Relations with and against labor are a pre-requisite to a successful degrowth movement.

First, as a critique of capitalist political economy, degrowth cannot but consider waged work as “the standpoint from which capitalism's mysteries can be uncovered and its logics laid bare" (Weeks 2011, 6). In most countries around the world, waged work is the main way for people to get access to food, clothing, and shelter, as well as healthcare and retirement. Neoliberal ideologies of the "end of work" notwithstanding, people cannot but aspire to be included in the work society. This, however, is not the result of individual choices, but a governmental dispositif that is instrumental to capitalist political economy. As Kathi Weeks writes, “Enforcing work, as the other side of defending property rights, is particular preoccupation of the postwelfare, neoliberal state" (ibid., 7). In a more recent assessment of labour politics worldwide, Verity Burgmann has noted how "the trajectory of capitalist development is to draw more and more people into waged work" (Burgmann 2016, 6). Since the 1980s, this long-term trend has been accompanied by a decisive move towards lowering labour's share of income and labour standards, in order to fuel increased global competition—a process known as "race to the bottom" (Newell 2012). Increasing working hours, precariousness, and casualization of jobs; decreasing wages and occupational safety; recurrence of old and new forms of unpaid and slave labour; and the deregulation of labour markets and the legitimation of anti-union politics as necessary to global competitiveness are all ways in which globalized capitalism is intensifying the exploitation of labour on the world scale. It is worth noting that, at the same time, the global rate of waged work has been increasing-not diminishing—as more and more people have been deprived of access to a means of subsistence via both dispossession and the degradation of natural resources (Federici 2012) and have become proletarians.

In short, the growth society is the same as the work society. A political economy of degrowth thus needs, primarily, to expose, denaturalize, and politicize the social organization of work as a key mechanism of capitalist political economy (see also Koch, this volume).

Second, as a political ecology concept, degrowth signifies sustainable forms of social metabolism that make the enhancement of human potential compatible with, or even dependent upon, the health of the biophysical environment. Such an ambitious aim cannot but involve waged work as a core agency in social metabolism. In its essence, the key problem with the relationship between labour and degrowth resides in the fact that the growth society has developed in the opposite direction: it has made human development and social welfare dependent upon the degradation of the biophysical environment, thus turning wage labour more and more into an agent of "metabolic rift" (Foster 1999). This process has ended up locking labour in the "treadmill of production" first described by Allan Schnaiberg for the US society of the 1970s, in which an unprecedented expansion of social welfare was strictly dependent on ever- increasing levels of production and consequent material throughput: the secret of the treadmill's functioning was its resting upon a social pact among capital, labour, and the state (Islam and Hossain 2015), thus creating a powerful mechanism for dividing labour from environmental poli- tics (Russell 2017). The paradox of the treadmill is that, while technology has seemingly reached levels of productivity capable of liberating humanity from scarcity, freeing more and more natural resources and time from socially necessary work, the exploitation of both labour and nonhuman nature has intensified, and new extractive and commodity frontiers have been opened for exploitation. At the same time, the progressive reduction of public expense in social welfare has determined an exponential increase in the pace of the treadmill, as people need to work more and in more unsustainable ways in order to get the same wages and social benefits as before.

In short, since wage labour is, in all societies and politico-economic contexts, a key mediator of social metabolism, a political economy of degrowth needs to elaborate the policy instruments that are needed to disentangle wage labour and social welfare from treadmill metabolism.

Third, as a call for the liberation of society from the constraints of growth-mania, the degrowth movement needs to find ways of appealing to organized labour, intended here as not only the confederate trade unions but also various kinds of workers' organizations (social/community and rank-and-file unions, digital labour platforms, international labour movements, etc.). Even though, globally speaking, the contractual power and representativeness of organized labour has declined, this by no means implies that labour has become irrelevant as a politico-economic force. In the past four decades, trade unions have been the main target of neoliberal globalization and are undergoing a painful transformation of social organization and political strategy (Burgmann 2016). This transition phase opens up spaces for redefining labour's environmental politics as well, as the emerging field of environmental labour studies has been showing (Stevis, Uzzell, and Räthzel 2018). It is in this historical process that a convergence of labour with degrowth and other alter-globalization, counter-hegemonic movements (e.g., ecofeminist, decolonial, environ- mental/climate justice, peasant, commoning) can be envisioned. To this aim, the degrowth movement must take seriously workers' conditions and needs, as well as labour movements' concerns and dilemmas vis-à- vis ecology and the climate, so that new ideas might be formulated for a political economy of degrowth that firmly include labour's perspectives and subjectivities.

In short, the degrowth movement must see itself as a potential ally of labour movements in a common path towards environmental and cli- mate justice.

A vision for the liberation of waged work (from treadmill metabolism) is still to be elaborated within the degrowth perspective. Three paths can be foreseen here: first is the struggle against job blackmail, that is, the trade-off between employment and environmental/public health (working-class environmentalism); second is the struggle against "green" capitalism and to reclaim Just Transition as a strategy for a truly equitable green economy (eco-socialist transition); third is the struggle against alienation and for workers' control at the point of production (occupy production).