Reclaiming Value Beyond GDP: Labor and Social Sustainability

This paper explores the ambivalent position of labour law in both reinforcing and challenging the productivist paradigm, while emphasizing its potential to facilitate a shift toward more socially sustainable models of work. Historically, labour law has played a pivotal role in entrenching productivism and capitalism, framing labour primarily as a means of producing marketable goods and fuelling GDP growth. However, this reductive conception reveals its shortcomings particularly within mature economies, where the pursuit of unrestrained growth deepens social inequalities and accelerates environmental degradation. Increasingly, efforts are being made to decouple societal progress from resource overexploitation and to assess genuine well-being through emerging, context-sensitive indicators that move beyond GDP. Parallel to this, new initiatives aim to integrate ecological and social objectives, ensuring that the green transition does not unfold at the expense of the most vulnerable groups and workers. Nonetheless, within labour law lie dormant possibilities for a more sustainable orientation. These are found not in its core, but along its peripheries: in rules that acknowledge socially meaningful forms of activity beyond wage labour, in protections of “non-productivist time and spaces,” and in evolving doctrinal and institutional innovations at both EU and local levels that experiment with participatory and cooperative labour models. Together, these developments gesture toward an alternative understanding of labour—one that affirms its intrinsic and collective value, encompassing contributions to social and ecological well-being that transcend the logic of capitalist exchange.