Barcelona Metropolis

Denial of the obvious

In particular, profound transformations are taking place in the world of work, where we must name what is happening and offer an outlook at this fragile time. Work is not just what the rules say it is. It includes a whole world that is beyond the bounds of what the labour law heralds; it is a series of different realities that are not recognised on many occasions as work experiences, and that generate an all-too-common phenomenon of escape from labour law (which is sustained precisely by denying the employment nature of the act of working). Times of denial of the obvious, using poor legal engineering that, banally, but with the strength of economic power, out-and-out denies the basic and undisputed labour institutions to escape the guarantees of the so-called work in the strict sense. Years ago, the Uruguayan Óscar Ermida described it as labour transvestism, referring to the costumes they wish to dress the work relationship up with to disguise it. A phenomenon that “dresses workers up in the clothes of independent, sole proprietorship, service leasing companies and even limited liability companies and cooperatives.”

We live with the false clothing of freelancers at the service of digital platforms, where employers also want to pass for people in disguise. If there is no company, there is no work. The height of nonsense. It is true that, in recent months, the Spanish Supreme Court ruled that food-delivery riders are employees. The same has happened in Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom. The UK’s Supreme Court ruled that Uber drivers are salaried. In this regard, it seems that labour inspectorates and courts in our neighbouring countries and in parts of Latin America are leading a movement of compensation regarding labour policies as a “privilege” of recent decades, which have wreaked so much damage, exacerbating job insecurity and excluding many workers from labour law protection. This compensatory movement would have to be integrated into a new 21^st-century Work Statute, where there is power to legislate accordingly.

Labour policies and their laws should offer greater consistency to a more complete concept of work that is more attuned to reality. Work as human or artificial creation, operated by humans, is at the centre of life. Not only since modernity, which placed it at the core of social order as a sort of charter of rights and obligations, and from the family point of view as a key to the invisible recreation of existence, but always, since work, in an original sense, is one’s basic power to satisfy one’s needs. If, as physics suggests, work is a transfer of energy, a human science like labour law would ask, where is that energy directed? A transfer to anywhere? No, towards a meaningful place, in other words, a job oriented towards the production of wealth that supports human needs and desires.

And in that search for meaning, which pushes to put limits on exploitation, to the idea that work is a commodity that moves away from the human to be simply sold, there is a steel connecting thread between work and ecology, the science that deals with the relationship of living beings – and their creations – with each other and with nature, in the search for a balance that sustains life. An ecology that, as it has learned from feminism, is aware and acknowledges that, throughout history, women have been the great ecologists (the guardians ensuring human life is reproduced), those who have taken responsibility at home and outside it to understand words such as wealth, production, economy, profit, need and work in a humane, sustainable way and truly focused on the development of peoples; words on behalf of life.

Paradigm shift

The present is in dire need of change, suffering from so much injustice and looting of what it does not have to spare and what perhaps can be fixed, only if the tide of mass destruction in which the dominant capitalist patriarchal disorder occurs is turned. A shift in the production paradigm is necessary in a broad sense, around the creation of wealth, what is at the service of living, in peace and harmony, among everything that populates the planet.

The ecology of work is then a limit inextricable from alienation of labour, not only of those who work but also of the workplaces themselves and of the markets where the material or immaterial wealth created is made available to other human beings, also susceptible to being exploited together with the raw materials and fossil fuels necessary to this effect, because it reminds us that there is an original balance to protect and restore so that life can continue. Undoubtedly, this basic human activity that is work has to be rethought, and rooted in a new model that has the support of life as a keystone.

Actually, the ecology of work as a new paradigm is not a choice, although it has to be assumed politically in every action or omission. Nor is it an invention or a play on words. It is the political instrument whereby work is situated as the focal point of coexistence in a healthy and sustainable ecosystem. At this end of an era, jeopardised by disease, we can only work to change the meaning of work, so that its understanding and our outlook are broadened, so that the right to work and labour rights are extended, so that the wealth that it generates is distributed, so that its time is pared down, relieved and the burden is distributed when its effort is difficult to bear, so that the value of work in feminine and masculine terms is acknowledged, and so that the work that is destroying wealth instead of creating it is brought back. That is what the ecology of work is about, as an unavoidable starting point and a strand of urgent meaning that unites the present, the ravages of two centuries, the brutality of the last fifty years and the possibility of a good standard of living while working.

For this reason, many women and men know that it is a turning point, that we are risking harmony in this and we are fighting to transform the world of work recognised as such from the inside and the outside, expanding its boundaries and its guarantees. And we envision a labour law that does not work only on the defensive, but that also goes beyond the crisis, that protects more and more people. A labour law and social security systems that facilitate and embrace the new paths of politics and an economy that give precedence to looking after life.