A society based on mass unemployment is coming into being before our eyes. It consists of a growing mass of the permanently unemployed on one hand, an aristocracy of tenured workers on the other, and, between them, a proletariat of temporary workers carrying out the least skilled and most unpleasant types of work…. In the context of the current crisis and technological revolution it is absolutely impossible to restore full employment by quantitative economic growth. The alternative rather lies in a different way of managing the abolition of work: instead of a society based on mass unemployment, a society can be built in which time has been freed.
The social theorist André Gorz wrote these lines in 1980, toward the beginning of what we now think of as the neoliberal era. And yet, in 2026, at what we might think of as the end of that era, the same situation presents itself, unresolved.
That situation is a crisis of work. Economists call it the polarization of the labor market—the hollowing out of the “middle-class” manufacturing sector, and the proliferation of low-wage and high-wage services. Urban sociologists call it the disappearance of work—the process in which, as the twentieth century came to a close, urban (and often Black) Americans lost the manufacturing jobs that had once led them to the city, resulting in widespread poverty and, eventually, mass incarceration. Value-form Marxists call it the anachronism of value—the process by which, as capital continuously revolutionizes production, it undermines the very core of its profit-making power: human labor. We have many names for the problem, but few solutions. This is where Gorz comes in to help.
What has attracted legal academics to Gorz is his combination of radical social theory—which draws largely (though often silently) on Marx’s Grundrisse—and a commitment to real, forthcoming change. This is why Gorz’s concept of “non-reformist reform,” popularized in the legal academy by Amna Akbar, is so appealing: it tells us that the radical is in fact possible, if we pursue it on the correct terms.
In this post, I will put forward a contemporary version of the argument that Gorz makes in the opening quote—a non-reformist response to the crisis of work. Instead of pursuing a policy of infinite work, as the United States has largely done in the last century, we must pursue a policy of freed time. The concrete version of that policy can be described as “work-spreading”: the even distribution of working hours across the population. The law must address today’s bifurcated labor market not through expensive industrial policy or growth-oriented tax and transfer policies, but through the regulation of hours.
The Dual Crises of the Labor Market
Gorz helpfully lays out the two parts of the problem: the decline of work and the uneven distribution of remaining work across the population. The decline is the result of straightforward capitalist processes: as capital revolutionizes production, it replaces human labor with machinery, driving down the number of working hours that are both necessary and available. With less work available, a distributional problem emerges—not merely of income, but of work itself. As Gorz writes, “an increasingly large section of the population will continue to be expelled, or else marginalized, from the sphere of economic activities, whilst another section will continue to work as much as, or even more than, it does at present, commanding, as a result of its performances or aptitudes, ever-increasing incomes and economic powers.”
As I alluded to above, this is a trend that is well documented by the social science literature, though in slightly different terms—terms like “polarization,” “fissuring,” “the hourglass economy.” In the last several decades, it is high-wage workers who have seen their number of working hours grow the most. Low-wage workers, on the other hand, have seen a decline in their working hours. This is important: high-wage workers—lawyers among them—might not perceive a growing absence of work because those workers have plenty of working hours.
Reformist Reforms
So what do we do about the shortage of work and its maldistribution? The typical solution—on both the right and the left—is to create more work. There are many ways to create work: through lowering interest rates to spur investment (Keynesians), through the creation of jobs through industrial policy or jobs programs (New Dealers), through tax breaks or deregulation (neoliberals). LPE sympathizers might prefer some of these solutions to others—they might prefer the creation of more nursing or conservation jobs instead of more factory jobs, more state expenditure and fewer tax cuts. But even these more LPE solutions fight very hard to preserve “work” and to increase the amount of work available. To use Gorz’s terminology, these are reformist reforms. They perpetuate the work-based society rather than moving us beyond it.
The Non-Reformist Reform: Work-Spreading
Gorz, meanwhile, suggests abandoning this attachment to “work” as a social form. Waged work, after all, has only become the dominant form of human activity over the last two hundred years. We might imagine other forms of human activity, free of the wage. As Gorz says, “freeing time—so that individuals can exercise control over their bodies, their use of themselves, their choice of activity, their goals and productions.” But this freeing of time can only be achieved by suppressing “the need to purchase the right to live by alienating our time and our lives”—that is, by reducing the role of wage work in our lives.
The legal version of this vision might begin with a policy of “work-spreading.” In a recent post on this Blog, Eamon Coburn discussed the overtime provision of the Fair Labor Standards Act, the legal home of work-spreading in the American context. The Fair Labor Standards Act was intended to disincentivize employers from working their employees over 40 hours a week by making such hours 50% more expensive. The overtime provision was passed toward the end of the Great Depression as a response to the bifurcated labor market of the 1930s: mass unemployment side-by-side with sweatshop overwork. The intention of overtime was to spread work from those who had too much to those who had too little.
Today, when we once again have a bifurcated labor market and a looming unemployment crisis, we must reclaim overtime’s original purpose. To achieve work-spreading, we need a stronger policy of hours regulation—more expansive overtime protection, more expensive overtime penalties, and a shorter workweek.
The Ideology of Work
It is unlikely, however, that work-spreading policies will be immediately accepted. This is not only because neoliberals and fascists are opposed to them. Such policies are also likely to face opposition from many actors within our own coalition. This is because, as Gorz points out, the social form of work is self-perpetuating. Capitalism is more than an “economic system”—it is our primary form of socialization.
Hours-rich workers are, Gorz warns, “unwilling to give up part of their work and the prerogatives and powers that go with their jobs.” Highly paid white-collar workers—lawyers and professors among them—will have trouble giving up work because it is such an important part of their lives, both materially and ideologically. Labor unionists, too, will have trouble giving up the work-based society, because so much of their worldview is based on the preservation and exaltation of work, on the need for quantitative rewards for work rather than its dissolution.
This is again where the historical precedent of the Fair Labor Standards Act might help us. In the 1930s, the American labor movement—at a high point of fracture—came together to support the implementation of work-spreading. Craft workers and industrial workers both recognized the need to reduce the amount of work done across the economy, to solve the crisis of unemployment and to increase free time. This legal history shows us that a different worker subjectivity is possible. But to grasp it, we will have to vigorously challenge the wage-based society and our own attachment to our working hours.
Can we, the long-houred professionals, shorten our workweeks so that all might work? Furthermore, can we accept that our work, so important to us, might, in an ideal world, not exist at all? It is worth considering Gorz’s words, written in 1999: “Let us make no mistake about this: wage-labor has to disappear, and with it, capitalism.”
