this post was submitted on 05 May 2026
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Work Reform
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A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
Our Philosophies:
- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
- Income inequality is the main cause of lower living standards.
- Workers must join together and fight back for what is rightfully theirs.
- We must not be divided and conquered. Workers gain the most when they focus on unifying issues.
Our Goals
- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
- Better worker representation, including but not limited to unions.
- Better and fewer working hours.
- Stimulating a massive wave of worker organizing in the United States and beyond.
- Organizing and supporting political causes and campaigns that put workers first.
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Think about what people who don't have to work now do and apply it, or alternatively think about what people do in their down time.
My partner paints and does various other types of art. They are disabled and we live in Australia so they have a support payment, meaning they don't have to work for money. They have made some awesome art that I really love and they do it because they want to. There is no time pressure, not external motivation, it is purely intrinsic motivation that drives their behaviour.
I on the other hand have done a bunch of different jobs in which I have made things like in IT where I put together servers and replaced aging infrastructure. The stress of the external time pressures and so on took away a good fraction of the joy of it. In my home lab I have some cool things I have played around with and I genuinely enjoy them, but that is my own stuff with my own money and time, so the joy is there in full.
If I were considering how things would happen in a solar punk future it would not be jobs, it would not be something you are incentivised to do, it would be something you do because you want to, so hours would likely be less and you would likely have multiple fairly different things. I personally would probably cook, garden, care for kids and disabled people, do cool stuff with computers, and learn about genetic engineering and associated cool science stuff. None of those would be 40+ hours a week, but I would have periods of getting stuck into a project and spending a lot of time for a couple of weeks on one thing while reducing the time for the rest.
This all rides on automation taking care of most of the labour requiring tasks. I would still cook because I enjoy it, even though a machine could do it just as well with no effort from me. I would learn about things out of interest, not utility.
In some solarpunk shortstories, that I read with a bookclub recently, there are still kinda jobs. Probably there will always be some undesired things to be done by humans (too complicated or too resource intensive to automate). Basically the stories (I think it was in "Halfway to better" by Susan Kaye Quinn) outlined two kinds of jobs:
These stories have a heavy focus on achieving things for the community as a whole. Work both as self expression and service to others. That sounds quite appealing to me. It shows a way for a highly technologised society, without going the monopolised power route of Cyberpunk.
Adjacent to that: In "Always coming home" by Le Guin the outlined society (which is more of the low tech variant of Solarpunk) has a nice quirk. The people choose their profession and the results that you produce are yours. But being rich has a totally different meaning for them. Only the one, who gives much of his or her overproduction to the community (through communal resource fund for example) is considered rich (connotated positively from both the individual and communal side). The one who, who hoards is considered poor. So there are still jobs, and the society absolutely expects you to work. Though because everyone is contributing according to their abilities to communal life and funds, nobody suffers due to inability to work.
The community chores category is really interesting! Do you remember what kinds of work would fall into that? Or have any in mind?
In that story it the shown example was about tending to the communities vegetable and fruit plants on the buildings top. Though I can also see cleaning up or transporting stuff. Maybe even a system, where citizens would be socially required (as part of the notmal upbringing, not enforced with force) to learn basic tasks from each of the most important areas of expertise, to then do these basic tasks as chores, keeping the experts free for more complex work (and simultaneously spreading wide knowledge)