“Ecology and work come hand in hand,” he says in his study for the Manu Robles-Arangiz Institute. What do you mean by that?

Politicians and institutions often say that ecology is against employment, which is for the rich. But it's the other way around, because ecology does more work. If this crisis has emerged from an economy that harms nature, it has to look for jobs related to ecology and use more hands than before. For example, with organic farming you need 30% more labor than with “conventional” agriculture. Ecology is a work of the future, more ecology, less energy and more work.

Unemployment is becoming more and more serious and there is increasing talk of the possibility of distributing work. At the Ecopolitics Centre you have claimed a working week of 21 hours, why?

The New Economic Foundation conducted a study in England and is the model we have taken as a reference. We have calculated the paid working time and the number of salaries without pay, the average between the two is 21 hours. But it's a symbolic number, we're in the 21st century, and people have to start thinking that maybe we have to work less to live better. We want to provoke him.

A friend told me when I talked to him about the distribution of work. “If you cut my electricity and gas bill in half…”.

If you propose a 21-hour working week without changing anything else between people, that is called minijob. All you're going to do is make poor workers, like in Germany. But this is one more measure among many others. You have to redistribute wealth, consume less and have a different lifestyle. Without that you will not be able to reduce the working week.

Serge Latouche: “You have to work less to earn more. More and more work is being done, less is being done. It is the law of the market.”

In France, at 35 hours, it was claimed that less work was needed to live better. Then Sarkozy said we had to work harder to win more; that can still have some logic. What are we hearing in Spain with the People’s Party? Recently, Rajoy said we had to work harder, but winning less to get out of the crisis.

Faced with the crisis, many people think that wages should be lowered and more work should be done to produce more. That classic thinking can lead to competition with the Chinese, but it will only make society even more impoverished.

He says that with a day of 21 hours you also have to change your life. You talked about leisure, but it also affects other areas, such as equality between women and men.

Distributing the work serves to protect the planet, that is very important and we cannot forget it. If you work less on pay, you will have more time for a greener life: Instead of going to Rome in a single day by plane, you’ll do it in more days; instead of buying prepared dishes in Carrefour, you’ll spend more time cooking…

But it also serves to deepen social justice. Nowadays, unpaid work is performed by women, who is in charge of domestic tasks or care? Men have to go home, work on a day-to-day basis, educate children… It’s a way to rebalance jobs.

The concept of work has been changing according to the time.

The Greeks believed that work was for slaves, while in the Middle Ages work was linked to the sun and religion. When the industrial revolution came, we radically changed our minds and started to work looking at the clock. In the 19th century, people’s rights suffered a great setback; in the Middle Ages some 1,500 hours were worked per person a year, that is, awkwardly, and at the time of industrialization some 3,000 hours came to work. The working-class struggle of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries meant, to a large extent, a return to the medieval situation.

The myth that industrialization was a breakthrough must therefore be called into question. We have inherited the industrialization model. But what does all this teach us? That you can change the concept that we have of work, it's actually already changing, and that's where the journey that feminists have made goes. In twenty years' time, our idea of work is going to be very different.

Even when entrepreneurs talk about privilege or flexicurity, are they changing the perspective of work?

Yes, of course. Flexibility is a new factor to take into account. We didn't imagine working all our lives in the same place, but our parents already had that idea, that they would keep working in the factory where they started working until their retirement. Some of us accept flexibility in a positive way, because we “liberate” from paid work, but others use it to exploit it: the burden of keeping the worker and hiring him when they want, without having to pay social security, can be removed from the burden.

The Danish model says: I will give you more flexibility, but you will give me more security. What do we do here? The worker provides flexibility, but receives less social protection in return. The distribution of work has to do with solidarity, with the maintenance of close links to protect the most vulnerable.

The study reveals that with the subsidies for the implementation of the 35-hour working day at the CAPV, 15,000 jobs can be created. LAB in Navarre expects 28,000 jobs with different measures. This type of project requires the involvement of many actors, how can we achieve it?

We have given the idea, but we have to think about how to convince the institutions, the employers and also the workers. The worker can say that, like his partner, he cannot pay the mortgage or gas by reducing his working hours. First of all, we have to do a job of raising awareness and remind the trade unions that the division of labour and the reduction of working time is one of their historic demands. That is why we celebrated 1 May.

The institutions, on the other hand, do well, because it makes it possible to reduce unemployment. And among some aspects, the idea of distributing the work has also been welcomed. If I am not mistaken, Bildu, Equo and Ezker Batua picked it up in their election show.

What about the entrepreneur?

I would say that there are entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs. We have a tough fight with multinationals, but small businesses are closer, and innovative ideas, such as the Economy of the Common Good, are emerging there. We don't have a social majority yet, but it's slowly building up.

There are citizens who, out of solidarity, have reduced their working hours, and in some companies there has also been a proposal to reduce employment.

If you want to be consistent with yourself and believe in it, what less than practicing. In addition, it will help us improve our daily lives. But that does have its limits, in many places it is impossible to reduce working hours. We must make a qualitative leap towards collective bargaining, so that the reduction in working time is regulated for all workers.

There the unions have an important role to play, and I think they have started to take it up again. If until recently that idea has been among us! Popular legislative initiatives around basic income in the 1990s also raised the division of labor.

You have made a classification of employment by ethics and ecology, because not everything is worth having “full employment”…

We have to see what kind of employment we can accept in society. There are jobs that destroy value, like the arms industry. How many companies do we have in Euskal Herria in this area? A hundred? They only lead to death, poverty and hunger. There are jobs that are not worth it and others that are worth it.

Are you talking about green employment?

Green and decent jobs. Green employment is not valid if the worker is exploited. The green jobs are the ones that restore nature, the ones that cause the least damage to the environment, the ones that allow the development of the South… We have made a list according to that.

The number of jobs that can be created in Euskal Herria has also been analyzed.

The European Union and the International Labour Organisation have carried out numerous studies to promote the ecological transition of the economy, but in the Basque Country we have found hardly any of them. What we have done is extrapolate the hypotheses of these organizations to Euskal Herria and contrast the results. For example, a building rehabilitation plan can generate up to 18,000 jobs here.

How many jobs are we talking about in total?

In Hego Euskal Herria they could be close to 100,000.

What is “New Deal Berdea”?

It is a way of naming everything we are talking about. The New Deal Berdea calls for a major ecological transition, proposes a major public investment to get out of a brown and unsustainable economy, with the support of private capital, to carry out sustainable activities. It's a political project to change what we have.

Job creation and investment in the millions, how are they reconciled with the decline?

Investing does not mean creating wealth, but acquiring what you have already created, has nothing to do with growth.

For many of us, we are already in starvation, but what we need is “organised disgrowth”.

I agree. We now have a growth rate, the wealth of the poorest has been transferred to the richest. The word “organized” is very important, as the transition has to be democratic. If we are to set limits on ourselves, we need rules decided collectively and democratically.

The year 1968 was a stimulus to the environmental struggle. Is political ecology today at a turning point like that?

The 1968 one is easy to say, because we have 40 years of view. It was a turning point for the good and the bad. We lack that vision to explain the current, but I think yes, we have indications to think that important things are happening. It is now impossible for a politician to go through all this, the ecological transition is no longer a political option, but a political necessity. In addition, there is no other solution, as growth is not going to return, it is over.

In Euskal Herria, the vanguard of environmentalism has been citizen initiatives and platforms. Is a strong political movement necessary for the “ecological transition”?

Both are necessary. We have to change things from the bottom, and a lot of experiences are emerging, like ethical cooperatives, that are going to shape the world of tomorrow. But if you want that to extend to the whole of society and be systemic, you need a political project behind it. We can't forget that, because only small experiences don't work. That is why I am in a political party, because I have made that commitment. In any case, I am not referring to usual political parties, but to parties that are very close to social movements.