Rapid transition opens doors to decent work. Over-work, unemployment and under-employment characterise the modern global economy.
Increasingly, if you have a job, the hours are likely to be long, and the work low-paid and insecure. It’s just as bad if the hours are too few and low-paid to sustain a livelihood. If you’re unemployed, it’s easy to end up being treated as a second class citizen – excluded from many forms of civic and social life.
Youth unemployment is particularly harsh and socially divisive, often leading to generations being trapped in subsistence. But even when you are in work it can seem like a treadmill, struggling to meet the costs of living and a home, and in consumer cultures, it’s constantly promised that a better life lies just the other side of the next shopping trip. Evidence says otherwise.
The irony of all of this is that, in an era when the great challenge is to meet everyone’s needs as we make the rapid transition to live within the bounds of the biosphere, there is no shortage of good work that needs doing. An awakening to the ‘green collar economy’ has institutions as diverse as the International Labour Organisation and multiple industry associations predicting tens of millions of new jobs in low-carbon sectors.
At the same time, both public and private employers are finding that many workers realise greater satisfaction by opting to work shorter weeks, helping to spread the benefits of employment more broadly. Even the economic grandfather of work specialisation, Adam Smith, warned of the human consequences of poor-quality, repetitive work. Now the circular and green economies seem to offer ways to get off the consumer treadmill of endless material accumulation (for those who could even afford it or were prepared to go into debt), as well as opportunities for more meaningful work. By changing ingrained working patterns, the conditions for rapid transition can be created.
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Story of change
Work less, gain more? The 4 day working weekResponding to a recession in the early 1990s, the public sector in the Netherlands began offering a four-day week to staff to save money. Since then it has...
Story of change
When everything changed: the US & UK economies in World War IIBoth the United States and the United Kingdom has within living memory gone through a period of very rapid transition in terms of a huge reduction in the...
Story of change
Transition Towns – the quiet, networked revolutionThe Transition Network began in 2006 in the small rural UK town of Totnes, Devon. It was initially a response to the twin threats of climate change and peak...
Story of change
The New Deal and a Green New Deal – turning economic and environmental disasters into an opportunity for national, public renewalA proposal for a Green New Deal from the dynamic new Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has become a rallying point for progressive politics...
Story of change
The Medellin miracleIn the early 1990s Medellín, the second largest city in Colombia, was the most violent city in the world. The homicide rate reached an unprecedented and...
Story of change
The decline of the single bottom line and the growth of B-CorpsBusiness is rarely a byword for sustainability. Sometimes a founders’ own ethics build a corporate culture of greater environmental care. Now, the B Corps...
Story of change
Rojava in Syria – growing local democracy and defending ecology in the midst of conflictIn 2012 in Rojava, Northern Syria, a group of Kurds set up a secular, ethnically inclusive and bottom-up democratic system, in which all ethnic and...
Story of change
Off-grid solar power lighting up rural KenyaThis rapid transition has seen the booming of a private market since the early 1980s – with hundreds of thousands of Solar Home Systems (SHS) installed...
Story of change
Make do and mend: the rise of repair cafesThe relationship with ‘stuff’ in high-consuming, wealthy economies is set to change. From the European Union to the United States new laws are being...
