Sen­a­tors who vot­ed against the pipeline in Novem­ber, the union says, threw away a chance to ​“unlock mil­lions of work hours,” and instead ​“killed thou­sands of jobs.”

In the labor move­ment we’re sup­posed to be for any­thing that cre­ates more paid work. But here’s some heresy for you: I think we need less work.

I keep get­ting these emails from the Labor­ers union: ​“The Key­stone XL Pipeline isn’t just a pipeline, but a life­line to good, fam­i­ly-sup­port­ing jobs.”

Is the Sen­ate ​“killing jobs?” Maybe. Mean­while, jobs are killing us.

Jobs: Often Awful

Exhib­it A: the trag­ic death of New Jer­sey fast food work­er Maria Fer­nan­des last August, nap­ping in her car between shifts. She was cob­bling togeth­er at least three Dunkin’ Donuts jobs to make ends meet.

But it’s not just non-union jobs. Exhib­it B: Jen­ny Brown’s sto­ry last month on ​“Fight­ing Fatigue.” Even union­ized pilots, train engi­neers, and bus dri­vers are work­ing extreme hours that endan­ger them­selves and others.

Part of the prob­lem is boss­es impos­ing awful sched­ules. And part of it is we’ll take all the hours we can get, because pay is so low and the cost of liv­ing so high.

That means work isn’t shared among all who want it. There’s one 60-hour job instead of two 30-hour jobs, and unem­ploy­ment stays high.

Then there’s Exhib­it C: the Key­stone XL pipeline itself. As we near a cli­mate-change point of no return, sci­en­tists say we must dras­ti­cal­ly reduce car­bon emis­sions. The pipeline only wors­ens the threat.

These jobs could kill us all. Work­ing less isn’t just a humane goal — it’s a plan­e­tary necessity.

But it’s not hard to under­stand why the Labor­ers are pro-pipeline. Work­ers need to put food on the table today. So unions push for more work, how­ev­er awful it might be.

How could we reduce the pres­sure to work so much, for fast-food work­ers and train engi­neers alike? One side of the coin is rais­ing wages — some­thing labor’s been build­ing good momen­tum for, at least at the bot­tom of the scale.

The oth­er side, the one we don’t talk about as much, is reduc­ing the cost of living.

Labor for Leisure

We wouldn’t need to work so hard if the rent (and mort­gages) weren’t so damn high. If tran­sit were free, and fre­quent enough. If we had free health care and high­er education.

Sound utopi­an? It shouldn’t. Take the fed­er­al mon­ey already going to high­er ed in loans and grants, hand it straight to pub­lic uni­ver­si­ties instead — and you could have free tuition for all, tomor­row. Same with health care: sin­gle-pay­er would cost less than we already spend on our dys­func­tion­al pri­vate system.

In the Nether­lands if you want to reduce your hours to part-time, by law your employ­er has to let you, unless they show it would be a hard­ship. Lots of work­ers have tak­en advan­tage. Of course, uni­ver­sal health care helps make this option viable.

In a recent issue of Jacobin, Daniel Aldana Cohen tells the won­der­ful sto­ry of 1936 France, where work­ers struck for and won two weeks’ vaca­tion for everyone.

That sum­mer, ​“the sub-min­is­ter of leisure and sport man­dat­ed 40 per­cent dis­counts on train fares for once-a-year trips. Hun­dreds of thou­sands took advan­tage right away, near­ly two mil­lion the fol­low­ing year. Many vis­it­ed the beach for the first time, while oth­ers trav­eled to see rel­a­tives or camp in the countryside.”

Imag­ine it! For the plan­et and our health, it’s time to build a labor move­ment that stands for less labor — not more.