Declaration for the Future of Work

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Every day, we invest our most precious assets in work: our irreplaceable time, energy, and skills. When we show up to work, we're making a strategic investment decision, betting our most valuable assets on an organisation's ability to provide fair returns. Like any investor, we deserve transparency, power, and the ability to withdraw our investment when the deal no longer serves us.

Transparency is the foundation of any trust-based relationship between investor and organisation.

We can no longer accept pay secrecy, mysterious promotion criteria, or "that's confidential" when decisions affecting our lives are made. Information is power. We need transparent pay processes, clear advancement pathways, and access to workplace analytics, strategic planning data, market research, and performance indicators that organisations use to shape our roles, teams, and futures.

This isn't about overwhelming us with spreadsheets. It's about empowering us to make informed decisions about our careers and contribute meaningfully to strategic conversations.

Our investment of time, skills, and emotional labour deserves compensation that honours the true worth of what we contribute to society.

We deserve returns that reflect the true value we create, not just market rates that have historically undervalued essential work. 

We reject the artificial hierarchy that places financial transactions above human care, that values managing money more than managing classrooms, that pays more for optimising profit margins than for keeping cities moving or ensuring people can access basic necessities. 

The platforms and companies that profit from our flexible labour must contribute proportionally to a shared infrastructure that supports our economic security.

The traditional model of tying healthcare, retirement savings, and worker protections to a single employer is fundamentally broken. In an economy where 40% of workers are expected to be freelancers, contractors, or gig workers by 2030, and where layoffs and redundancies leave people without long-term protections, benefits have to be detached from employers.

We need portable benefits that accumulate across all our lives - healthcare coverage, retirement contributions, disability protection, paid care leave to care for young children or elderly family members, and professional development funding that travels with us throughout our careers.

Our well-being isn't just about productivity metrics or workplace perks. Organisations must recognise that we exist in the broader context of our lives. We have families, communities, health needs, personal growth, and responsibilities that extend far beyond the workplace.

We need policies and practices that honour our humanity: flexible arrangements that adapt to life's realities, mental health support that goes beyond surface-level benefits, and respect for boundaries between work and personal time. 

Peak performance comes from sustainable practices, not from treating us as resources to be optimised.

We need meaningful seats at the table when decisions are made about workplace policies, technology implementations that reshape our roles, and strategic directions that determine our career futures.

A power shift requires that we move beyond token representation toward genuine partnership in organisational governance.

The people who do the work have the most valuable insights about how to improve it. For too long, we've been consulted rather than included as decision-makers. We've provided input through surveys and committees, while the actual choices about our work lives are made elsewhere.

We're ready to build collaborative frameworks where influence comes from expertise and contribution, not just hierarchy.

When technology decisions are made, we want assurance that human impact and planetary health are given equal weight to quarterly returns.

Every AI system, every automation platform, and every digital tool introduced to our workplaces carries embedded assumptions about what matters most: efficiency, surveillance, cost-cutting, or human flourishing.

We refuse to accept technology that degrades our work experience or compromises our principles. Our organisations must source technology from providers who demonstrate a genuine commitment to sustainability, ethical data practices, and our well-being. The rush to automate and optimise cannot come at the expense of dignified work, environmental responsibility, or social justice.

The rapid pace of technological change means continuous learning isn't optional, it's essential for economic survival.

It is time to move away from a model where employers decide what we need to learn and when we're allowed to grow.

We need access to education and skill development that serves our interests, our curiosity, and our vision for fulfilling work. This would work best if it were publicly funded, giving us the control, educational sabbaticals as a standard right, and diverse learning pathways that help us explore new fields, deepen existing expertise, or pivot entirely when industries shift.

The future of work is too important to be decided without us. Rather than being passive recipients of change imposed from above, we can be active participants in shaping policies, workplace practices, and economic structures that will define work for generations to come.

Individual voices matter, but they grow exponentially stronger when joined with others in exploring similar challenges and aspirations.

The right to organise, advocate, and support one another collectively remains as vital today as ever. We champion the freedom to form and join communities of mutual support - whether through unions, professional collectives, cooperatives, or entirely new forms of organisation that transcend conventional employment boundaries.

At the heart of this principle lies our call for regular worker assemblies - democratic gatherings that bring together people across all industries, sectors, employment types, and generations to collectively examine emerging challenges, share experiences of displacement and adaptation, and actively participate in designing solutions for our evolving economy.

These assemblies should create space for honest dialogue about job displacement risks, reskilling needs, and the kind of working future we want to build together.

The transition to sustainable work is not just an environmental imperative - it's an opportunity to create more meaningful, purpose-driven careers that align our daily labour with our deepest values.

We can no longer accept that environmental destruction is an inevitable byproduct of economic progress, and we commit to prioritising work that actively contributes to environmental restoration, carbon reduction, and sustainable resource use.

We recognise that a habitable planet is the foundation upon which all future work depends, and we can not compromise our children's future for short-term economic gains. Every job, every industry, every workplace decision has to be evaluated through the lens of planetary sustainability and regenerative impact.