by John de Graaf
11.05.04

hen thousands of weary women walked off their jobs in the textile mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts, during the great strike of 1912, their demands were simple: “We want bread and roses too!” Bread and roses: unforgettable metaphors for the two great goals of the original labor movement—higher wages and shorter hours, or money and time (to smell the roses!).

For more than a century, working people around the world understood that leisure time was as important to life as material goods. Karl Marx wrote that true wealth was “liberty to seek recreation, liberty to enjoy life, liberty to improve the mind. It is disposable time and nothing more!” The first great martyrs of the American labor movement, unjustly hanged for their roles in Chicago’s infamous Haymarket “massacre” of 1886, were champions of the eight-hour day.

In 1926, American Federation of Labor President William Green claimed that shorter work hours were necessary “for the higher development of spiritual and intellectual powers.” His vice-president, Matthew Woll, charged that modern production “ignored the finer qualities of life.” “Unfortunately,” wrote Woll, “our industrial life is dominated by the materialistic spirit of production, giving little attention to the development of the human body, the human mind, or the spirit of life.”

Juliet Stuart Poyntz, education director of the Ladies International Garment Workers Union, declared that what employees wanted most of all was “time to be human.” “Workers,” she observed, “have declared that their lives are not to be bartered at any price.” “No wage, no matter how high,” she continued, was more important than the time that workers needed to be full human beings. But what would not be bartered, could, unfortunately, be stolen, as we shall see.

During the depression, labor activists called for work-sharing to increase employment. Heeding Samuel Gompers’ charge that as long as anyone was unemployed, the hours of labor were too long, the AFL actively championed a 30-hour work week. Its dreams were nearly realized when the U.S. Senate passed the Black-Connery Bill on April 6, 1933. The bill set the official U.S. work week at 30 hours—anything more would have to be paid for as overtime. But under pressure from the National Association of Manufacturers, the Roosevelt Administration got cold feet and refused to support the bill in the House, where it died.

Nevertheless, after a rise during World War II, American working hours continued a gradual decline throughout the 1950s and ‘-60s. Social scientists frequently predicted that new technologies would bring even shorter hours. In a sociology class I took in 1968, we were told that the U.S. would face the major social problem of too much leisure time by the year 2000.

The Senate was predicting a 14-hour work week by then, with seven to ten weeks of vacation a year. We got the technology— and a near doubling of hourly worker productivity. But employers, not workers, have gotten the benefits. All the leisure we might have has been pick-pocketed by the “invisible hand” of the free market and the sleight-of-hand of “trickle-down” (or more aptly, “gush up”) economics. Today, most studies and observers agree, Americans are actually working longer hours than they were in 1970.

In fact, Americans, whose work hours were roughly equal with those of European workers in 1970, are now working an average of 350 hours—nine weeks—more than western Europeans do. We work more than the citizens of any other wealthy industrial nation, including the famously workaholic Japanese.

The result is a multi-faceted disaster. Overwork and time-stress have left the U.S. with the poorest health of all industrial countries, despite spending far more per capita on health care than any other country does. Overworked Americans find little time for good nutrition or exercise, putting us at risk for diabetes, heart disease, and other ailments. Millions suffer from sleep deprivation. Overall, stress and burnout cost the U.S. economy more than $300 billion a year—mostly in so-called “externalities” that corporate work-time policies create, but which the public pays for.

Lack of time for social bonding also weakens our mental, civic, and political health. American politicians make constant appeals to “family values,” but ignore the fact that time is most important family value of all, without which families, and friendships crumble. Since 1970, the percentage of American families who regularly eat dinner together or take vacations together has declined by one-third.

Robert Putnam (“Bowling Alone”) and others have documented the loss of American “social capital” as volunteerism, membership in various social organizations, voting and political participation have steadily declined. All of these require time. Putnam largely blames TV for the time loss, but forgets that TV viewing is highest in countries with the longest work hours—the U.S. and Japan—and lowest in countries such as the Netherlands, which has much shorter work hours. TV is the perfect passive “activity” for weary workers. Political participation requires, above all, time—and the mental energy—to understand the issues; one cannot take informed action without time to study the issues.

New Studies in the U.S. and Europe by psychologist Tim Kasser provide important preliminary evidence of time’s importance to happiness. He and his colleagues have found that once individuals have risen above poverty levels, continued increases in wealth add little or nothing to perceived levels of happiness. By contrast, evidence is piling up that long working hours do reduce happiness levels, while increasing “time affluence” tends to make people happier.

So, what accounts for America’s epidemic of time poverty? If our time has been stolen from us, then the thieves are unbridled consumerism and the “conservative” slash and burn economic policies that came with the so-called Reagan revolution. Using the label ‘conservative’ to describe policies that undermine families, equity, health, social stability, economic security and our natural heritage is incorrect, as they are, in fact, radically disruptive.

Since World War II, the mass marketing of products—and an even more ubiquitous, consumer-driven media sphere—has convinced Americans that the good life is the goods life. As a society, we have been persuaded to trade all of our gains in productivity for money and stuff, and none for more time. A growing number of us have been convinced that the health of our economy and society is measured by the Gross Domestic Product, and the grosser the better. Both major political parties have urged us to sacrifice everything on the altar of the GDP, even though it is a terribly flawed instrument for determining how well we’re really doing. As a result, American consumer spending in real dollar terms has doubled since 1970.

But not everyone’s material living standards have improved. While European working hours fell and American hours rose, the U.S. also became more stratified, as taxes fell for the rich and social programs were cut. As recently as 1980, the U.S. stood in the middle of the pack among industrial nations in relative income equality and also in working hours. We now have the widest gap between rich and poor and the longest working hours. Greater inequality, as Ichiro Kawachi and Bruce Kennedy point out in their important book, The Health of Nations, leads to longer work hours for all income groups. Taxed less, the rich work more because they keep a higher share of their earnings, expecting to invest it (to make even greater earnings), and use it to retire early or spend it for luxury items. Middle-class Americans, whose numbers are shrinking, find the cost of necessities like housing and health care rising rapidly, and the consumer bar—set by the rich—tough to keep up with. To avoid being left behind, they work harder, and take on more debt, which leads many to seek overtime work. For the poor, real incomes and the purchasing power of the minimum wage have declined—and they must often work two or more jobs just to meet their most basic needs.

Without the protection offered by Social Democratic parties like those in Europe or strong labor unions, Americans are held hostage by the lack of a safety net. With sudden layoffs becoming a staple in the “new” economy, they give back earned vacation time so as not to be viewed as slackers. They work longer to gather savings in case they are suddenly laid off. They continue in jobs they hate, and in jobs whose long hours ruin their health, in order to keep health care benefits, largely because the U.S. is the only industrial nation without a national health care system.

Laws in Europe and other industrial nations guarantee paid vacations of four weeks or more, paid family, childbirth and sick leave, limits on working hours and mandatory overtime, and in some cases, shortened work weeks and equal hourly pay and promotion opportunities for part-timers. Such laws are not limited to rich countries. An important recent study by the Harvard School of Public Health finds that 163 of the world’s 168 countries guarantee paid childbirth leave; the U.S. does not. More than half of all nations guarantee paid sick leave, paid annual leave (vacations) and limits on work-time; the U.S. does not.

In the U.S., freedom has increasingly come to mean the choice between products in the marketplace. But in a real way, this vaunted freedom is a major thief of our time. Time spent shopping increases as consumers must choose between 40,000 items on supermarket shelves. We now spend time trying to choose between dozens of phone plans (do I want 200 free minutes for $29.95 or 400 for $39.95?), health insurance plans, pension plans, stock options. What about the time we spend sorting through junk mail? All of it is unpaid, unnecessary overtime work.

The issue of time was once the great issue for labor and progressives, who challenged the theft of their time and won the eight-hour day, the weekend and the forty-hour workweek. It’s time for a re-crafting and resurgence of that struggle. Lack of time makes every other progressive goal harder to achieve; Americans don’t even have time to think.

Reproduction of material from any LiP pages without written permission is strictly prohibited | Copyright 2002 LiPmagazine.org | info@lipmagazine.org