Much of the debate on sustainability and environmental crises has focused on consumption, especially individual consumption. Many citizens in Europe do have the ability and agency (and thus the responsibility) to make sustainable choices in their lives. Avoiding flying or reducing our intake of meat are activities over which adults do (mostly) have agency over, which can play an important role in reducing our emissions. However, focusing too much or solely on consumer choices alone can distract us from the bigger picture: consumption typically follows production, and thus sustainable consumption also requires sustainable production and sustainable work.
(This is a shortened, edited and translated version of an article previously published on Feministeerium in Estonian.)
Walking around any city today, we are increasingly bombarded by greenwashing advertisements telling us that consumers have the power to make the world sustainable through their consumption choices. "Buy a more expensive T-shirt made from recycled materials" - the choice is yours. Soft drink bottles now say "PLEASE RECYCLE ME" as if we, the consumers, had the power to solve plastic waste. The adverts are designed to make us feel as if we had a real choice, that by choosing the 'right' and 'green' product, we could change the production process itself. We are made to feel that manufacturers really do care about us and the world: "If only these selfish consumers would demand the right products, environmental problems would be solved!"
But plastic recycling has largely been a scam to normalise the continued use of cheap plastic, and even whether bottles are recycled or not is only very indirectly a consumer choice. The decision to put soft drinks in plastic bottles or not, or to sell environmentally destructive and slave-produced fast-fashion clothing is not a consumption decision by an individual, but a production decision made by corporations. While companies shift responsibility to the individual, the reality is that consumer sovereignty is a myth that leaves those who are responsible and with the power to enact change, free to continue benefiting from an economic system that puts our future in danger. The idea that we can consume our way out of the problem of over-consumption by making the right or green choices ignores the fundamental problem - we are stuck in the treadmill of over-consumption precisely because of over-production and over-working.
The illusion of consumer sovereignty
Already in the 1960s the economist Ken Galbraith explained that household decisions about what goods and services to buy in the free market were not based on people's own internal preferences and budget constraints, but mainly on what is available and, above all, on manufacturers' marketing strategies or advertising. The consumer's choice between a hundred different shampoos in a shop does not signal consumer freedom, because the buyer cannot decide how, from what (or by whom, under what conditions) the shampoo is made, or the packaging it is in. It is the companies and manufacturers who make choices about what services to offer, what goods to produce, how, how much, by whom, under which conditions. This is why regulation is important for setting the environmental and social perimeters and limits within which businesses must operate.
The influence of large corporations and advertising on consumer behaviour is very strong, and people's choices are influenced more by production decisions and marketing strategies than by their own personal preferences. Individual desire is a concept created by companies to psychologically influence consumers. For example, manufacturers deliberately design items with a limited life span (known as 'planned obsolescence') so that people will replace an outdated or broken item with a new one, or make shampoo bottles that release too much detergent at once so that consumers will buy a new bottle more quickly. All of these production choices shape our behaviour as consumers.
Global overproduction leads to global overconsumption.
Corporations not only have unequal information about the products themselves compared to consumers, but also enormous economic power, which gives them the ability to shape markets or flood them with their own products, thereby shaping consumption policies to suit their own needs. While each individual bears some responsibility for his or her own actions, consumption choices and their harmful effects on the environment and other societies, the sharp end of the equation is not in the hands of the individual. We live in a world where the balance of power between consumers and producers is skewed, and it is precisely this grossly unfair relationship that renders any slogans about sustainable consumption empty rhetoric.
The wider problem is that our current economic system is based on economic growth and increasing production to keep employment levels high. If we want to reduce aggregate demand and overconsumption, we need to focus on reducing aggregate production, because consumption always follows production. It is not possible to reduce consumption without reducing production, because once goods are produced, companies will find a way to bring them to market and sell them. Global overproduction leads to global overconsumption. Therefore, to avoid the collapse of the natural environment, production must be limited, which means limiting employment.
(Over)production, (over)employment, (over)consumption.
As early as 1930, the economist John Meynard Keynes foresaw that it would be the power of fossil fuels that would lead to a significant increase in productivity in the 20th century. Keynes predicted a future in which people would work just 15 hours a week and enjoy a rewarding, free life. But he did not foresee the huge impact of the media industry and marketing today. Instead of using productivity gains to improve people's quality of life, meet their needs, reduce production and shorten working hours - giving us real freedom over our lives - the media and advertising industry has helped channel productivity gains directly into increased consumption, with enormous environmental impacts.
In 2024, Europe has built up extreme material wealth. It is no longer the 1970s. What causes material poverty now is not the lack of production but high levels of inequality, with both extreme material wealth and extreme poverty coexisting. The average European lives in material wealth unimaginable even a century ago, yet we still think and behave as if we were living in the 1970s, as if there was a certain level of consumption we needed to urgently catch up with. Today it seems that we are bequeathing to future generations a planet whose mineral resources have been nigh exhausted by our consumption craze, a hungover rubbish dump of a planet full of plastic and waste. All this will already stay here for hundreds of years. How much bigger must our landfills become? How much faster do we need to buy new clothes and throw them away again? How much bigger do the cars we drive need to get to keep the car industry going? How many times a year do we have to replace our furniture to keep the furniture industry profitable? And when are we going to wake up and realise that this is not 'freedom'?
Far from basic needs
If we compare life in 2024 with for example 1974, the main difference is that less and less of our material resources are used to meet our basic needs (physical safety and well-being) and more and more of our (over)consumption is based on intangible human desires, our need to mark our importance and position in the social hierarchy. However, the desire to demonstrate our worth via new kitchen cabinets does not come from the depths of our hearts, it is not an innate human urge: it is created by corporations who need to create a market for their products and maintain an ever-accelerating production cycle to drive their business forward. Unlike in 1974 and 1994, today's material consumption is often one that replaces what we already have in our lives with something newer, more modern or bigger - newer furniture, more modern clothes and phones, bigger cars and houses.
Globally, we have become hyper-productive in the last 50 years: man-made materials such as plastic, asphalt and concrete weigh more than all the biomass on Earth. For our part, we have produced so much material that it exceeds the weight of all the living things on our planet. But all this man-made mass will be there for future generations to enjoy - all the plastic bottles and road surfacing, all the concrete and rubbish we have produced, including, for example, the 1.6 million square kilometres of the 'Great Pacific Garbage Patch' that is floating in the ocean and growing. But we cannot convert the ever-increasing amount of waste and rubbish back into new materials. We cannot go back in time.
Are all jobs good and necessary in themselves?
In her work, Kathi Weeks brilliantly critically assesses the role of work in our societies by challenging the dominant ideology that glorifies work as a moral and social imperative. She argues that work has been overvalued, not only as an economic necessity, but also as a defining feature of individual identity and social worth.
In the Middle Ages, feudal landlords used physical coercion as well as Christian teachings to coerce labour: the Church taught that "work is close to God", and the belief in a better life after earthly torment and hard work normalised serfdom.
While physical coercion of the extreme kind is much rarer, work ideology continues to shape our lives as well as the direction of the environmental crisis. The focus of work propaganda has changed. Instead of God, the ideals of Communism, or ‘the Fatherland’, today the basis for upholding work ideology is the goal of self-fulfilment through consumption. The masters of the current system may seem distant and opaque to us, but the nature of their exploitation remains the same. We justify overwork by overconsuming because we have created the idea of consumption as freedom: the more work I do, the more money I earn and the more freedom I have to buy things. At the same time, this justification works the other way round: I deserve a new car, new clothes and a holiday because I have worked so hard.
Off the treadmill of work
As human beings, we all have similar basic physical, material and emotional needs: food, shelter, creativity, self-fulfilment through useful and creative tasks, love, community, the need to be with loved ones and the need to be alone. In today's world, however, it is paid work that is emphasised as a way of meeting all these needs. Paid work is supposed to help meet our material needs: we are paid for our work, which we use to pay for our housing, food, clothing, entertainment, transport and so on.
We are told that work is also a socially useful activity that should give us a sense of identity and belonging, and satisfy our creative, emotional and love needs. All of this, then, either through paid work or through the consumption that paid work enables us to do. However, these promises often fail us. Working hard does not always enable us to live well or to get by: even full-time paid work may not provide for basic needs. Despite sacrificing their time and vitality to create wealth for others, many people struggle to make ends meet. Nor can work, and the overconsumption we can afford to pay for it, largely meet our emotional, psychological and social needs. Thus, work is not a socially beneficial activity in itself, but often harms society.
For Weeks, questioning the normalisation of the 40-hour work week and full-time employment was an important starting point for change, since the societal structure of the 40-hour week limits personal freedom and reinforces norms that prioritise productivity over human well-being. The concepts of postwork and sustainable work have emerged as challenges to work ideology, aiming to broaden our understanding of work. Work includes not only paid tasks, but also care work, volunteering and community service.
Sustainable work is about finding ways of working that benefit people, society and the natural environment. It is freedom from the ideology of work and the opportunity to live a more human life, where we have time for the things that matter, where we can do creative and rewarding work and fulfil our potential as human beings. It also aims to strike a balance between how we work and how our work affects society and the environment. It means not only committing to work, but also ensuring that existing jobs are beneficial to people, society and nature. The idea of sustainable work allows us to rethink what tasks and jobs society really needs.
In this rethinking, we look not only at the jobs that people do, but also at how these jobs affect health, different communities and the environment as a whole. What are the jobs that need doing that provide the basic needs for society (nutrition, mobility, housing, etc) in increasingly insecure times? Such a rethink of work will also help to better recognise the value of tasks that are really important for the functioning of society, such as bringing up children and caring for the elderly (the often invisible labour of women). Rather than focusing solely on creating new jobs as a goal for society, we should be thinking about how to reduce the overall volume of work. We need to find ways of sharing work more equally between people and perhaps even doing away with certain types of work altogether. Sustainable work also means thinking about how we can ensure that people's well-being and needs are met outside of paid work.
Halliki Kreinin - RIFS