MANAGEMENT RX FOR XR
Extinction Rebellion is using holacracy to scale its international movement
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REUTERS/JAVIER BARBANCHOAnother self-organized

 Extinction Rebellion protest for the environment.

By Aimee Groth December 29, 2019

One of the defining events of 2019 was Extinction Rebellion, the global protest movement bolstered by activists like Greta Thunberg to make the climate emergency a priority for governments around the world.

Since its founding in 2018, XR, as it’s known, has mobilized thousands of people in dozens of countries, brought sections of London, New York, and Sydney to a standstill, and spawned 3,000 arrests in the UK alone (purposeful arrests are a core part of its strategy).

While the movement has received its share of criticism as it has grown in size and power—namely around its lack of diversity—its sheer numbers and degree of international press coverage point to an enviable level of operational success.

A key to this success? Choosing an effective organizational model early on, informed by the latest management science. XR is a decentralized network designed to resemble a holacracy, an operating structure for self-organization tested by tech companies like Google, Zappos, and Medium. Anyone can join XR so long as they adhere to its 10 core principles and values, including a commitment to nonviolence.

While holacracy, too, has received its share of criticism as it, too, has gained traction, the system is credited for providing a basic framework for effective self-organization. At a holacracy training session at Zappos, the online shoe retailer, in 2013, HolacracyOne co-founder Brian Robertson, who invented the system, described his creation as providing “a rule system for anarchy.”

Extinction Rebellion’s embrace of holacracy makes it the largest-scale use case to date, eclipsing Amazon-owned Zappos’s high-profile trials with holacracy involving 1,500 employees. Like Zappos, which has quietly backed away from certain tenants of the system and has begun to experiment with its own, modified version of holacracy, XR is also taking a broader interpretation of holacracy.

“We’re not dogmatic about using holacracy; it’s an adaptive version,” says Ronan Harrington, a UK political strategist who was personally recruited by XR co-founder Roger Hallam to join the movement.

XR is not formally engaging HolacracyOne’s services. Instead, its leadership has trained itself using online videos and with guidance from advisors like Miki Kashtan, an international teacher of nonviolent communication and former McKinsey consultant Frederic Laloux, whose internationally bestselling book Reinventing Organizations profiles successful self-managed organizations, including HolacracyOne.
Circular logic

The defining feature of a holacracy is its circular hierarchical structure, which is quite different from the static pyramid hierarchies most organizations employ today. The flattened hierarchy, combined with a focus on granular roles over broader job titles, as well as distributed decision-making and clear frameworks for conflict resolution, makes holacracy a more dynamic and scalable option for self-organizing entities like XR.

Reflecting basic holacratic structure, XR has a number of core “circles” that focus on everything from finance and fundraising to legal, tech, and even the nature of self-organizing systems. The core circles send representatives to the main circle, led by XR co-founders Hallam and Gail Bradbrook. Feedback loops run quickly both down- and upstream. Those in core roles are empowered to make decisions as they see fit, so long as they consult with others who have expertise in order to make thoughtful decisions.

More complex decisions involve “integrative decision making,” a process where all proposals need to pass with no objection. When necessary, a rapid-response team makes faster decisions on strategy and other issues.

The movement has learned from the mistakes of Occupy Wall Street, which was weighed down by crowded general assemblies that made decisions by consensus, which quickly became a hindrance to progress. By contrast, holacracy is designed to protect against that kind of gridlock by empowering individuals to act with full sovereignty within the scope of their roles, while retaining a democratic bent through its governance and integrated decision-making processes.

Harrington notes that the average XR protester probably would not even know that they are operating within a holacracy (though the group does hold training sessions on holacracy in various local chapters). “People know [holacracy] by the processes we have,” he explains. “For most people it’s their first experience in a self-organizing system.”
A different approach than Occupy Wall Street

Daniel Thorson, who has explored the concept of societal and ecological collapse through his podcast Emerge: Making Sense of What’s Next, participated in the UK protests this past autumn. While he wasn’t initially aware of XR’s holacratic design, he observed that anyone was empowered to act as they desired, so long as it was in accordance with the movement’s principles. He kept up-to-date on the campaign’s UK strategy through a widely broadcast channel on Telegram, the encrypted messaging service. Transparent information flow is a core tenet of holacracy because it fosters trust, the lynchpin of all effective self-organized systems.

Thorson, who also participated in Occupy Wall Street, was struck by the way XR participants were noticeably more in control of their emotions than the Occupiers were, evidenced by a more cool-headed approach to protesting.

In London’s Trafalgar Square, “you’d come across a sign for therapeutic yoga and sound healing, right next to a table for the scientists of XR, and the Buddhists of XR,” he said, referring to the mixture of the spiritual and the sacred within the context of the protest movement. “At Occupy there would have been antipathy for that.”

On Thorson’s podcast following his visit to the UK, he interviewed Harrington, who pointed out that many XR protesters have done their “shadow” work, that is, healed traumas within themselves so they don’t project dysfunctional conditioning onto others, namely law enforcement.

“They have done inner work on antagonism, so they are projecting less onto the public,” explained Harrington, noting the clear link between self-development and systems transformation. “[When] an activist hasn’t actually processed the rage and the anger that comes from issues with their mothers and fathers, they project that onto the system. And people feel that.”

Thorson adds that the inherent discomfort associated with protesting can easily trigger unhealed emotional wounds. “You can tell where trauma is if you get irritated,” he says. “There are so many opportunities for people to freak out. People were more angry and rageful at Occupy, whereas at XR people are pretty peaceful. It’s more of a festival atmosphere.”

The XR movement itself has its roots in the spiritual. In 2016, Bradbrook attended an ayahuasca ceremony in Costa Rica for activists with the intention of discerning the “codes for social change.” (Ayahuasca is a plant-based medicine thought to have a mind-opening effect.)

Not long after, Bradbrook, a former biophysicist, met Hallam, a former organic farmer who is pursuing a PhD at King’s College London centered on how to create social change; and together they began laying the groundwork for XR. The activists studied notable protest movements in modern history and determined that nonviolence, promoted by the likes of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., has by far been the most effective strategy. Their message was bolstered by the work of Jem Bendell, a professor of sustainability leadership at the University of Cumbria, who published a viral academic paper in July 2018 “discussing the need for deep adaptation in the face of impending ecological collapse.”

Using holacracy as an operating system, they scaled XR globally in relatively fast order, starting with the group’s official founding in October 2018 and accelerating with mass protests in April and October of this year. The campaign has brought attention to the climate emergency, but it is still far from persuading political leaders to meet its demands, which include a commitment by the British government to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2025. Based on their academic research, XR’s leaders predict it will take 3.5% of the population getting involved to affect systemic change.

As XR strategizes for its next phase in 2020, it is also integrating lessons Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, which is leaderless out of necessity. “We admire their Bruce Lee, be-like-water approach,” says Harrington, though he is quick to note a core difference between the two is XR’s commitment to non-violence. Either way, he says, “Hong Kong shows us the value of keeping something in the news long enough.”

Thousands of Google’s cafeteria workers have unionized

Around 2,300 contracted workers who serve meals to Google employees in the San Francisco Bay Area have unionized, saying they’re overworked and underpaid.

By Shirin Ghaffary Dec 31, 2019, 10:00am EST

A Google cafeteria in Kirkland, Washington. Cafeteria 

workers at San Francisco-area Google campuses are

 unionizing. Stephen Brashear/Getty Images


Around 2,300 cafeteria workers who work at dozens of Google campuses in the Bay Area, including the search giant’s main headquarters in Mountain View, have unionized.

The workers — who include dishwashers and food preparers who serve breakfast, lunch, and dinner for Google employees — voted last month to form a union after a campaign that’s been two years in the making, according to a source involved in the campaign.

Their organizing has gone largely under the radar even amid other high-profile worker activism at Google in the past year, which has included employee protests about sexual harassment, the company’s work with US immigration agencies, and allegations that the company retaliates against employees for reporting HR issues. But the cafeteria workers’ unionization is some of the most significant union activity tech industry workers have accomplished — particularly for service workers who operate as part of Google’s vast “shadow workforce” of contractors who largely receive lower pay and fewer benefits compared to the company’s full-time employees.

The workers who voted to unionize earn wages that start at around $35,000 a year, according to a source familiar with the matter. And they say they don’t receive all the same benefits such as retirement plans that are standard for full-time Google employees. Their move to organize represents a symbolic pushback against the status quo of growing economic inequality in Silicon Valley, where all but the top 10 percent of income earners have seen their wages decline from 1997 to 2017.

The cafeteria workers are organizing with a local chapter of the union Unite Here, which represents some 300,000 workers in the hotel, food service, laundry, warehouse, and casino gaming industries nationally in North America, according to its website.

An arbitrator officially recognized that a majority of the workers at cafeterias across Silicon Valley voted “yes” to union representation on November 20 of this year, according to a union flyer that Recode reviewed. Since Google contracts these on-site food service workers via a third party, they are technically employed by the multinational food service firm Compass Group, which staffs many of Google’s cafeterias through its subsidiary, Bon Appétit Management Company. Compass Group and the union are now in the process of negotiating a contract, according to sources.


“We’re fed up and want change because at one of the richest companies in the world, we’re being overworked and underpaid,” the source involved in the campaign told Recode. “The disrespect from management is just adding insult to injury,” they added, alleging that in organizing meetings, some workers shared stories of being bullied, sometimes subject to “casual racism,” and pressured to work overtime without pay by Compass management.

A representative for Unite Here declined to comment on the union organizing.

“As an organization, Compass Group firmly believes each of our associates has the right to make an informed decision about whether they want to be represented by a third party such as a labor organization,” a spokesperson from Compass Group told Recode in an email. “If they do, Compass Group will meet with the union and engage in good faith bargaining with the goal of achieving a mutually satisfactory agreement as we have done at Google Mountain View.”

With regard to the allegations that management has mistreated employees, a spokesperson wrote that the company is “committed to creating a positive, fair and rewarding work environment, and one in which every Compass Group associate feels empowered to discuss any and all workplace issues.”

A spokesperson from Google shared the following statement: “We have worked with Compass for many years and they’ve done an excellent job operating many of Google’s cafes. We work with lots of partners, many of which have unionized workforces and many of which don’t. We’ll continue to partner with Compass.”

The Google spokesperson also said food service workers employed by Compass at Google’s New York and Seattle area offices have unionized in the last two years with Unite Here.

Service workers in the tech industry, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area, have long seen stagnating wages that haven’t kept up with skyrocketing housing prices. In Silicon Valley, where Google’s campuses are located, the cost of living is currently the highest in the entire US, around $2,911 a month for an apartment, according to a recent estimate from the Silicon Valley Institute for Regional Studies.

The situation has become so dire that an ad hoc RV camp formed outside Google’s headquarters, where some tech employees including Google’s own contractors are living. In June, Google announced it would invest $1 billion in land and building homes to help ease the crisis. Facebook and Apple have also made commitments of around $1 billion and $2.5 billion, respectively, to address California’s housing crisis that many say has been driven in large part by the growth of major tech companies.

But it could take years before residents see any meaningful results from these efforts, and in the meantime, service and retail workers, along with teachers, firefighters, law enforcement officers, and other non-tech employees, are finding it increasingly difficult to afford to live in their communities.

Previous tech unionization efforts

In recent years, Google and other major tech companies have faced scrutiny for the vast differences in the labor conditions for full-time employees versus contracted workers. At Google, contractors make up around half of the company’s total workforce and are called “TVCs” — temps, vendors, and contractors.

The complaints TVCs have aren’t just about pay, but also working conditions. Many TVCs say they’re bound by forced arbitration agreements, meaning they can’t take their employer to court over workplace issues like sexual harassment. While Google eliminated forced arbitration in its own employment contracts following employee protests, contractors can still be subject to such agreements with the third-party companies that hire them to work at Google.


Some tech contractors have successfully unionized in the past. Back in 2017, around 500 food service workers organized at Facebook’s Menlo Park offices with Unite Here Local 19, the same group currently organizing workers at Google. That union negotiated a five-year contract that included $4.75 per hour in raises, as well as health care coverage and a benefit pension plan.

And thousands of security officers working at hundreds of offices in Silicon Valley, including major tech companies like Facebook, Cisco, and Genentech, unionized with SEIU in 2017. Shuttle drivers who help transport employees of companies like Facebook and Apple have been organizing with the Teamsters in the past several years. And in August, a group of around 80 Google contractors in Pittsburgh voted to unionize, drawing attention to the divide between these workers and their full-time counterparts.

But now, these roughly 2,300 cafeteria workers unionizing at Google’s Silicon Valley campuses represent one of the largest bargaining units of workers at a single major tech company — and a serious demonstration of the strength of a growing labor movement in tech.

Their organizing also comes at a time when Google’s white-collar workforce is increasingly participating in union organizing efforts, despite Google leadership’s attempts to crack down on employee dissent. In October, Google workers held a talk about unionization in Switzerland despite management’s attempts to cancel the meeting, as Recode first reported.

Around a month later, Google employees discovered that the company was meeting with an anti-union consulting firm. And shortly before the Thanksgiving holiday, Google fired four employees who say they were retaliated against for their union organizing. The Communication Workers of America union filed a complaint on behalf of these four in December with the National Labor Relations Board, which has since launched an investigation.

Earlier this month, another former Google employee came forward to say she was fired for her internal organizing efforts. Google denied that it has fired employees for organizing, and said that it terminated the employees for breaching the company’s data security policies.

Some white-collar tech worker activists say unions aren’t necessary to achieve some of the untraditional demands, such as canceling what they view as unethical projects to build technology for warfare and to support US immigrant detention camps. And in the face of apparent recent white-collar organizing suppression by Google’s management, some have doubted the viability of forming a well-organized union.

“I think this is a very symbolic and important push,” said Veena Dubal, a law professor at UC Hastings who studies labor organizing in the tech industry. “The fact that this union was able to organize these very precarious workers, in a large tech company that’s already getting heat for their labor practices with their own employees — it’s such a big deal that it could really push the conversation about tech and labor practices more broadly.”

A year of protest, as seen through street art

From Argentina to Lebanon, images that defined a year of unrest.

By Hannah Brown hannah.brown@voxmedia.com Dec 31, 2019

2019 will go down as a year of worldwide unrest. In the last few months, protests have raged from Haiti and Venezuela to Iraq and Lebanon, from Russia to Canada.


Around the world, citizens are frustrated about inaction on climate change or angry about government corruption. Some protests have made international news; others have come and gone with less attention. But one thing many of them have in common is the presence of protest art.

The quality and wit of signs, murals, and costumes are striking, prompting viewers around the world to think about the movements in new ways.

The appeal of a nonverbal, approachable commentary in the world of social media is not lost on activists. In Lebanon, anti-government protestors portrayed politicians as the Joker. In Santiago, Chile, women unfurled a banner to protest gender-based violence.

Here’s a look at some of the works from around the world.
South and Latin America
Argentina

Members of leftist parties and Bolivian citizens watch a burning dummy depicting President Trump during a demonstration in support of Bolivia’s overthrown president Evo Morales in front of the US embassy in Buenos Aires, on November 22, 2019. Juan Mabromata/AFP/Getty Images

Chile

Women protest against gender violence and the government in Santiago, Chile, on November 29, 2019. Javier Torres/AFP/Getty Images

Colombia

Colombian indigenous people and students protest on the eighth consecutive day against the government of Colombian President Ivan Duque in Bogota on November 29, 2019. S Juan Carlos Torres/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Venezuela

A mother and daughter walk by anti-Nicolas Maduro graffiti, who is rendered as “Salt Bae” in Caracas, Venezuela, on February 12, 2019. Roman Camacho/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Middle East
Iran

An Iranian man walks past a mural painted on the walls of the former US embassy in Tehran on November 2, 2019. Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images


Iraq

An Iraqi protester paints on a concrete barrier on al-Rasheed street in the capital Baghdad, during a lull in the anti-government demonstrations on December 5, 2019. Ahmad Al Rubaye/AFP/Getty Images


Lebanon

Anti-government protesters sit under graffiti depicting Lebanese politicians as Joker in downtown Beirut on November 12, 2019. Joseph Eid/AFP/Getty Images


Palestine

A Palestinian woman in Gaza City walks past a wall with graffiti showing President Trump with a footprint on his face on June 23, 2019. The Arabic text below reads, in Arabic: “For al-Quds (Jerusalem) and the right of return we resist.” Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via Getty Images


Sudan

Sudanese protesters sit in front of a recently painted mural during a demonstration near the army headquarters in the capital Khartoum on April 24, 2019. With the fall of veteran leader Omar al-Bashir, Sudan’s long-stifled graffiti artists have been able to express their art. Ozan Kose/AFP/Getty Images

Europe and Asia
Hong Kong

Lok Yi, a 27-year-old art student, folds paper cranes in the Times Square shopping area of Causeway Bay in Hong Kong, on September 29, 2019, as part of ongoing anti-government protests. Marcus Yam / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images


Russia

A protester holds a banner demanding the release of actor Pavel Ustinov in Moscow, Russia, on September 19, 2019. Ustinov was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in jail for participating in anti-government protests. Celestino Arce/NurPhoto via Getty Images


Ukraine

Activists hold a banner depicting Ukrainian anti-corruption campaigner Kateryna Gandzyuk in Kiev, Ukraine, on February 9, 2019. Gandzyuk died from injuries from an acid attack in July 2018. STR/NurPhoto via Getty Images


North America
Canada

High school students lie on the ground as they protest climate change in front of the Canadian prime minister’s campaign office in Montreal on October 18, 2019. Louis Baudoin/AFP/Getty Images OTTAWA IS THE CAPITOL OF CANADA 

United States

Parents and their children held a rally outside Governor Andrew Cuomo’s offices in Manhattan on December 5, 2019, protesting against the controversial bills being proposed that would allow children to be vaccinated with STD vaccines without parental knowledge or consent. Erik McGre

The sad truth about our boldest climate target

Limiting global warming to 1.5˚C is almost certainly not going to happen. Admitting that need not end hope.
By David Roberts@drvoxdavid@vox.com Jan 3, 2020, 10:30am EST


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Activists in Berlin stood with signs calling for limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius at a rally that criticized Germany’s insufficient climate policy on May 29, 2019. Michael Kappeler/picture alliance via Getty Image


In the 2015 Paris climate agreement, the countries participating in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) agreed to a common target: to hold the rise in global average temperature “well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius.” The lower end of that range, 1.5˚C, has become a cause célèbre among climate activists.

Can that target still be met? Take a look at this animation from Carbon Brief:



UNEP: 1.5C climate target ‘slipping out of reach’ | @hausfath @robbie_andrew https://t.co/dGUfgnegzf pic.twitter.com/feXQTVyuNM— Carbon Brief (@CarbonBrief) December 30, 2019

No graphic I’ve ever seen better captures humanity’s climate situation. If we had peaked and begun steadily reducing emissions 20 years ago, the necessary pace of reductions would have been around 3 percent a year, which is ... well, “realistic” is too strong — it still would have required rapid, coordinated action of a kind never seen before in human history — but it was at least possible to envision.

We didn’t, though. We knew about climate change, there were scientists yelling themselves blue in the face, but we didn’t turn the wheel. Global emissions have only risen since then. Humanity has put more CO2 in the atmosphere since 1988, when climate scientist James Hansen first testified to Congress about the danger of climate change, than it did in all of history prior.

Now, to hit 1.5˚C, emissions would need to fall off a cliff, falling by 15 percent a year every year, starting in 2020, until they hit net zero.


That’s probably not going to happen. Temperature is almost certainly going to rise more than 1.5˚C.

A lot of climate activists are extremely averse to saying so. In fact, many of them will be angry with me for saying so, because they believe that admitting to this looming probability carries with it all sorts of dire consequences and implications. Lots of people in the climate world — not just activists and politicians, but scientists, journalists, and everyday concerned citizens — have talked themselves into a kind of forced public-facing optimism, despite the fears that dog their private thoughts. They believe that without that public optimism, the fragile effort to battle climate change will collapse completely.

I don’t think that’s true, but I can’t claim to know it’s not true. Nobody really knows what might work to get the public worked up about climate change the way the problem deserves. Maybe advocates really do need to maintain a happy-warrior spirit; maybe a bunch of dour doomsaying really will turn off the public.

But it is not the job of those of us in the business of observation and analysis to make the public feel or do things. That’s what activists do. We owe the public our best judgment of the situation, even if it might make them sad, and from where I’m sitting, it looks like the 1.5˚C goal is utterly forlorn. It looks like we have already locked in levels of climate change that scientists predict will be devastating. I don’t like it, I don’t “accept” it, but I see it, and I reject the notion that I should be silent about it for PR purposes.

In this post, I’ll quickly review how 1.5˚C came to be the new activist target and some reasons to believe it might already be out of reach. Then I’ll ponder what it means to admit that, what follows from it, and what it means for the fight ahead.
How 1.5˚C became the “last chance”

The new target adopted in Paris reflected a growing conviction among scientists and activists that 2˚C, the target that had served as a kind of default for years, was in no way “safe.” Climate change at that level would in fact be extremely dangerous. Thus the addition of “efforts” to hit 1.5˚C.

But it wasn’t until last year that the world really got a clear sense of how much worse 2˚C (3.6˚F) would be than 1.5˚C (2.7˚F), after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a special report on the subject. Its findings were grim. Even 1.5˚C is likely to entail “high multiple interrelated climate risks” for “some vulnerable regions, including small islands and Least Developed Countries.”

All of those impacts become much worse at 2˚C. (The World Resources Institute has a handy chart; see also this graphic from Carbon Brief.) Severe heat events will become 2.6 times worse, plant and vertebrate species loss 2 times worse, insect species loss 3 times worse, and decline in marine fisheries 2 times worse. Rather than 70 to 90 percent of coral reefs dying, 99 percent will die. Many vulnerable and low-lying areas will become uninhabitable and refugee flows will radically increase. And so on. At 2˚C, climate change will be devastating for large swathes of the globe.

In short, there is no “safe” level of global warming. Climate change is not something bad that might happen, it’s something bad that’s happening. Global average temperatures have risen about 1.3˚C from pre-industrial levels and California and Australia are already burning.

Still, each additional increment of heat, each fraction of a degree, will make things worse. Specifically, 2˚C will be much worse than 1.5˚C. And 2.5˚C will be much worse than 2˚C. And so on as it gets hotter.

The aforementioned IPCC report is the source of the much quoted notion that “we only have 11 years” to avoid catastrophic climate change (which I suppose now is “only 10 years”). That slogan is derived from the report’s conclusion that, to have any chance of limiting temperature rise to 1.5˚C, global emissions must fall at least 50 percent by 2030.

That goal, a 10-year mobilization to cut global emissions in half, has become the rallying cry of the global climate movement and the organizing principle of the Green New Deal.Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg and others at a rally. Sarah Silbiger/Getty Images
Being honest about 1.5˚C

Climate hawks, along with numerous recent scientific and economic reports (including the IPCC’s), emphasize that limiting global warming to 1.5˚C is still possible — physically and economically possible, with technology and resources we now possess.

And it’s true. As the IPCC showed, with sufficient torturing of climate-economic models, it is still possible to construct a pathway whereby emissions decline at the needed rate. Such scenarios generally involve everything going just right: every policy is passed in every sector, every technology pans out, we take no wrong turns and encounter no culs de sac, and climate sensitivity (the amount temperature changes in response to greenhouse gases) turns out to be on the lower end of scientific estimates. If we roll straight sixes for long enough, we can still win this.


The slogan meant to summarize this state of affairs has been around, with variations, for decades: “We have all the tools we need, all we lack is the political will.”

But political will (whatever that is) is not some final item on the grocery list to be checked off once everything else is in the cart. It is everything. None of the rest of it, none of the available policies and technologies, mean anything without it. It can’t be avoided, short-circuited, or wished away.

After all, it is possible to end global poverty in a decade, or even less. We have the technology to do so; it’s called money. The people who have more could give enough to those with less so that everyone had a decent life. Similarly, it’s possible to end global homelessness, habitat destruction, hunger, and war. The resources exist. All we lack is the political will.

But we haven’t ended those things. There are lots and lots of ways to reduce suffering that are possible, and have been possible for a long time, and we still don’t do them. We don’t even do a fraction of what we could to reduce immediate, visible suffering, much less the suffering of future generations and far-off populations. It turns out to be extraordinarily difficult to generate and effectively deploy the political power needed to secure beneficial policies (and hold them in place over time).

It’s not that progress hasn’t been made against a lot of large-scale problems. Global poverty and hunger have been declining. In the US, politics have radically shifted on issues like LGBTQ marriage and drug policy in recent years. Things can change quickly.

But global hunger is starting to edge up again, in no small part thanks to climate change. And climate change is different from those other large scale problems, for two reasons.

The trajectory to 1.5˚C, in red. Oil Change International

First, it’s not that progress is swinging around too slow, it’s that there’s very little progress at all. For all the frenzy around renewable energy in recent years, the best we’ve been able to do is slightly slow the rise in global emissions. We’re still traveling headlong in the wrong direction, with centuries of momentum at our backs.

Secondly and consequently, the level of action and coordination necessary to limit global warming to 1.5˚C utterly dwarfs anything that has ever happened on any other large-scale problem that humanity has ever faced. The only analogy that has ever come close to capturing what’s necessary is “wartime mobilization,” but it requires imagining the kind of mobilization that the US achieved for less than a decade during WWII happening in every large economy at once, and sustaining itself for the remainder of the century.


Emissions have never fallen at 15 percent annually anywhere, much less everywhere. And what earthly reason do we have to believe that emissions will start plunging this year? Look around! The democratic world is in the grips of a populist authoritarian backlash that shows no sign of resolving itself any time soon. Oil and gas infrastructure is being built at a furious pace; hundreds of new coal power plants are in the works. No country has implemented anything close to the policies necessary to establish an emissions trajectory toward 1.5˚C; many, including the US and Brazil, are hurtling in the other direction.

Just focusing on the US, there’s a more than 50/50 chance that President Donald Trump will be reelected in 2020, in which case we are all, and I can’t stress this enough, doomed. Even if Dems take the presidency and both houses of Congress, serious federal action will have to contend with the filibuster, then the midterm backlash, then the next election, and more broadly, the increasingly conservative federal courts and Supreme Court, the electoral college, the flood of money in politics, and the overrepresentation of rural states in the Senate.

The US, like many other countries, is balanced on a knife’s edge of partisanship, its growing demographics frustrated by structural barriers, its direction uncertain, and its policies and institutions increasingly unstable. Does a sudden and thorough about-face in social, economic, and political practice feel like something that’s in the offing this year? It doesn’t feel like that to me.

The difficulty of envisioning such a thing has led climate hawks like Al Gore to place their hopes on unpredictable social “tipping points,” invisible thresholds that, once breached, will allegedly yield radical change. (Back in 2012, Gore told me, “we’re not at the tipping point, but we’re much closer than we have been.”)

For as long as I can remember, people have been pointing out signs that such a tipping point is in the offing — counting the number of street protests, or the number of times TV news anchors saying the word “climate,” or the number of city officials endorsing 2030 goals — but global emissions just continue rising.

As I’ve written before, such tipping points are certainly possible. By their nature, they cannot be ruled out. Insofar as we have any hopes for rapid action, they rest there.

But hoping for a radical, unprecedented break in human history is very different from having a reasonable expectation that such a thing will take place. Lightning striking the same spot 100 times is possible. A roomful of monkeys with typewriters producing a Shakespeare play is possible. Human beings shifting the course of their global civilization on a dime is possible. But it probably won’t happen.

We’ve waited too long. Practically speaking, we are heading past 1.5˚C as we speak and probably past 2˚C as well. This is not a “fact” in the same way climate science deals in facts — collective human behavior is not nearly so easy to predict as biophysical cycles — but nothing we know about human history, sociology, or politics suggests that vast, screeching changes in collective direction are likely.
Coping with the tragic story of climate change

What bothers me about the forced optimism that has become de rigueur in climate circles is that it excludes the tragic dimension of climate change and thus robs it of some of the gravity it deserves.

That’s the thing: The story of climate change is already a tragedy. It’s sad. Really sad. People are suffering, species are dying off, entire ecosystems are being lost, and it’s inevitably going to get worse. We are in the midst of making the earth a simpler, cruder, less hospitable place, not only for ourselves but for all the kaleidoscopic varieties of life that evolved here in a relatively stable climate. The most complex and most idiosyncratic forms of life are most at risk; the mosquitoes and jellyfish will prosper.

That is simply the background condition of our existence as a species now, even if we rally to avoid the worst outcomes.Yeah, it’s a bummer.

Tragedy isn’t the only story, of course, and it’s not necessarily the one that needs to be foregrounded. There’s can-do innovation and technology, there’s equity and green jobs, there’s national security, there’s reduced air and water pollution — there are lots of positive stories to tell about the fight against climate change.

But it would be shallow, and less than fully human, to deny the unfolding tragedy that provides the context for all our decisions now.


I know from conversations over the years that many people see that tragedy, and feel it, but given the perpetually heightened partisan tensions around climate change, they are leery to give it voice. They worry that it will lend fuel to the forces of denial and delay, that they are morally obliged to provide cheer.

I just don’t think that’s healthy. To really grapple with climate change, we have to understand it, and more than that, take it on board emotionally. That can be an uncomfortable, even brutal process, because the truth is that we have screwed around, and are screwing around, and with each passing day we lock in more irreversible changes and more suffering. The consequences are difficult to reckon with and the moral responsibility is terrible to bear, but we will never work through all those emotions and reactions if we can’t talk about it, if we’re only allowed chipper talk about what’s still possible in climate models.
Hope in the face of tragedy

Saying that we are likely to miss the 1.5˚C target is an unpopular move in the climate community. It solicits accusations of “defeatism” and being — a term I have heard too many times to count — “unhelpful.”

Such accusations are premised on the notion that a cold assessment of our chances will destroy motivation, that it will leave audiences overwhelmed, hopeless, and disengaged.

But the idea that hope lives or dies on the chances of hitting 1.5˚C is poisonous in the long-term. Framing the choice as “a miracle or extinction” just sets everyone up for massive disappointment, since neither is likely to unfold any time soon.

As climate scientist Kate Marvel put it, “Climate change isn’t a cliff we fall off, but a slope we slide down.” Every bit makes it worse. No matter how far down the slope we go, there’s never reason to give up fighting. We can always hope to arrest our slide.

Exceeding 1.5˚C, which is likely to happen in our lifetimes, doesn’t mean anyone should feel apathetic or paralyzed. What sense would that make? There’s no magic switch that flips at 1.5˚C, or 1.7, or 2.3, or 2.8, or 3.4. These are all, in the end, arbitrary thresholds. Exceeding one does not in any way reduce the moral and political imperative to stay beneath the next. If anything, the need to mobilize against climate change only becomes greater with every new increment of heat, because the potential stakes grow larger.

Given the scale of the challenge and the compressed time to act, there is effectively no practical danger of anyone, at any level, doing too much or acting too quickly. The moral imperative for the remainder of the lives of everyone now living is to decarbonize as fast as possible; that is true no matter the temperature.

No one ever gets to stop or give up, no matter how bad it gets. (If you need a kick in the pants on this subject, read this essay by Mary Heglar.)



This can no longer be news among other news, an "important topic" among other topics, a "political issue" among other political issues or a crisis among other crises.
This is not party politics or opinions. This is an existential emergency. And we must start treating it as such. https://t.co/beRUwiJM1Y— Greta Thunberg (@GretaThunberg) December 29, 2019
Preparing for the world to come

As a final, practical point, speaking frankly about the extreme unlikelihood of stopping at 1.5˚C (and the increasing unlikelihood of stopping at 2˚C) could affect how we approach climate policy.

To be clear, it shouldn’t have any effect at all on our mitigation policies. In that domain, “as fast as possible” is the only rule that matters.

But it should mean getting serious about adaptation, i.e., preparing communities for, and helping them through, the changes that are now inevitable. As the old cliché in climate policy goes, we should be planning for 4˚C and aiming for 2˚C instead of what we’re doing, which is basically the reverse, drifting toward 4˚C while telling ourselves stories about a 2˚C (and now, 1.5˚C) world.

Here in the US, we need to think about how to help Californians dealing with wildfires, Midwestern farmers dealing with floods, and coastal homeowners dealing with a looming insurance crisis.

All those problems are going to get worse. We need to grapple with that squarely, because the real threat is that these escalating impacts overwhelm our ability, not just to mitigate GHGs, but to even care or react to disasters when they happen elsewhere. Right now, much of Australia is on fire — half a billion animals have likely died since September — and it is barely breaking the news cycle in the US. As author David Wallace-Wells wrote in a recent piece, the world already seems to be heading toward a “system of disinterest defined instead by ever smaller circles of empathy.”

That shrinking of empathy is arguably the greatest danger facing the human species, the biggest barrier to the collective action necessary to save ourselves. I can’t help but think that the first step in defending and expanding that empathy is reckoning squarely with how much damage we’ve already done and are likely to do, working through the guilt and grief, and resolving to minimize the suffering to come.

The neoconservative fantasy at the center of the Soleimani killing

No, Mike Pompeo, killing the military leader won’t give Iranians more freedom.

By Alex Ward@AlexWardVoxalex.ward@vox.com Jan 3, 2020

President Donald Trump speaks as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo 

and National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien listen during a meeting

 in the Oval Office of the White House on December 17, 2019, in 

Washington, DC. Alex Wong/Getty Images


Days before the US invaded Iraq in 2003, then-Vice President Dick Cheney told NBC News why the Bush administration believed the military mission would be successful. “I think things have gotten so bad inside Iraq, from the standpoint of the Iraqi people, my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators,” he said.

That didn’t happen, and the US instead got bogged down in a brutal years-long war, leading to thousands dead and injured and trillions of dollars spent. What’s more, US forces were quickly seen to be little more than imperialist occupiers across the Middle East.

But the ideology that American force can give people of the Middle East space for a democratic uprising persists. That became clear when Secretary of State Mike Pompeo offered an optimistic assessment of how citizens of Iraq and Iran will react to the Thursday night killing of Qassem Soleimani, who led Iranian covert operations and intelligence across the Middle East and was one of Tehran’s most senior military leaders.

“We have every expectation that people not only in Iraq, but in Iran, will view the American action last night as giving them freedom, freedom to have the opportunity for success and prosperity for their nations,” the top US diplomat told CNN on Friday morning. “While the political leadership may not want that, the people in these nations will demand it.”


Like all wishful thinking, Pompeo’s statement has a sprinkling of truth. Videos on Twitter showed Iraqis celebrating Soleimani’s demise. And some Iran experts, like the Council on Foreign Relations’ Ray Takeyh, told me that the repressive regime’s power now is somewhat lessened with Soleimani gone. “In a roundabout way, Pompeo’s statement does seem sound to me,” he said.

But let’s be clear about what Pompeo is really saying. His claim is that dropping bombs on Soleimani and other military leaders will prompt citizens of Iraq and Iran to rebel against their governments, thank the US, and push for something akin to American democracy. That, most experts say, is folly.


“I doubt any significant number of people in Iran and Iraq will see this as a gift of freedom,” says Trita Parsi, an Iran expert at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

Yet the long-held myth of America liberating Iran with military force appears to have taken hold in the Trump administration — and it could potentially cause more problems with Tehran down the line.
Why “neoconservatism” could make Trump’s Iran policy worse

Back in 2016, Max Fisher wrote for Vox about “neoconservatism,” and how that ideology proved the real culprit for why the Bush administration went to war in Iraq.


Neoconservatism, which had been around for decades, mixed humanitarian impulses with an almost messianic faith in the transformati[onal] virtue of American military force, as well as a deep fear of an outside world seen as threatening and morally compromised.

This ideology stated that authoritarian states were inherently destabilizing and dangerous; that it was both a moral good and a strategic necessity for America to replace those dictatorships with democracy — and to dominate the world as the unquestioned moral and military leader.

That same ideology — now focused on Iran — is championed by Pompeo and former National Security Adviser John Bolton. Killing Soleimani, they effectively argue, will help draw a straight line to eventual regime change in Iran.



Congratulations to all involved in eliminating Qassem Soleimani. Long in the making, this was a decisive blow against Iran's malign Quds Force activities worldwide. Hope this is the first step to regime change in Tehran.— John Bolton (@AmbJohnBolton) January 3, 2020

But Eric Brewer, a long-time intelligence official who recently left Trump’s National Security Council after working on Iran, doesn’t find that narrative compelling. “Soleimani’s death is not going to end Iranian influence in Iraq,” he told me, “nor is it likely to lead to some sort of regime change uprising in Iran.”

There are a few reasons for that.

First, Iranian influence is already well entrenched inside Iraq’s military and political structures; removing Soleimani from the equation doesn’t change that. Second, Iraqis and Iranians have shown they are willing to push for better governance without US military intervention spurring them to action. In fact, Iraqi protests recently led some of the leadership there to resign, partly fueled by the perception that Iran was really running Iraqi affairs of state. And today there are already large-scale anti-US demonstrations sweeping Iran after the Soleimani killing.

Third, US-Iran history over the last few decades makes everyday Iranians skeptical of American intentions in the country, especially Washington’s involvement in the 1953 coup of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. (There was an anti-government movement to remove President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from power when Barack Obama was president, and he chose not to get involved so it didn’t seem like the US was meddling.)

Finally, there’s the hypocrisy problem: The US has no qualms about supporting other authoritarian regimes around the world, including Iran’s chief rival Saudi Arabia.

In other words, Iraqis and Iranians wanting a more democratic future don’t necessarily need the US to get it, and may not even trust Washington to begin with. “The idea that there will be a critical mass in Iran believing that the US has Iran’s best interests in mind is nonsensical,” the Quincy Institute’s Parsi told me.

But the belief in this idea is a persistently bad and uniquely American one. It smacks of thinking frozen in the Cold War, that all it will take is the toppling of a dictator to allow democracy to flourish. Yet time after time, from Libya to Egypt to elsewhere, that just hasn’t proven true.

More likely than not, Soleimani’s death will lead to an escalation of violence between the US and Iran. Tehran will retaliate — maybe not immediately, but eventually — putting Americans at risk. That will, in turn, likely lead to an escalation that puts thousands more in danger. Instead of “freedom,” then, everyone gets war.

The question now is if Trump administration leaders will continue to form Iran policy based on the misguided notion that American military might will bring about democracy in Tehran or the region. That hasn’t worked before, and it’s unlikely to now.

The strong economy is an opportunity for progressives

Time to tackle long-simmering problems: child care, poverty, and the environment.

By Matthew Yglesias@mattyglesiasmatt@vox.com Jan 6, 2020

Construction workers build a portion of a high-speed railway

 line in Fresno, California, on May 8, 2019, amid ongoing 

construction of the railway in California’s Central and 

San Joaquin Valleys. Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images


Many on the left hoped that the silver lining of the prolonged slump since the Great Recession of 2008 would be to discredit capitalism and build momentum for drastic change. Only the youngest voters have stayed wedded to this idea, with much of the broader electorate holding a fairly positive view of the status quo: 76 percent of voters rate economic conditions as either “very good” or “somewhat good,” according to a CNN poll in late December.

For liberals, this sets up a worrisome political dynamic ahead of 2020. Typically, positive attitudes about the economy are good news for incumbent presidents.

But one nice thing about a strong labor market is that it creates political space to finally pay attention to the myriad social problems that can’t be solved by a “good economy” alone — things like child care, health care, college costs, and environmental protection — that during, the Obama years, tended to be crowded out by a jobs-first mentality.

Good times, in other words, could be the perfect opportunity to finally tackle the many long-lingering problems for which progressives actually have solutions and about which conservatives would rather not talk.
Voters are happy with the economy

For years, there was a mostly true narrative that despite positive GDP growth, actual good economic news was largely limited to stock prices and corporate profits. More recently, however, the corner has turned.

The Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index shows a high degree of optimism about the future of the economy. A Gallup poll found that 65 percent of adults think it’s a good time to find a quality job, and 55 percent rate economic conditions as either good or excellent. Fifty-six percent of Americans rate their personal financial situation as good or excellent, 66 percent say they have enough wealth and income to live comfortably, and 57 percent say their personal financial situation is improving.

Corporate profits, meanwhile, remain high but have actually been falling as a share of the economy since 2012.

At the same time, a low unemployment rate plus higher minimum wages in many states mean that pay is rising — especially for workers at the bottom end.

At the same time, according to voters, “the economy” no longer rates among the top four problems facing the nation.

That doesn’t change the fact that macroeconomic management remains, substantively speaking, one of the government’s most important tasks. But the mission for the next administration won’t be to heal a broken labor market, but to take advantage of a sound one to create huge benefits.
A strong labor market heals many ills

One nice thing about low unemployment is that it tends to lead to wage increases.


Employers, of course, don’t like to raise wages when they can get away with it. But in the context of a strong labor market, that stinginess brings its own benefits, since the only way to get away with avoiding big wage increases is to take a risk on workers who might otherwise be locked out. Companies have suddenly found themselves more open to hiring ex-convicts, for example, which is not only good for a very vulnerable population but also makes it much less likely that ex-offenders will end up committing new crimes. Similarly, people in recovery from drug and alcohol addiction aren’t normally an employer’s first choice of job applicants. But beggars can’t be choosers, and a strong labor market is a great chance for people who need of a second chance to get one.

A related issue is racial discrimination. For as long as we have records, the black unemployment rate has always been higher than the white unemployment rate. But the racial unemployment gap, which surged during the Great Recession, has been steadily narrowing ever since. Discrimination becomes more costly during periods of full employment, and continued strength in the labor market will continue to whittle away at this and other similar gaps.

Last, but by no means least, a strong labor market is the optimal time for labor militancy.

The threat of a strike is much more potent at a time when customers are plentiful but potential replacement workers are scarce. And periods in which it’s relatively easy for an experienced worker to get a new job with a new company are typically periods in which it’s hard for employers to intimidate workers out of organizing. Indeed, as Polish economist Michael Kalecki predicted way back in 1943, this is one reason why business interests somewhat counterintuitively fail to advocate for robust full employment policies. An actual recession is bad for almost everyone — but a healthy chunk of the population out of work makes for a decent disciplinary tool, and it keeps the political agenda occupied with things like the need to fix the mythical “skills gap” rather than with worker demands for a bigger piece of the pie.

Meanwhile, a reduced public obsession with the need to address short-term economic problems opens up more space to address the many longstanding problems that can’t be cured by a strong economy.
A good labor market doesn’t fix everything

Even as the labor market has gotten steadily healthier in recent years, the American birth rate continues to fall from its recession-era highs.

Women tell pollsters that’s not because the number of kids they’d ideally like to have has fallen. Instead, the No. 1 most-cited reason is the high cost of child care. Child care doesn’t get more affordable just because the unemployment rate is low. If anything, it’s the opposite — child care is extremely labor-intensive, and the prospects for introducing labor-saving technology into the mix look bad. To make child care broadly affordable would require government action; it’s just not going to happen in a free market, which doesn’t magically allocate extra income to people who have young kids.

Six-month-old Zachary Vizcaino plays on a mat while his mother, 

Emily Vizcaino, works nearby at Play, Work or Dash,

 a coworking space that offers child care, on January 29, 2017,

 in Vienna, Virginia. Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post via Getty Images

More broadly, America’s sky-high child poverty rate compared with peer countries is entirely attributable to our failure to enact a child allowance policy. A better labor market helps marginally, but it doesn’t address the fundamental issue that a new baby increases financial needs while also making it harder to work long hours.

By the same token, getting sick is expensive, and simultaneously, often leads to income loss. Absent a strong government role, there’s no way to ensure that care and other needed resources are there for those who need it most.


Last, but by no means least, there’s the environment. An unregulated economy generates a lot of pollution, and nothing about strong economic growth changes that. On the contrary, what happens is the long-term negative impacts of the pollution end up outweighing the short-term benefit of letting businesses operate unimpeded. Moving the ball forward on everything from climate change to lead cleanup to air pollution requires persuading voters to make the opposite calculation: that the economy is doing well enough to prioritize long-term concerns.

These are all policy areas in which progressives want to act regardless of the current state of the economy. But the mass public is more likely to give these ideas a hearing when there’s no real worry of a short-term economic emergency. And conservatives really have nothing to say about any of them.
Trump has no record outside the economy

The administration of President Donald Trump is steadily pursuing a policy agenda aimed at stripping as many people as possible of their health insurance, but the president never talks about it.

By the same token, his reelection campaign claims “we have the cleanest air on record” when, in fact, air quality has been declining under Trump, and his administration is working on a bunch of regulatory rollbacks that will make air pollution even worse. Meanwhile, Trump’s only child care proposal has been the idea of creating a one-off grant program designed to give states extra money if they agreed to lower quality standards for child care settings.

Donald Trump makes a video call to US troops stationed 

worldwide from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, 

Florida, on December 24, 2019. Nicholas Kamm/AFP 

via Getty Images

Progressives have ideas about how to boost economic growth, but conservatives have their own clearly articulated vision, one centered on tax cuts and business-friendly regulation. By contrast, when it comes to other social concerns that transcend the short-term state of the economy, progressives have a set of proposals and, well, conservatives have basically nothing. The strong economy is, itself, an asset for Trump during his reelection bid. But the recovery he’s presiding over plainly began under former President Barack Obama, and all Trump has really done is avoid rocking the boat too much. Meanwhile, growth itself is raising the salience of a whole range of other topics on which conservatives have essentially nothing to say.

Democrats’ best path forward isn’t in denying that economic progress has been made, but in emphasizing the extent to which it’s absurd that a rich and stable country like ours is also home to sky-high child poverty, middle-class families who can’t afford day care for their kids, and worsening air quality. Low unemployment is great, but it should be the start of good social policy — not the end.

CHANGING THINGS UP
Finland’s new prime minister wants her country on a four-day workweek

By Michelle Cheng

January 6, 2020

Finland has been at the forefront of flexible work schedules for years, starting with a 1996 law that gives most employees the right to adjust their hours up to three hours earlier or later than what their employer typically requires.

The country’s newly installed political leader, Sanna Marin, just upped the ante, though, proposing to put the entire country on a four-day workweek consisting of six-hour workdays.

Marin, the world’s youngest sitting prime minister and the leader of a five-party center-left coalition, said the policy would allow people to spend more time with their families and that this could be “the next step” in working life.

Marin is not the first politician to recently float the idea of scaling back work hours. Neighboring Sweden tested out six-hour work days a couple of years ago. And the UK’s Labour Party said in September that if elected, it would bring a 32-hour working week to the UK within 10 years. (It wasn’t elected, however, and details on how the hours would be structured were in any case vague.) In France, the standard work week is 35 hours, reduced from 39 hours in 2000.

A slew of companies around the world have been running their own experiments lately. Perpetual Guardian, a small New Zealand firm that helps clients manage financial estates, trialed a four-day work week before formally adopting the policy in November 2018. Its CEO, Andrew Barnes, is now an evangelist for the idea. In Ireland, a recruiting firm called ICE Group shifted to a four-day workweek and found that people’s habits changed, with staffers taking fewer breaks and checking social media less often.

Both firms are small—Perpetual Guardian trialed the schedule with 240 employees; ICE Group has a staff of about 50 people in Ireland. But larger companies have been experimenting, too. Microsoft Japan, for example, implemented a four-day workweek this past summer. The company said employees reported being 40% more productive, and that the policy was particularly popular among younger workers.

While shorter work weeks can bring clear benefits to employees’ well-being, they also can be difficult to implement. The Wellcome Trust, a science research foundation in London, dropped plans for a four-day workweek last year, saying it would be “too operationally complex to implement” for its staff of 800.

But for those that have latched onto the idea, there is the prospect of baking even more flexibility into the system. At Perpetual Guardian, for example, a four-day workweek isn’t the only model; after measuring the productivity of its staff during a typical, five-day workweek, the firm set a standard benchmark and then allowed its employees to work out how to get there in 80% of the time, which could mean fewer workdays per week, or shortened hours spread across five days.

Finland’s new prime minister backs four-day working week
Jon Stone
The Independent January 6, 2020


Finland's Prime Minister Sanna Marin took office in December at the head of a broad left-of-centre coalition: AFPMore


Finland’s new prime minister is a supporter of cutting the working week to four-day days, and has argued that the change would let people spend more time with their families.

Sanna Marin, a social democrat, who took office in December, leads a broad coalition that also includes greens, leftists and centrists.

“I believe people deserve to spend more time with their families, loved ones, hobbies and other aspects of life, such as culture,” she had previously said at her party's conference in the autumn of 2019.

“This could be the next step for us in working life.”

While the idea is not government policy under her coalition administration, her recent support for the radical move raises the prospect that Finland could eventually become the latest country to experiment with cutting working hours.

Ms Marin, who is the world’s youngest serving national leader, also suggested that as an alternative the standard working day could be reduced to six hours, down from the current eight.

The working week in Europe was progressively shortened around the turn of the 20th century, largely under pressure from the labour movement – with the gradual introduction of the modern two-day weekend and the eight-hour day.

But change has been slower in recent decades, with the five-day week and eight-hour day becoming the standard benchmark across the developed world.

An attempt by former French prime minister Lionel Jospin to bring in a 35-hour workweek at the beginning of the 21st century produced only limited success, with many loopholes and low uptake.

Ahead of last year’s general election, the UK’s Labour Party said it wanted to work towards a four-day week as a long-term aim within a decade, though the party remains in opposition.

Critics say reducing the working week while paying people the same amount would impose a cost on business, but proponents say the difference would be made up because of increased productivity.

Some local councils in Finland’s neighbour Sweden have been experimenting with six-hour days in recent years, with early results suggesting the move increased productivity.

The political backdrop to the Finnish prime minister’s call is months of industrial unrest, which brought down the previous government. The strikes were brought to an end by a pay deal between unions and employers, which saw improvements in pay rises and working conditions.

Finland has one of the highest levels of trade union coverage in Europe, with 91 per cent of employees covered by collective agreements guaranteeing working time, pay and conditions.

This figure compares with an EU average of 60 per cent. The corresponding coverage for the UK is 29 per cent of workers, one of the lowest in the bloc – while the highest are found in France, Belgium and Austria, where collective bargaining coverage is near-universal.

This article has been updated to clarify that Sanna Marin's comments were made in 2019 before she became prime minister.

Finnish prime minister wants 4-day workweek, 6-hour workday

Brittany De Lea
Fox BusinessJanuary 6, 2020

Finland’s new prime minister, Sanna Marin, wants to encourage Finnish workers to have a better work-life balance.

The 34-year old, who has been serving as prime minister since December, has detailed plans to introduce an abridged workweek in the country as a means to allow people to spend more time at home.

Not only is Marin aiming for a four-day workweek, she is also weighing a six-hour working day, according to New Europe.

“I believe people deserve to spend more time with their families, loved ones, hobbies and other aspects of life, such as culture. This could be the next step for us in working life,” Marin said, as reported by multiple news outlets.

NEW ZEALAND FIRM'S 4-DAY WORKWEEK WORKS, OTHERS SHOULD FOLLOW

4-DAY WORKWEEKS ARE BETTER FOR BUSINESS, MICROSOFT FINDS – AND HOW TO MAXIMIZE YOUR TIME AT THE OFFICE

Other countries and businesses have also considered similar ideas.

As previously reported by FOX Business, a New Zealand company tested and later officially implemented a four-day workweek after deeming it was beneficial for business and staff.

Perpetual Guardian – an estate planning business – conducted a study over the course of two months whereby employees were still paid for five days of work. An independent study of the shortened workweek concluded that staff stress levels decreased, engagement increased – as did measures of leadership, commitment, stimulation and empowerment.

The company’s CEO is even encouraging other businesses to take up the model.

Microsoft tested a four-day week in Japan, finding productivity levels increased and business expenses declined.

In Sweden, a 23-month study was conducted among nurses at a care center for seniors, which found that nurses took fewer sick days and absences and had more energy when they left their jobs.

Microsoft Japan’s four-day week is new evidence that working less is good for productivity

By Cassie Werber 

November 4, 2019


The theory behind introducing a four-day work week—without cutting pay—is that employees will be so delighted to have time gifted back to them that they’ll work harder in the hours remaining. The latest trial to emerge, from the large workforce at Microsoft Japan, suggests it might be applicable at scale, and even in one of the world’s most notoriously “workaholic” cultures.

Microsoft Japan ran a trial in August 2019, when every Friday it closed the office and gave roughly 2,300 full-time employees a paid holiday, according to Sora News 24, which first reported the story in English. The result was an enormous jump in productivity. Based on sales per employee, workers were almost 40% more productive in the compressed hours of August 2019 as they were the same month a year earlier.

Other productivity hacks were also encouraged, including limiting meetings to 30 minutes and suggesting that instead of calling meetings at all, employees could more fully utilize software available for online collaboration (in this case, of course, that software was Microsoft Teams, though other systems are available). On their day off, workers were encouraged to make use of the time by volunteering, learning, and taking rest “to further improve productivity and creativity,” according to a company blog (link in Japanese).

In the coming months, another trial will run with slightly different parameters, the blog adds. This trial won’t cut hours in the same way, but rather suggests that employees focus on resting well and coming together to share ideas about how to work, rest, and learn.

Other companies that have trialed and implemented four-day weeks have found, similarly, that their productivity is boosted. Perpetual Guardian, the New Zealand estate management firm that was one of the first to go public with a research-backed assessment of its trial, and then adopted the policy in November 2018, found that productivity was unharmed by the shortened work week, while staff stress levels were dramatically improved. More recently, recruitment firm ICE Group this year became the first company in Ireland to adopt a four-day week for all its staff.

Microsoft Japan’s trial is significant because it’s the biggest yet in terms of both staff numbers and the apparent effect on productivity. It’s caught the global imagination, perhaps, because Japan’s work culture is seen as particularly punishing. If a big Japanese tech company can change its ways and achieve startlingly better results, perhaps there’s hope for combatting other long-hours work cultures, like the US.

With translation assistance from Tatsuya Oiwa.