Time To Act

Overworked Americans

by Paul Rogat Loeb

The ad in the airline magazine shows a young boy on a swing, the backdrop for an interactive pager being held by a man's hands. "Maybe you don't have to send an e-mail right now," says Bell South's ad for their interactive paging service, "But isn't it cool that you can?" The ad, with its headline of work@lifespeed, celebrates a world where our jobs engulf our every waking moment. It's not just our workplaces. Our lives in general seem faster, more complicated, more at the mercy of distant powers. We have less time for our families, and less room to ask where we want to go as a society and as a planet. The very pace of environmental crises, global economic shifts and the threats of war and terrorism make it harder to address them. As Milan Kundera writes, "there is a secret bond between slowness and memory, between speed and forgetting."

If we're to act effectively as engaged citizens, we're going to have to slow down our lives, our culture, and a world that seems to be careening out of control. People talk of these pressures everywhere. "I'd like to be more involved in my community," they say, "to take a stand on important issues. But I just don't have the time."

The pace and length of the work week was once the central issue in the labor movement. In 1791, carpenters struck for the ten-hour day, challenging employers who paid flat daily wages during the long summer shifts and then switched to piecework during the shorter winter days. A movement to make this a universal standard grew throughout the nineteenth century, in response to the 70-hour weeks of America's new industrial enterprises. By the 1860s, the labor movement made the eight-hour day its central focus, with marches, rallies, and related political campaigns. A hundred thousand New York City workers, mostly in the building trades, struck and won this right in 1872, followed by other workers, industry by industry, like the printers in 1906 and the steelworkers in 1923. Finally, in 1940, Roosevelt instituted the universal 40-hour week, with mandatory overtime when employers exceeded it.

The workers who won these changes fought for time with their families, but also for time to educate themselves and act as citizens. And then the debate over the pace and speed of life quietly stopped. Harvard economist Juliet Schor has concluded that Americans' working hours have been steadily increasing for the past 30 years. Between 1969 and 1987 alone, paid employment by the average American worker jumped by over 160 hours per year, or the equivalent of an entire extra month on the job. We now work the equivalent of nearly nine weeks more a year than our European counterparts. This burden threatens to expand even more so as Congressional Republicans push to end the deterrent of overtime pay in sector after sector of the workforce. That doesn't count employers simply breaking the law--like the Wal-Mart managers now being sued in 28 states for allegedly forcing employees to punch out after an eight-hour day, and then continue working for no pay at all. The increase of work hours complements a more general politics of the whip. Whatever our jobs, most of us now work harder than we used to, do more in less time, and worry more about being downsized. This is true whether we're on a factory assembly line, writing code for a software company, or teaching the kids of the poor in an under funded school.

Meanwhile, we spend more hours driving to and from our jobs, as urban sprawl, escalating housing prices, and lack of decent public transit options raise the stress of our commutes. Once we could rely on employer-funded pensions and Social Security, confident that if we worked long enough, our old age would be provided for. Now, for most of us, saving for retirement has become problematic.

The US has long been the only advanced industrial nation in the world not to offer universal health care, but most of us used to be covered through our jobs. Now we pay more and more to get less and less, and spend hours choosing between equally bad options, trying to cover our families as best we can.

As in the past, making any significant dent in the rules of the game will require common action. This is beginning to happen as union-backed Living Wage laws, like those passed in Los Angeles, Detroit, Baltimore, New Orleans, and over 60 other municipalities, help assure that city workers and contractors earn enough in a 40-hour week so they don't have to work extra jobs. Recently, 87,000 Communications Workers of America members who worked for the telecommunications giant Verizon successfully struck against mandatory overtime and workplace speedups. They told of having to choose between keeping their jobs and picking up young children from day care, being disciplined for breaking to drink water or go to the bathroom, and being stressed to the point of physical illness. They stayed out until they won a slower pace and limits on work hours. In Michigan, United Auto Workers members wrote it into their contract to get Election Day off--and volunteered by the thousands in the narrow November 2,000 victory of Senator Debbie Stabinow. A new coalition promoting Take Back Your Time Day ( www.timeday.org) highlights the theft of our lives by our workplaces. It will build toward major October 24th events, marking the point at which, comparing the annual hours worked by the Europeans to ours, they would have the entire rest of the year to spend at their leisure.

We'll also need common action to reverse the way that immensely consequential national and global decisions are increasingly being made at a pace that leaves no time for public input, no time for democracy. No company controls our hyper-paced world more than Enron. With the help of George Bush, they successfully stripped barrier after barrier to energy trading--first in Texas, and then nationally. When Bush became president, they got to pick the head of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, who accelerated the process still further. Together with conservative think tanks, Enron successfully pushed the idea that energy would be delivered most efficiently and quickly without regulatory checks. Those who argued otherwise, they claimed, were obsolete dinosaurs.

My own local utility, the publicly owned Seattle City Light, made the mistake of buying the propaganda. Though they own dams sufficient to generate most of Seattle's needs, they switched from stable long-term contracts to buying energy on the spot market. Then came a drought year, which dropped the water level behind the dams and left less available for generating electricity, so they needed to buy more outside electricity than expected. When Enron manipulated energy availability to drive the prices from $24 per kilowatt hour to $450-500 they left the utility in a $600 million hole. City Light managers trusted that the market would be reasonable. They got outmaneuvered by a company built on speed, speculation, and working every possible angle to squeeze out the maximum possible dollars. They weren't used to energy politics being run like a Blitzkreig.

Working behind the scenes, the Bush administration has killed ergonomics rules, a decade in the making, that sought to slow the pace of work and help prevent workplace accidents that take the lives of six thousand workers each year and injure six million. It has attacked Environmental Impact Statements that delay the process of development long enough for us to glimpse the larger consequences of ecologically damaging projects. From the USA Patriot Act to hugely regressive tax cuts, it has also rammed through immensely consequential legislation with minimal time for citizens or elected representatives to respond.

But we're seeing the beginnings of a citizen activism that combines new approaches, like online organizing, with traditional grassroots outreach. The strength of the new worldwide peace movement or the movements against corporate globalization would be inconceivable without electronic networks to pass on information. While electronic discussions can foster surprisingly productive dialogue, they work best as an adjunct to face-to-face conversation and community. We need the visible human presence of public vigils and protests, and the step-by-step outreach that happens when we discuss major public issues in our communities.

Challenging the increased pace of work and of change may require slowing down the rest of our lives, including our activism. "You can't solve all the world's problems," longtime labor and environmental activist Hazel Wolf reminded me on the eve of her 100th birthday. "You have to guard against taking on more than you can do and burning out with frustration."

For most of us, community activism will inevitably be sacrificed to meet workplace requirements. If we can begin to reverse this, we'll have more time to heal the real wounds of our communities, of our nation, and of the world. We could try to raise enough root questions so we do more than just challenge particular abuses of power; we could offer a broader alternative.

We fight for bread and roses, in the words of an old union song--not only for survival, but for the beauty and richness that make life worth while. We fight as well for the right to be citizens, for the chance to create a democracy where all can participate.

Paul Loeb is the author of Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time (www.soulofacitizen.org. A different version of this article appears in Experience Life magazine and in the book Take Back Your Time (Berrett-Koehler publishers www.timeday.org ) To receive Loeb's articles directly, send a blank message to paulloeb-articles-subscribe@onenw.org.

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