When the global financial system went in to a tailspin in September 2008, western governments, faced with the spectre of collapsing industries and rising unemployment, acted quickly and decisively to secure the manufacturing and construction sectors of the economy. Emergency measures like the auto industry bailout in the U.S., massive injections of cash into the construction sector in Australia and similar support for the manufacturing sector in the U.K. were meant to protect jobs in the face of the potential collapse of these industries.
But massive cash injections can only sustain these industries for so long. Inherent in the concept of sustainability is a recognition that there must be limits to growth if we are to ensure that the present generation does not harm future generations by exhausting available resources. With global supplies of key resources such as oil, copper and steel tightening, we are rapidly approaching these limits, and may soon reach the point when continued expansion of industry becomes not just ecologically perilous but economically impossible.
The global economy has been built on the backs of industries that are neither environmentally nor, in the long run, economically sustainable. We are faced, then, with two unworkable options: allowing these industries and their massive labour forces to disintegrate, precipitating a calamitous increase in unemployment and widespread economic hardship, or continuing to pour vast amounts of public money into an economic model on the brink of collapse. Neither option is tenable, but a third option is emerging that involves rethinking not just the role of work in the economy, but the role of the economy in society.
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Cutting the Global Economy Down to Size: The Nature of Work and the Green-Collar Workforce
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Cutting the Global Economy Down to Size:
The Nature of Work and the Green-Collar Workforce
By Robin Tennant-Wood
Briarpatch Magazine, November/December 2009
Straight to the Source
