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Original title: “Postface : Reconnaître le travail soutenable”, Revue internationale du Travail 164 (1). Translation by the ILR editorial team. This postscript is also available in Spanish, in Revista Internacional del Trabajo 144 (1).

As I set out to explain in this postscript, the articles in this Special Feature are of great significance: they constitute a remarkable contribution to our knowledge about work and could be instrumental in improving practices.

Over the past few decades, many countries have witnessed a complete dismantling of employment protections (Méda 2019). These have been challenged in theory: memorably, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has repeatedly called “employment protection legislation” into question, criticizing its rigidity (OECD 2004); but also in practice, through the many reforms to make work more flexible. In addition, these reforms, and especially those in Western countries, have often focused on the issue of working time, its relationship with other social time – such as family or leisure time – or its reduction, as in the case of France.

In various countries – Germany in the 1980s and, later, France – the idea took hold that work is permeated and constrained by instrumental rationality, capitalist logic and technical specialization, which can be avoided by reducing the space occupied by work and freeing people from its constraints. Some authors argued that working conditions had not been given enough space or attention in public debates, overshadowed by unemployment and employment – this was a criticism, aimed specifically at the Left, voiced by Bruno Trentin in La città del lavoro (Trentin 1997) – and called for the liberation of work, that is, the improvement of the specific conditions in which work is conducted (Coutrot 2018).

Nevertheless, during this period, studies continued to analyse working conditions, and major surveys – both national surveys and the European Working Conditions Surveys – made it possible to measure their development with some accuracy. In 2019, the ILO was thus able to report on the working conditions of more than a billion people across the world (in Europe, the United States, Turkey, China and Latin America), providing evidence that exposure to physical risk was common (more than half of workers were exposed to repetitive movements), that between a fifth and a third of workers were exposed to high noise levels and that women worked more than men and earned less (ILO and Eurofound 2019). Accordingly, interest in the concept of sustainable work started to grow.

In a note that retraces the genealogy of “sustainable work”, Patricia Vendramin (2016) claims that the concept first appeared in the book Creating Sustainable Work Systems (Docherty, Forslin and Shani 2002) and primarily aimed to address the problem of the intensification of work. As Vendramin (2016, 2) explains, for Docherty and his colleagues, a system of sustainable work was a system that was capable of reproducing and developing all the resources and components that it used. In particular, it had to be capable of regenerating and developing the human and social resources that it mobilized.

According to Vendramin (2016), the concept initially took a socio-technical approach, seeking to associate the human, social and ecological factors in human activities. Following its adoption by French ergonomists specializing in ageing, this socio-technical approach was abandoned and the focus shifted to the quality of work. This marked a move away from a “system of sustainable work” to “sustainable work”. Although the ecological dimension had been fairly weak in the early research, it now disappeared altogether – various chapters of Creating Sustainable Work Systems do consider the ecological aspect but, in their conclusion, the authors recognize that “[a]lthough the notion of sustainable systems here is borrowed from ecology, the caring and efficient use of natural resources in general is not the topic of this book” (Docherty, Forslin and Shani 2002, 214).

As Lisa Herzog and Bénédicte Zimmermann observe in their contribution to this Special Feature (“Sustainable work: A conceptual map for a social-ecological approach”), work and ecology have been classed into different fields and disciplines, with proposals that only link them through truncated notions and slogans that do not view the exhaustion of human and natural resources as one and the same. The articles selected for this Special Feature help build a solid concept of sustainable work, without trying to skirt around the inevitable difficulties that could hinder this endeavour.

In their article, Herzog and Zimmerman propose a conceptual shift: they go beyond the limited objectives of “green jobs” and “decent work” to present a revision of the concept of work that is in line with the new definition adopted by the 19th International Conference of Labour Statisticians:

According to Herzog and Zimmermann, sustainable work must integrate ecological and social sustainability, address work beyond paid work, attend to local and global interdependencies and make its normative foundations explicit. They conceive sustainable work as comprising productive and reproductive activities that promote and prompt capacities that are essential in enabling humans and other living species to thrive, both in the present and in the future. This is a towering ambition. Achieving it, according to the authors, is dependent on the adoption of the capabilities approach and a re-politization of work.

The other articles in the Special Feature offer confirmation of the ways in which this definition of sustainable work can satisfy the expectations that are currently placed on work, as well as specific indications on how to achieve this. They all agree on the following:

The authors are therefore calling for a real revolution, both conceptual and practical. This Special Feature thus opens up a vast undertaking in both academic research and practice.

Considering, first, who would be equal to this undertaking, the Special Feature highlights the responsibility of the ILO (who else could develop such regulation and monitor its enforcement?) and the importance of coordination among relevant international institutions: the ILO, the World Trade Organization (WTO) and perhaps a future international organization on the environment. Research must continue to examine the regulation of value chains and the universal adoption of the European Union’s (EU) Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive, alongside other instruments such as the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive1 and discussions on the new responsibilities attributed to enterprises.

Alongside this vast undertaking, key and specific questions regarding the means of democratizing enterprises need to be explored in greater depth. What is the relationship between trade union representation and direct employee participation? What is the proper forum for the regulation of the right to deliberate on work and what shape should such regulation take? Should the mission of enterprises be reconsidered and to what extent? As many authors have suggested, should enterprises’ accounting systems be revised in order to guide their choices and, if so, what are the most appropriate alternative systems? And beyond that, does the national system of accounting – as an overarching mechanism – need to be revised in order to include unpaid care activities (Folbre 2006; Heggeness 2023), thereby giving due recognition to their essential role?

Lastly, what is the best way of giving paid and unpaid care activities this recognition and renewed visibility? There are various options. One is to adopt a comprehensive definition of work, covering almost all human activities, including domestic and family activities. If this is not done carefully, though, it could lead to confusion and create certain risks. For example, it could create the requirement that such activities be remunerated, thereby reinforcing rather than minimizing the gendered specialization of roles (Jany-Catrice and Méda 2011). Another risk is that all human activities could be considered to qualify as “production”, and non-productive activities subjected to the same rationalization as paid work. Aristotle said that “life is action not production”. Accordingly, my own early research (Méda 1995) distinguished activities by purpose, seeking to guarantee the access of men and women to the whole range of human activities – including productive, family, political and free personal development activities – based on a restricted definition of work, considered by some to be too restrictive. In order to avoid the limitations of both of these approaches, a wider conception of work – as proposed in this Special Feature – can be adopted while guarding against the risks that I have presented above. This is the approach taken, for example, by the ILO report Care Work and Care Jobs for the Future of Decent Work, which argues for the recognition, reduction and redistribution of unpaid care tasks within households and between households and the State (ILO 2018). This proposal gives the notion of care a central role, reassesses the purpose of human action and substitutes a paradigm of exploitation with one of respect, love and care, as advocated by the sociologist Aldo Leopold (1949).