The Spanish government, in need of gestures to disguise the growing blurring of social democracy, has opted for a reduction in the working day, rejected by employers and the right, who always see too many concessions to the working classes. Two and a half hours less per week doesn't cause any major scares. In fact, several sectors are already working below the 40-hour mark: education (34.5), public administration (35.9), and finance and insurance (37.2). Why not the others?
Divine punishment, fatalism, exploitation, a path to personal fulfillment, a way of being in the world. The relationship between humans and work can be seen as both a factor of liberation and submission. What is clear right now is that its structural role in society is changing rapidly. This is largely the result of changes in the balance of power within countries and, globally, with the shift from the industrial to the financial and digital economy.
We still live off the memory of industrial capitalism, in which the factory was the great reference point and the working class was spoken of as a social and political subject. Now everything is more dispersed. In fact, only 16.13% of the Catalan working population goes to the factory, compared to 15.2% of the Spanish population. The variables are staggering and the conditions very diverse: starting with the self-employed, who now number 3.3 million in Spain and 568,000 in Catalonia. In the factory, in the store, at school, in the office, in the administration, in services, on the farm, in the countryside... distance has been added, expanding online work, a prelude to structural changes that can significantly alter the status of the company as a shared framework. Without face-to-face contact, nothing is the same: ignorance grows, relationships weaken.
Work is often both a limit and a condition of personal freedom. We must be able to gain autonomy. But exploitation continues to exist, as if we had not yet freed ourselves from fatalism: you will earn your bread by the sweat of your brow. If there were an idea of progress, it would be this: that work should not be a punishment, a burden, but a rewarding experience. But it is a distant illusion, and, based on current inequalities, the gaps are growing, with the risk of fractures that mark new forms of illiteracy; that is, an impossibility of accessing the language of the present. That is why the destruction of the welfare state, which is underway today and which is now manifesting in the United States, is frightening. A warning that cannot be ignored.
