Simon Schaupp

If we want to understand the ecological crisis, we need to understand the world of work. After all, it is through work that society carries out its metabolism with nature. For sociologist Simon Schaupp, labor policy is therefore always also environmental policy – or ‘metabolic policy’. Nature itself plays an active role in this: the more it is exploited, the more drastically it affects the world of work.
Schaupp demonstrates this close connection between work and nature using historical examples: Without mosquitoes, neither the rise nor fall of the plantation economy can be understood. And in early slaughterhouses, striking workers put pressure on employers by bringing the assembly lines that had just been introduced to a standstill.
For our future, this means that if global warming is to be at least slowed down, the world of work must change: We must stop exploiting nature and finally take its autonomy seriously.

Dr. Simon Schaupp, born in 1988, is a senior assistant at the Chair of Social Structure Analysis at the University of Basel. His dissertation Technopolitics from Below, published in 2021, won several awards. His latest book Stoffwechselpolitik (2024) has been nominated as Science Book of the Year 2025.

In the Thinking Futures series