Time to Act

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 BellSouth'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 and principalities. 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. 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 wherever I go. "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." I hear this from low-wage workers holding two jobs to make ends meet, from professionals working late nights and weekends, for students beleaguered by outside jobs and debt. It's true for all of us stretched between escalating workplace demands and a sense that we'll never catch up on everything else we have to do, much less change a culture that keeps us scrambling, like an Alice in Wonderland world, simply to keep from falling further behind.

The pace and length of the working week were once the central issues 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.

As Harvard economist Juliet Schor has examined, 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 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 desperately struggling to survive, or teaching the kids of the poor in an underfunded school. If we're going to have a decent future, and not become "losers" in an increasingly divided economy, we're told that we need to become wheeling and dealing self-promoters constantly selling ourselves to survive. 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 an uncertain journey through treacherous shoals. The US has long been the only advanced industrial nation in the world not to offer universal healthcare, 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. We may have no choice but to negotiate our individual passages through these varied pressures. But as in the past, making any significant dent in them will require common action, to change the rules of the game.