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Brother, Can You Spare the Time?
During his first re-election campaign, FDR came to Bedford, Massachusetts in 1936, stumping for four more years of New Deal.
In the crowd was a young girl with an envelope. She tried to make her way to the President to give him the enveloped note but was turned away by a policeman. Roosevelt told one of his aides: "Get the note from the girl."
The young girl's note read: "I wish you could do something to help us girls....We have been working in a sewing factory,...and up to a few months ago we were getting our minimum pay of $11 a week...Today the 200 of us girls have been cut down to $4 and $5 and $6 a week."
A reporter asked President Franklin about the note. "Something has to be done about the elimination of child labor and long hours and starvation wages," was his reply.
Two years later, Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), establishing the minimum wage and 40-hour work week.
A few years ago, I was invited to the cozy confines of the Fetzer Institute in Kalamazoo, Michigan to participate in a weeklong retreat with other writers, activists and thinkers. For hours on end, we talked about the sorry state of the world and what we thought could be done to make it better. Like most of these kind of gatherings, we broke into small discussion groups to probe particular social problems more deeply.
John de Graaf, a longtime television producer and creator of the award-winning documentary "Affluenza," was in my discussion group. He noted the irony of how we live in the most affluent society in the history of the world, yet are increasingly time-poor. John had put his finger on the number one reason why people often can't do anything other than try and make their own lives better -- there's no time for anything else.
Then someone brought up FLSA and said, since FDR signed the bill into law, the time most people spent laboring had only increased -- to the point where, for millions of gainfully employed Americans, working 40 hours a week doesn't pay the bills. An increased workload also diminished most people's ability to even spend quality time with their families, to say nothing about getting involved in social activism.
What we needed, John said, was to "take back our time." And at that moment, Take Back Your Time Day was born; meant to symbolize a "challenge (to) the epidemic of overwork, over-scheduling and time famine that now threatens our health, our families and relationships, our communities and our environment."
Today, John's vision has grown into a 7,400-member citizens organization, pushing for labor-friendly policies and more free time. This year, Take Back Your Time Day (Oct. 24th) is celebrating the 70th anniversary of FSLA while calling for a new labor law that would make paid vacation a guaranteed right and not just a voluntary benefit employers "offer" workers.
A recent poll conducted by the Opinion Research Corporation found 69 percent of Americans support guarantee paid vacation law, with the largest percentage of respondents favoring a law guaranteeing three weeks vacation or more. Every demographic showed majority support for a vacation law. Only 27 percent said they opposed the idea.
Respondents were also asked how many weeks of vacation were needed to prevent "burnout." 52 percent said they need three weeks or more and 82 percent said they needed at least two weeks.
The survey also uncovered a sad feature of working life in America. Almost a third of working Americans (28 percent) took no vacation time at all; half took a week or less; and two-thirds got less than two weeks off. The median vacation time: 8.2 days, far below the three weeks most cited as the needed amount of time-off to prevent burnout.
The eighth annual Expedia.com vacation survey backs that up, reporting for "the eighth consecutive year, Americans received and used the smallest amount of vacation time among their (European) counterparts abroad."
Even worse, despite reporting an average of 14 paid vacation days again this year, about a third of employed U.S. adults will not even use all the vacation days they do get.
"Again this year, employed U.S. adults will leave an average of three vacation days on the table, in essence giving back more than 460 million vacation days in 2008. Despite these statistics, Americans do see the value in vacation, with more than one-third (39 percent) reporting they feel more productive and better about their job upon returning from vacation and 52 percent claiming to feel rested, rejuvenated and reconnected to their personal life."
"Work responsibilities" was cited as the biggest deterrent to taking vacation. And even when Americans do take vacation, 24 percent "report that they check work e-mail or voicemail while vacationing." That's up from 16 percent in 2005.
All of this has significant economic implications, de Graaf points out. "Time off is essential to health. Men who don't take regular vacations are 32 percent more likely to suffer from heart disease than those who do, and women are 50 percent more likely. If we want to cover everyone and reduce the cost of health care, one way to do it is to improve our health, and every study shows that more time off can help do that."
Seeing as how both Obama and McCain like to talk about health care and "creating more jobs," I've been meaning to pass a note to their respective campaigns: "I wish you could do something to help us take back our time. Let me tell you about Take Back Your Time Day."
I just haven't had the time.
- Posted in
24 Comments so far
Show AllRemember when most stores were closed on Sundays?
It was hard, back then, to work a 7 day week even if you wanted to.
Now we do business around the clock with copy shops & grocery stores open 24/7.
I do long for the good old days.
An excellent thought. I wish he had noted the "comp" time many government workers do and never get to take. And the way employers can manage "time" to avoid providing benefits.
The Kellogg Company used to have a 30 hour work week up until the 80's, now there is something I could push for. I think the three week vacation doesn't set the goal high enough. The 30 hour week allows for more people to be employed.
But the American system is keyed to work in the favor of business when wages are suppressed and the labor pool is large and the job pool small, so there's a fat chance that will ever happen.
Anyway, check out this article its a good read.
Is It Time to Dump the Forty-Hour Week?
by Dennis Kaplan and Sharon Chelton
http://www.consciouschoice.com/1995-98/cc095/dump40hourweek.html
Good article, thanks.
The US is alone in it's odd culture work "ethic" of humans serving the economy instead of the economy serving humans. I earn about 4 weeks of vacation time on my job, but don't try to use more than two weeks at once or your performance rating might suffer.
even poor Europeans consider 4 weeks the minimum vacation.
I would also love to see Sunday closures of most retail businesses, It is strange that "blue-laws" were abolished because of their religious implications, while in highly secular Europe, most stores remain closed on Sunday.
USAn
This is off topic and I apologize, but you made a statement the other day that facinated me.
You said "disarmement was mainstream" and I aimply couldn't figure that out. Mainstream would be most are disarming, yes? If you don't remember it, ignore this, I was just intrigued by the statement and what you were seeing.
Thanks and my apologies to the rest of you too.
The entire thousands-year history of Europe up to just 60 years ago was one of one sordid war after another. Yet now, war between European nations is almost inconcievable, and european nations spend, proportionally only a tiny, decreasing fraction on war that the US does - the US military budget being about equal to the entire rest of the world.
European courts have aquitted people involved in ploughshares actions against military facilities and equipment (invariably US-oowned like that facility in Sweden the other day) on the argument that though they did indeed commit costly trespassing and vandalism, it was in the pursuit of promoting peace, so the jury aquits them. Something like this would be impossible in a US court.
In fact, aside from the US, what other major industrial state has pursued war against another state in the past 50 years? The only nations that are continuing to accumulate arms and continue to use military action in pursuit of it's economic interests are the USA. The few other nations that continue to accumulate arms or take military postures are those nations that are legitimately afraid of US aggression or armed blackmail against their sovereignty.
I am convinced that if the US apologized for it's past actions and announced it full committment to dismantling it's huge war machine, the rest of the world, much of which is already moving in this direction, would enthusiastically join in. The only exceptions would be some isolated tribal area like Afghanistan - and even there the war would be forced to end as the world supply of arms dried up.
Interesting, thanks.
I would point out that Russia and China have both invaded other states to name a few.
China is busily building her military, etc.
I hope to get the chance to exchange some more thoughts on this later on. Thanks very much for taking the time.
The biggest delusion is that the Yankees won the Civil War.
Nearly 150 years after Lee's surrender, a candidate cannot win the presidency without carrying the South (prove me wrong Obama), and US workplace culture remains a slave culture.
Sioux Rose
A lot of Americans are conformists and have bought the marketplace lies surrounding "must have" products. Many play the "keep up with the Joneses" game, and have reached beyond their fiscal comfort zone to own what they can't afford. That was true prior to the gaming of the great game that has led to the statistics so indicative of wealth rapidly (as well as rabidly) aggregating upwards to the delight of the elites who control the wages, trade policies with other nations, and politicians who sell these programs.
Many Americans have bought incredibly large homes, ridiculously large vehicles, and with these things there is a related need to get more stuff to fill both. Maybe it was my former hippie days, but I have always opted for simplicity and always had a lot of time. When I lived in Puerto Rico I make an industrialist who lamented about the lack of work ethic in many Latin people, and the whole "manana" phenomenon. But an enlightened Latin man had quite the answer to this guy when the guy tried to convince him to turn his land into some entrepreneurial operation. The guy already had the life he wanted which included plenty of leisure time, as the capitalist tried to tell him how utilizing his plan, the guy could retire in his 50's. The key is to have the kind of lifestyle where one produces all along and thus there's no need for retirement. This is most true if one does what they love and the work becomes a seamless aspect of their lifestyle. That makes more sense of course for a writer or teacher than an athlete, however the idea about using less and enjoying more is wisdom for any age and era.
This article underscores one of the essential fallacies of our industrial system -the requirement of work.
Everybody has to work -and work a lot- to get by, even after machines have been employed to do much of the actual work.
The whole thing is unatural and insane. Machines or foriegners (or increasingly, the Machines OF foreigners) do the work of making stuff, then we make-up a bunch of work for ourselves to get the money to buy the stuff.
The Machines of a couple of million people produce food for hundreds of millions, yet it all has to be "processed-up" and made into TV dinners and breakfast cereal. Even though that means that some little kid will miss a meal because his Mom couldn't keep up with the pointless idiocy of her "service economy" job -or it was outsourced onto some even poorer sclub somewhere else.
The closer one looks at our society and culture -and the political and economic systems we employ- things just get weirder and weirder.
Surely such an unnatural and unfair structure will one day collapse?
Don't Panic,
-matti.
So perhaps we need to modify the way things are being done and bring our manufacturing back home. Let that Mom start on the factory floor and move up like so many others did before her. Before her government was taken over by anti-American internationalists and she was betrayed.
And the only service jobs we have are done here because you can't make a bed with a computer in India.
And what about Dad? They didn't call them Mom and Pop stores for nothing.
I guess we should hasve equal opportunity for the sex's. Dad has been on the bottom rung long enough!
This is why I refuse to use the self checkout at the store. That used to be someone's mortgage payment. Remember when you used to be able to walk into a store and get service? Now you go in grab what you want, scan yourself and pay a box and leave. Hell what do we need people for anymore?
Yes - little resistances are good. Like I won't buy my transit pass from a machine. I want a human presence in the subway and I do not want to help create statistics showing that token booth clerks can be safely eliminated.
Joe
Have you seen this? Watch, if you have the time for a laugh.
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/obama_promises_to_stop_americas
Joe
Excellent article but there is yet another aspect of this that should be mentioned: Creating jobs is very destructive.
If Bill Clinton hadn't felt obligated to create (or preserve) jobs in the weapons industry (In the 1996 presidential campaign, Bob Dole accused him of declaring war on California because of the minor spending reductions he did make), NATO would not exist. Eastern Europe would be a much more peaceful place. Militarists in Russia would have been much less successful in their pursuit of political power.
Similarly, the most persuasive argument for the continued existence of the automobile industry is the disruption that would result from lost jobs if it was replaced by mass transit. If we worked 20 or 30 hours per week there would be much less pressure to create jobs doing things that would be better undone.
Job creation has some very toxic byproducts, such as cars, cluster bombs and cruise missiles. In addition, the time and talents - the lives! - of the people who are forced to do this unnecessary and destructive work in order to survive are shamefully and tragically wasted.
What about light rail, planting trees, installing solar panels, planting wind farms, teachers, mentors, helpmates for the elderly and disabled, cleaners, bridge repairers etc. etc.? I am for using our national wealth to create such beneficial jobs - jobs with reasonable hours and pay and good benefits.
Joe
great article, mr. gonsalves. yeah, right. very relevant to today's newsworthy items. once again, it's amazing that you get space on the internet.
Lord knows I'm time-famished, and I only have one job. People wonder why its hard to get workers and the poor to organize. They're too busy trying to survive.
Work, eat, sleep, procreate. That's all they want us to do. I work, eat, sleep, write, read, wash dishes, do my laundry, try to get a workout in, check my mail, pay my bills, etc. Before I know it, it's 1am, and I have to get to bed.
The article by Kaplan and Chelton is worth reading.
"Over 70 percent of U.S. workers earning over $30,000 annually said they would trade a day’s pay for a day off work each week."
"In 1956 even conservative Vice President Richard Nixon predicted that all Americans would be working a four-day week in the “not too distant future.”'
"In France, Germany and Great Britain, workers have four to six weeks’ annual leave."
Jacob Freeze
My comment was supposed to be a reply to metanoia's comment below, and the link to Kaplan and Chelton's article.
http://www.consciouschoice.com/1995-98/cc095/dump40hourweek.html
Jacob Freeze
Great article, the scaring thing is it was written over 10 years agao and now we just work more than ever.