Working Hours and Sustainable Development

Abstract

Many works on sustainable development stress the part played by reduced working hours in the promotion of a model for alternative development. The direct link between working hours and the environment, however, still deserves to be supported. This is the issue we would like to discuss through an analysis of the relationships between consumption and working hours. We use surveys on French household expenses to highlight the environmental consequences of long hours: they encourage goods and energy-intensive consumptions and favour conspicuous expenditure and non-sustainable lifestyles.

Keywords:

• hours of work
• sustainable consumption
• status-seeking effect
• regulation

Notes

The external costs of long working hours, which are being examined here, should not, however, allow us to forget the impact of the reverse situation: underwork is equally damaging, both to the well-being of the individual and the collective. The reduction in standard working hours to the benefit of both reduced hours and increased hours thus contributes to this same sense of uncertainty.

France's National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques: INSEE) is a Directorate General of the Ministry of the Economy, Finance, and Employment.

It should nevertheless distinguish between different food products, namely meat, for which the environmental cost is particularly high (Frank 2007).

To get around this problem, the authors' analysis was limited, a second time, to just those households with a high income (more than [euro]30,000 per year) for which the correlation between working hours and income is appreciably lower (a correlation coefficient below 0.12). The main results are confirmed and stress new significant correlations between the longest working hours (more than 92 hours per week for the household) and specific aspects of budget that have a huge impact on the environment, such as transport bills, electricity bills or some food consumption.

At the same time, employing a cleaner means spending money for a labour-intensive service and reducing other outgoings. This is possible, but we find that using such services facilitates other types of consumption, which themselves are costly to the environment. Outsourcing domestic work releases time, and thus allows certain kinds of conspicuous consumption that take up too much time when no domestic help is available (housekeeper or gardener), such as owning a large house or a pet (Meagher 2003).

This report is one of the most important studies by “hygienist doctors” of the labour force during the industrial revolution.