J Every time you think that the CDU milieu should have slowly used up all policy ideas from the category “We all have to work more,” they come around the corner with the next proposal. Now Parts of the CDU want to abolish “lifestyle part-time”.. Such a wonderful PR term – it should be triggering, and is hate goat-triggered.
Because who doesn’t have that one friend who “just doesn’t feel like working a 40-hour week” and prefers to go bouldering and hang out hedonistically at festivals for half the summer? Conservatives love to distance themselves from this type. And left-wing liberals love to remind conservatives that the vast majority of part-time workers do not fit this type and are forced into part-time work.
“You’re right,” they like to argue, “we need economic growth. But abolishing the right to work part-time doesn’t help. There are much better ways to get more people, especially women, into work.” In the end, everyone from the center left to the far right agrees: We need growth!
Unfortunately, economic growth doesn’t just fall out of the sky, it has to be produced. So what does a country need to do to increase its growth? It must improve its competitiveness against other countries that are also striving for growth – because investors invest in the companies from which they expect the greatest return, and they get the greatest return where there is continuous growth.
In order to continue to grow, companies need investments. And how does a country improve its competitiveness? Less social security contributions, less regulations and bureaucracy, taxes and climate protection requirements for companies – and above all: more work.
We don’t work any less than before, neither does Gen Z. This is a conservative boomer myth. On the contrary, we are working collectively more than ever before. Growth just means that more has to be generated every year than the previous year. So we all have to work more than just more and, ideally, more productively. Well, okay, not all of them. Only those who do wage work.
That’s why the general laziness is now over – with being sick so muchall the holidays, all the vacations and the work-life balance! It’s all time when you could do something for German economic growth instead of getting healthy, resting or – god forbid! – to have fun.
From the perspective of capital and from the perspective of a capitalistically organized state, this makes total sense. But why the hell should we, who are already forced into wage labor in order to exist, give up the last vestiges of a good life for this economic growth?
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The Merzens of this world like to ramble on about “our prosperity” that we have to “work for together”. In reality, however, we are only involved in the work – we only get breadcrumbs, if at all, from the wealth that is generated through extra work. Not to mention that this growth imperative will make the planet we live on uninhabitable for all of us in the long term.
Well, not for everyone. But at least for those who can’t afford a climate disaster-proof fortress or a move to Mars. For everyone else, it might be time to think about how a society could function without capitalism and its inherent need for growth.