal project which is the key project for the next years and only with this project we can in to development in the post-course society this will be the first step and this will be the poor condition and this will make new coalitions new coalition between trade unions and NGOs like Fridays for Future this is the way to get these new coalitions only this because the trade unions they won't find for ecology with ecological arguments because they have to look for the work and how to organize the work and working time is one central part of it yes yeah thank you I'd like to directly follow this up to all three of you because there has been a question before Will already wrote an answer in written form but I think I'd like to also have the other two perspectives and maybe Will wants to expand on the question well Juliet mentioned in her talk that shaming environmentally damaging consumption does not work yeah and Will mentioned that post-work offers a positive vision of hope for people yeah something that is actually desirable and the question was that whether you see any potentials that NGOs that are today campaigning for a reduction in consumption instead switch to the messaging of well we have to fight for working time reductions and that might be a compensation for reduction in consumption also or is going or do you think working time reductions will stay a topic of the trade unions primarily I mean we were already talking about new strategic alliances and so on this might be something to bring together trade unions and environmental organizations but maybe you have some insight from contact with these organizations or at least some hopes I mean do you want me to go or I'm holding back because I talked a lot yeah I think you can start okay I'll start so I mean I think I think yeah as I wrote in the chat I think there needs to be alliances of all sorts of organizations look I think I think you know historically trade unions have trade unions have been at the heart of working time reduction campaigns and there still are though the existing ones Igor Mattel or in the UK have already mentioned some but at the same time there are different capacities of different organizations with different audiences basically and I think you know those those groups like Fridays for Future and similar environmental groups they need to they speak in their own particular language to and give their own particular reasons and tomorrow I'm sure in the sessions in this conference you'll hear from different campaigns and how they speak in what registers they speak in I think it's really important to have an activist wing of this working time movement as well as a research wing as well as those people talking to policymakers those people doing data analysis those people in trade unions who are talking about you know work of freedom work like balance and things like that not one organization can't do all of that and I think you'll need to have a widespread and I think actually the premise of this conference actually and the network that we're part of is to kind of develop that strategy and that kind of kind of like the infrastructure for that to happen so I think the other question is a really good one because ultimately we should put our hopes in one formal organization I think we should put them you know in the fact that people are pushing this in different ways and providing different resources so I think ultimately and that's to be fair that in the last five years that has been why there's been success right there's been on the one hand we need trade unions talking about this but on the other hand you have you know public intellectuals you have campaign groups you have NGOs you have policy like think tanks now waking up to the idea and it's become so much stronger and they reinforce each other right so I think think tanks look to trade unions to see how are they campaigning like this you know we look at companies who are already running this four-day weeks in their companies and we work with them to help design those things so it's a mutually reinforcing infrastructure. Just to piggyback on that I mean absolutely it has to be a wide a wide set of constituent groups but I think one point and it relates to a lot of what people are asking in the Q&A is I mean just to put it in its simplest terms is working time reduction a sufficient strategy a necessary strategy or both and I would say it's certainly a necessary part of a successful transformation with a robust climate agenda for emissions reductions it's by no means sufficient and there's just there's a there's a lot of other there are a lot of other things that need to be put in place obviously I mean if we're talking about energy system transformation and then someone asked about transportation and you know we know that to decarbonize our economies it takes a lot of change in many different ways we're going to have to do all those things it's going to so it's really important not to think of it as a magic bullet that all you have to do is reduce work time and all these other things just wonderfully happen I mean I think there are important dynamics that are set in place with reduced work time but they can also have rebound effects or unintended consequences and and so we really need to to remember that I do think it's necessary because otherwise you can get more unemployment and you know just problematic dimensions but I just I kind of wanted to make that point because there were you know quite a few of the the questions were really were are really relevant to that to that point thank you and I got a message that Margarita Steinrigo would also like to comment and Beata would you give her the flow for a moment yes okay okay Margarita you yeah you should be able to speak now okay yes I agree with Juliet sure the working time reduction is not the single measure what will help us in the climate crisis flight but I think there is a lot of aspects why it's really necessary and some of the points mentioned before I think are not in that risk what some people assume first the gender inequality reinforcing maybe this is really as Beata already said it's only when you let working time reduction in the form of individual part-time work as it is in the moment but because of that we in the trade unions and the women's organizations and for example our left party in Germany are fighting for a new working time standard around the 30 hours for everybody that really the men especially the men reduce their normal working time and only then you will have this effect that really every work the paid and the unpaid could be shared equally we have an experience with the Volkswagen experiment in the 90s there was really one effect of this 28 hours a week that men did share more of the work at home and the ideology of all the conservative was they will only work a second job or something like that in their free time this was not the case and sorry else the question how the discussion inside the trade unions about the relation of less consume or less working time I think at the moment most of the normal workers really are almost afraid to lose the job and this is the main motivation for everything and in so far I think we have to combine the how to say to make a picture of working time reduction as a mean for safe jobs as it is actually with the court's abide a short time work as a state measure with this prospective to have a new wealth a new well wealth of nations in form of more free time because really many many of also normal workers are suffering from too much intense work and too long work and we have such a rate of burnouts and also family conflicts because of working time that the desire to really have more time for family for friends for myself is a big driver in all these struggles and this would be the art of mobilization for this question to combine these two motives to have more free time and to have saved to save the job I'd like to follow if you look at the surveys most of the people they see we want to work less we want to work less when we are in a full-time job and this argument to see it everywhere that the people they want to have more time and it's a welfare of time which becomes more and more important and I think this is an argument you have to see which will be also very important for post-co-society post-co-society only everybody who speaks about carbon and carbon emissions and how can we decline them but we also have to see we want to speak about quality of life we have to speak of the quality of life in a post-carbon society and this is also a quality of time we don't us stress the whole time because we have to do this and this and this I have to stop my job and I have to look for the children and I have to go to the kindergarten and so that we have to share the time and this is also one argument when we speak about gender if the women will participate in the jobs as much as the man then you have to share you have share the time and this means it is not possible that 40 hours work a man and 30 hours works a woman and they both have two children 40 years ago the man worked 40 hours and the woman was at home and cared for the children and now we have to do a new distribution of the working hours and but in the result it has to become less in working hours because we have to save the climate and we have to change productivity and this was the argument we had before it is not enough it is important it is an important key but we have to change the working the the kind of work we do and this is meant with transformation we are full in transformation of in the social and ecological transformation of the automobile sector of the steel industry of all and this we must we must do we must fill with this life and the working time reduction is one instrument but only one instrument we also we have to look how we can produce in another way how we can change mobility and all these things if I I would like to suggest we take one last question from the audience and then we might make our final round and conclude because you only have 11 minutes left and the question I was wondering about because Margrethe highlighted the the fear of unemployment and since it's also a policy that is often promoted as being in a way to move towards a more sustainable and a more caring society I wanted to highlight the question from the audience whether you think UBI a universal basic income is an alternative to work in time reductions or might actually be complementary because it's a part wage compensation for instance if you work less yeah so that would be the last question I would suggest from the audience who would like to go first speaking of I mean I've I've talked the most but for me it's complementary I mean I think one of the really great things about UBI other than all of the the benefits that it gives to people and the you know human human welfare improvements associated with it are that it could actually lead fewer people to work and reduce people's working hours and so forth so I think it's a big benefit in that sense is something that can help a society move to lower levels of work effort so yeah yes yeah please yes I completely agree to this I think it is complementary I'm I think basic income is necessary it is necessary also because that the people don't have fear to become unemployed and somebody who says I want to work to work in the paid job I want to work in society issues in own work this is also okay I think and for that the basic income is the condition to have the possibility to do that so I think yes both is important for the post school society the both the basic income and the reduction of the working time thank you and well I assume you as a post work a proponent you're probably not adamantly against the UBI but if you would also like to comment do you think yeah I mean I'm just going to reiterate something Margareta said about if you look at the history of welfare often although welfare is something we really value particularly the post-war welfare state it's often been used as a stick to beat workers with so if you look at the workhouse in the 19th century and you look at the job center in the UK and unemployment centers in the US and so on too often there are disciplinary institutions with conditional requirements so that you can only get support if you're looking for a job and so on they are they are places of to dissuade people to you know to kind of go on to these social security nets and so I think the basic income would be a total game changer in terms of not having that fear of being out of a job and you know for all sorts of reasons it'll be a good thing so I think in terms of linking with working time I think it's it's part of like a new economic setup basically so I fully agree okay thank you so much for well a very intense debate and also three excellent inputs and we agreed in the beginning that we won't make a last round where you have the chance to wrap your position up a little bit if you if you would like to other than that you can also pass it yeah okay who would like to start with the final round I think I said it in my last point I think the working time reduction concept is underestimated because it is a central key for the change in post-course society and it is a central key for gender justice because women have the same right to come into the paid shops but it is necessary and it is important that all the people who don't want to go in paid shops that they have the possibility and for that the basic income is an added concept is concurrent is also very important for this thinking of new arrangements of work and thirdly and not last we have to have a concept of social ecological transformation and this concept must be done must be created together trade unions and ecological organizations like for the future but also other organizations and the trade unions they have to come in to discuss about other concepts of production and to think reproduction in the boat quest to we don't have to see linear concept we have to to see cyber concepts for the future thank you so yet would you like to go next so one of the things we haven't talked about too much is how a program of work time reduction would affect the distribution of power in society and if we think about the neoliberal era you know one of the the most important things in addition to the ecological and climate destruction that's occurring is the destruction of of power for ordinary people and the growth of power of elites business and their representatives in the state and the you know a key foundation as as people have been talking to the power of capital over labor is people's fear of unemployment fear of losing jobs and when you shift to work time reduction you have it affects you have fewer people unemployed you have a lower cost of job loss ubi also does a lot with this and so to the extent that we believe getting the kind of society we want requires much more power people power that is power vested in ordinary people and less in elites work time reduction should should really help us with that because it it transforms the dynamics of of labor markets in the same way that i think we understand ubi does as well so it you know that's a kind of positive rebound or positive knock on effect that you get from working time reduction that will make possible many of the kinds of things that we were talking about in the bayata especially has been you know talking about in this session around quality of life yeah thanks for for reinforcing this point in the end because i think it's also very crucial to the demand for shorter working times will you are the last one no i i haven't got much more to add it's been a great session and i look forward to taking these conversations into tomorrow and then also you know working together as part of that kind of ensemble of actors pushing this issue it's it's got to happen yeah i um well now i will say what i wanted to say so that only leaves me to thank you once more and to hand over to adrian who will conclude the day very shortly give a outlook for tomorrow and yeah thank you