by David Wann
A full third of U.S. adult employees don’t use all of their vacation days—574 million vacation days were left on the table in 2006! Why? Because overwork has become “normal” in America. We can’t afford to lose our jobs because house payments are huge, the standard of living is inflated, and health-care benefits are linked with work. Although employers are convinced that longer hours mean more productivity, countless studies link longer work hours with carelessness and injuries. “Job stress and burnout costs the U.S. economy more than $300 billion a year,” estimates de Graaf. 12
John de Graaf has become politically active on the work-time issue, meeting with politicians such as Barack Obama to find political support for legislation that his organization advocates. This proposed legislation would amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to grant three weeks of time off for anyone who’s worked at a job for a year. Says de Graaf, “Unlike 96 other countries in the world, the U.S. has no law governing vacations.” He’s had a close look at European work standards, observing first-hand how the French, Germans, Dutch, Swedes, Italians, and other Europeans make time for living. “Their national policies ensure things like guaranteed maternity leave, minimum annual vacation time, and part-time opportunities with benefits. And the results are plain to see: they have much lower stress. In France, for example, it’s not just the red wine that leads to lower risks of heart disease, but the long, leisurely meals that create healthy bonds of friendship.”13
The French are setting the pace when it comes to slowing down work commitments. Many French labor unions have negotiated with employers workweeks as short as 35 hours, and the average French employee also enjoys 39 days of vacation, compared to 14 in America. “On average, Europeans work 350 hours less than Americans overall,” says de Graaf. There have been occasional experiments with reduced workweeks in the United States, such as the well-documented, and well-loved, six-hour day at the Kellogg Company, which lasted from 1930 to 1985. With two hours more of discretionary time, Kellogg employees transformed the lifestyle of Battle Creek, Michigan. Families and neighborhoods benefited from the extra time; schools included curricula about the “arts of living,” and parental involvement in schools—such as “room mothers” in the classrooms—increased. Parks, community centers, skating rinks, churches, libraries, and YMCAs became centers of activity. Kellogg workers recall that the balance of their lives shifted from working to living. What to do with their time became more important than what to buy with their money.14
California’s Paid Leave Law of 2004 goes one step further than the federal Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, which provides up to twelve weeks’ unpaid time off to care for babies or sick family members. The California law provides partial payment for up to six weeks time off, but the catch is that it’s 100 percent employee funded. It appears that until employees’ voices are once again unified in their demands for time, overwork will continue to be a defining American and Canadian characteristic.
Time to Care
A Policy Agenda Proposed by Take Back Your Time
• Guarantee paid leave for all parents for the birth or adoption of a child. Today, only 40% of Americans are able to take advantage of the 12 weeks of unpaid leave provided by the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993.
• Guarantee at least one week of paid sick leave for all workers. Many Americans work while sick, lowering productivity and endangering other workers.
• Guarantee at least three weeks of paid annual vacation leave for all workers. Studies show that 28% of all female employees and 37% of women earning less than $40,000 a year receive no paid vacation at all.
• Place a limit on the amount of compulsory overtime work that an employer can impose, with our goal being to give employees the right to accept or refuse overtime work.
• Make Election Day a holiday, with the understanding that Americans need time for civic and political participation.
• Make it easier for Americans to choose part-time work.
• Provide hourly wage parity and protection of promotions and prorated benefits for part-time workers.
www.timeday.org/
Some courageous employees are willing to challenge the rules of work-time as individuals. When newspaper reporter Carol Ostram and two coworkers first proposed a job-share arrangement more than ten years ago, their editor vehemently declined. Ostram explained that she loved journalism and could do a better job if she was able to decompress occasionally; and that there were other parts of her life that she could no longer put “on hold”—such as caring for her mother and elderly aunt, and spending more time with her partner. But the editor stood firm in a work culture that employs many a workaholic.15
A few years later, after a change in management, the three employees pitched the idea again, agreeing to pay some of their own health and dental benefits and to guarantee that two of the three writers would always be available in heavy news weeks. They had learned that their idea was less marketable as “family time” and “worker satisfaction” than getting managers what they needed. “We got our job share, finally, because newsroom managers wanted desperately to hire someone with specific skills for another position,” says Ostram. “The money wasn’t in the budget, but we noted repeatedly that the job share would be a way to ‘gain’ a position. It might have gone a lot more smoothly for us if we’d figured out earlier that it wasn’t about us.” Each job was scheduled as four months on, and two months off, an arrangement that soon began to bring each person’s life into blossom.
“Susan, for example, suddenly found time for herself,” Ostram recalls. “She painted the inside of her home, began exercising, read voraciously, and still had time to volunteer at her children’s schools. She and the kids romped at the beach, and she reveled in spending time with them while they were still young enough to want to do that.” Each of the three found that they became more energetic, more likely to be effective when they interviewed people. “We would come back armed with Great Ideas,” says Ostram, “and with the energy to shape them into Great Stories.” In fact, the job sharers soon earned kudos from bosses and helped establish the newspaper as a great place for working women.
As for the editors at the newspaper who had originally opposed their job share proposal, one took an early retirement and moved to a small town in Idaho. Another got so stressed and busy she forgot to pick up her little kid after summer school. “She was so horrified at what she’d done, she changed her life, her job, her hours,” says Ostram. First she took some much-needed time off. Later, she came back part-time—in a job-share. 16
Lore Rosenthal, a Maryland sign language interpreter, is another example of a person choosing to shorten her workweek. Says Rosenthal, “I recently reduced my hours from thirty-two to twenty-eight hours per week. I told my boss I needed that extra hour a day, to go work out or do something healthy. To my delight, she granted my request! I am now a employee; I still qualify for full benefits, health insurance, 401 (k), profit share, annual leave, sick leave, and holiday pay. I immediately went out and joined Curves, an exercise class. I decided to make my health more of a priority and work/money less of a priority.” Lore’s fellow workers are glad she made the switch. When their boss observed that at even thirty-two hours, Lore wasn’t having physical problems but those who worked forty hours were, the standard workweek became thirty-two hours. This was also a quality-of-life enticement to keep the interpreters from going to work for other employers.17
John de Graaf proposes a phased-in retirement plan that can deliver many of the time-rich benefits Ostram and Rosenthal experience. Says de Graaf, “At 55, an employee might cut back to thirty-two hours a week and receive 20 percent of his pension. Then at 60, he’d go to twenty-four hours a week (or else work 60 percent of the year); at 65, to sixteen hours, and at 70 he might choose to retire.” Such a program would have multiple benefits, he points out: It would reduce fiscal pressure on pension systems, open up spaces for new workers, retain older workers as mentors, allow older workers to find
hobbies and interests gradually, and help retirees to avoid the depression that sometimes follows the sudden loss of connection with workplace associates. 18
Time for Quality
Quality in products and experiences takes time, but it also provides time. For example, if a person has takes the time to eat quality food, he or she may live longer. However, this presents another possible challenge: Having lots of time available but not knowing what to do with it. Seventy-nine million baby boomers are now in the process of learning how to “cope with leisure” in their retirement years, since working has kept many of them so busy they didn’t have time to cultivate hobbies and skills. What they come up with might result in great value for our society. (No doubt there will also be mountains of snack food consumed in front of the TV.) High-quality leisure time requires creativity. We need to know ourselves well. What do we like to do? What are we good at? Do we want to fill our time, or just kill it? When we retire, we have to actively learn new things about ourselves and about the world. As people retire, it’s a setup for feeling as if we’ve missed the boat if we’re not constantly out spending the money we’ve saved. Yet to me the more important values to have “saved” are calmness, curiosity, skills, a sense of humility, and self-worth. These will help ensure that time is of greater value than money.
Linda Breen Pierce distinguishes between “dead” time and “live” time. Ten minutes spent getting dressed for work is perceived as less time than ten minutes chatting with a friend, she suggests; and half an hour stuck in traffic is no comparison to half an hour walking in a beautiful neighborhood. Prison inmate Donny Johnson may never again have any of those experiences, but he converts dead time into live time as well as he can while doing time at Pelican Bay Prison in California. Using a paintbrush made from plastic wrap, foil, and strands of his own hair, he paints little abstract prison masterpieces on postcards. Recently twenty of the paintings sold at a gallery on the “outside” for $500 apiece. Although drug abuse and aggression were challenges for Johnson (he’s serving three sentences for murder), creativity hasn’t been. The colors in his palette come from M&M’s ordered from the commissary, which he soaks a few at a time in salvaged plastic grape jelly containers. “Skittles also work,” he told a New York Times reporter, “but I end up eating them all.”
Advertiser H. Jackson Brown Jr. once wrote, “You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, [Louis] Pasteur, Michelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein,” yet in our world of overconsumption (which several of these luminaries foresaw), the way we use time has a direct bearing on our personal ecological footprints. For example, my neighbors Jim and Beth Davis have now climbed all fifty-three of Colorado’s 14,000-plus-foot mountains, and are now going after the thirteeners. Other than a little gas and lots of trail mix, that passion hasn’t consumed anything. These experiences give them greater pleasure than products do, and are a great example of how information, curiosity, experience, skill, and time can substitute for consumption in the new American lifestyle.
My sister, whose photographs appear in this book, has always loved to shop. She once told me that she only liked to take walks when they included shopping destinations along the way. But she recently discovered that she doesn’t need to buy and own things like well-crafted clothes and jewelry if she instead takes great photographs of them. It’s the inherent qualities of products that stimulate her—the colors, patterns, shapes, artistry, and materials. Digital photos, made of ethereal bits and bytes, don’t take much of a bite out of the environment.
Time to Let Go
“Time is God’s way of making sure everything doesn’t happen all at once,” goes the amusing and ponderous saying, but it often seems this celestial strategy isn’t working! You dart out of your house and dive into the car because you’re late for work, but as you’re backing out, something under the hood makes a terrifying, screeching sound, accompanied by blinking red lights on the dashboard. The neighbor flags you down to complain about dog poop, and the kids appear in the driveway right on schedule, having missed the bus. Throughout the day, work deadlines hover over your desk, bills have to be silenced, the dinner groceries have to be hunted and gathered, and a doctor’s appointment needs to be stressed over and finally canceled at the last minute. Many days, it feels like everything is happening all at once. “I just don’t have time” is the standard lament, and it’s literally true. We don’t have time—it has us. (Think about the word “deadline,” or the phrase “drop-dead date.”)
But imagine the long-awaited summer vacation in southern Colorado, when you’re finally able to let time spread out a little. What a relief! Camping in a place like the Great Sand Dunes, mysteriously deposited by nature near a red-tinged mountain range, you can leave your watch in the glove compartment and let all life’s gears wind down. After all, what real difference does it make if it’s three or four in the afternoon? When you let time take a break, reality is simplified to three remarkable events: sunrise, high noon, and sunset. No worries! It becomes too much of a chore to keep track of the day, let alone the hour. When even brushing your teeth becomes enjoyable, you’re back in sync with real time. Cooking breakfast—an eight-minute, every-second-counts stunt back at home—becomes a decompressed, mindless opportunity to combine colors, smells, textures, tastes, and sounds of nature with daydreaming, and meandering conversation. If the pancakes burn, cook some more—there’s plenty of time.
“The modern mind,” writes Wendell Berry, “longs for the Future as the medieval mind longed for Heaven.”19 Berry argues that we’ve been conned into believing that the present is something we need to escape because it’s just not good enough. We can’t be here now because we don’t yet have enough money, enough gadgets, or a large enough house. We’re not yet powerful enough or “happy” enough to live in the present. The truth is, if we’re satisfied with what we have in the present, we’re less likely to be obedient consumers, so the supply-side of the economy has invested trillions to engineer dissatisfaction into our shell-shocked psyches. Leisure, love, and laughter can best be had in the future, we begin to believe, but we can’t put our fingers on where that disturbing idea came from.
My not-then-ex-wife, Julie, and I sat on top of a huge sand dune, wriggling bare feet into the cool sand beneath the hot surface. I realized how badly I needed a “mindwash.” Maybe I could enter one end of the vacation all grimy—like a car entering a carwash—and emerge from the other end as a calm, centered human being. About half a mile away, our kids were doing mindless, joyful gymnastics on a sand bunker near the creek—we could hear them very faintly, laughing, screeching; doing handstands and somersaults. Completely in the present, they were, completely at the Sand Dunes on a sunny Wednesday morning—or was it Thursday? Hypnotized by snow-capped mountains in the distance, I wondered how much time the huge dune we sat on contained, if it somehow became the grains in a gigantic hour glass.
Historians tell us the impetus for subdividing time into units smaller than hours was the unbearable longevity of Christian sermons in the Middle Ages, which often droned on for two hours or more. In self-defense, churchgoing tinkers manufactured smaller sand glasses to measure half-hour and quarter-hour time periods. (The Egyptian sundial and water-drip timepiece—both invented about four to five thousand years ago, preceded the sand glass, invented in Europe around A.D. 100) But the world’s most familiar face—the clock—didn’t emerge until the thirteenth century, in Benedictine monasteries. Since the sixth century, Saint Benedict’s cardinal rule, that “idleness is the enemy of the soul,” had echoed through the somber stone hallways of Benedictine orders, and now the elders had an unerring instrument to keep idleness at bay. Saint Benedict’s well-meaning preoccupation with orderliness may have transformed the social order of our species, nothing less.
By the late fifteenth century, the clock had come out of the cloisters and become the central feature of the town square. The newly emerging bourg
eois class, a vigorous, mercantile bunch of folks, quickly adopted and replicated the clock, correctly sensing that it could make them rich. Not that country folk readily surrendered to synchronization—it took a few hundred years for the clock to midwife the industrial revolution. But the die was cast. The gears were already in motion.
Until the clock came onto the scene, medieval folk adjusted the rhythms of work and leisure to natural cycles. They organized their lives by the calendar, a tradition- and ritual-oriented device. Calendar cultures commemorate ancient legends, historical events, heroic deeds of gods, and the phases of Moon, Earth, and Sun. What the clock brought was a schedule-regulated culture. We became hungry for the future, obsessing about human productivity per unit of time. We became Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times, hanging desperately to the gears of the clock; and later, the soccer mom, speeding frantically across town to pick her kids up at three different ball fields.
A week into our schedule-free vacation, time and Colorado had worked their magic. Slowly climbing a boulder-filled trough towards the sky above Crested Butte, I was right on the verge of Fundamental Knowledge about time, because I was in it. I knew consciously that time is the sun’s course across the sky, yes, but it was also the gradual, relentless erosion of the very mountain I was climbing. Time was what separated me from Julie, who moments ago had gone back to camp because of the thunderheads brewing in the northwestern sky. Time was the day-by-day aging of my own body, moving relentlessly toward the aches, pains, and, hopefully, wisdom of old age. It was the meteorites we’d seen last night, streaking from hundreds of thousands of years away—and it was stars that weren’t even there anymore. It was lupines and delphiniums bursting into living color every summer, and it was the western tanager’s migration from Colorado to Guatemala and back—I knew all this from thirty-six years of living.
