Resurgence issue 227 - TYRANNY OF TIME by John de Graaf

TYRANNY OF TIME

Illustration: Peter Till

Illustration: Peter Till

A letter to our European friends.

IT ISN'T EASY being an American (or, more precisely, a citizen of the United States) these days. Sure, there are still those out there who envy our big houses, monster cars and conspicuous consumption. We still have the grossest domestic product. Oh, and I almost forgot, we have 'freedom' fries.

That's the good news (if gluttony can be considered good news). Now for the bad news. We're involved in an unpopular war, sold to us through lies and deception. We're cowering in fear of new terrorist attacks and throwing away our domestic liberties to prevent them. We're bleeding in Iraq, and bleeding jobs to China and India. Our leaders won't even sign the tepid Kyoto Accords on Climate Change.

We've lost the respect of enemies and allies alike. We've got the biggest gap between rich and poor of any industrial country, the lowest life expectancy and poorest health (despite paying far more per capita for health care than anyone else does), the highest levels of crime and incarceration…

But I've got to mention just one more thing: we US citizens are the workaholics of the industrial world, putting in, on average, about 350 more hours on the job per year than you Western Europeans do. That's about nine full work weeks more. Each year.

We are materially satiated (except for the very poor, for whom two jobs barely keep the wolf from the door) and time-starved. We marry our jobs and live to work, with destructive impacts at all levels of our society. For example:o Workplace stress and burnout cost our economy $344 billion a year. Eight out of ten of us say we're often stressed at work. Only 23% come to the job refreshed on Monday mornings; o with no time to cook, we reach for calorie-laden 'fast' and 'convenience' foods and watch as levels of obesity and diabetes skyrocket; in the past generation, our family dinners have all but disappeared. We eat lunch in twenty-nine minutes, alone. Family vacations are endangered species here, too. Yet time is a family value, without which our bonds weaken and break;o we vote less, volunteer less, and grow increasingly ill-informed, easy marks for thirty-second commercials and simplistic political advertising; ando we use more throwaways, recycle less and have the biggest ecological footprint on the planet.

WHEN WE'RE NOT on the job, we're working in other ways, the kind of labour the late Ivan Illich called 'shadow work'. We spend more time shopping, struggling through the aisles of over-choice, or trying to decide between dozens of nearly identical telephone plans, pension plans, and health plans, or erasing spam on our computers, or commuting through gridlock, or navigating through voice-mail hell. Unpaid overtime, all of it.

We're tired in America, dead tired. So tired that a pollster for President Bush found that time poverty was the most important issue for Americans who hadn't yet made up their minds who to vote for.

We're so tired that the Simplicity Forum, a sort of unofficial think- tank for the voluntary simplicity movement, has launched a Take Back Your Time campaign - its first national initiative. <www.timeday.org>

In June 2004, labour, religious, family, business, academic, health and environmental activists from the US, Canada and even the UK met in Chicago for Take Back Your Time's founding conference. It was an ideologically diverse gathering, with participation ranging from corporate executives to the Industrial Workers of the World and the National Mobilization Against Sweatshops, from wiccans to evangelicals. And, believe it or not, everyone got along famously, sharing tales from the depths of time poverty and overwork.

One theme dominated: we're looking to you in Europe for alternatives and we want to hear more from you. We want to know how you won six-week vacations. We average about two weeks, and 37% of US women earning less than $40,000 a year get no paid vacation time at all.

We want to know how you - and 163 countries around the world, actually - won paid family leave to care for infants and sick relatives. We get none at all.

We want to know how you won restrictions on the length of the working week - a forty-eight-hour maximum under the European Union Work-Time Directives. Our employers can force their workers to work as long as they wish, as long as they pay overtime premiums (and many even avoid those).

We want to know how some of you have won part-time parity laws that allow people to choose part-time work without losing healthcare, or key benefits, or equal pay per hour, or the right to promotions.

WE KNOW YOU'RE not perfect and that Europe is no utopia. But we understand that Europeans have made a vital choice that we in the US have failed to make. While we have traded all of our gains in labour productivity for higher wages (in fact, we are working longer now than we were a generation ago), you have chosen to trade at least a portion of your gains for time instead of money and stuff.

You have chosen to work to live, while we live to work. Your attitude has crossed political boundaries and, for me, is summed up best in a statement by the former Conservative Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Ruud Lubbers: "It is true that the Dutch are not aiming to maximise gross national product per capita. Rather, we are seeking to attain a high quality of life, a just, participatory and sustainable society. While the Dutch economy is very efficient per working hour, the number of working hours per citizen are rather limited. We like it that way. Needless to say, there is more room for all those important aspects of our lives that are not part of our jobs, for which we are not paid and for which there is never enough time."

We envy you because we cannot imagine a US political leader of any party making such a statement. We envy you because we know that no political leader of any country would make such a statement without reflecting what his or her people are already thinking about, talking about, and hoping for.

We are green with envy. But we are also afraid, because now, more and more, we are seeing reports in our newspapers that, under the pressure of unrestrained globalisation, Europeans are beginning to lose their hard-earned leisure. We read that companies are threatening to move their plants to low-wage countries unless workers agree to longer hours on the job. And our guardians of profit say with a smirk: "See, there is NO alternative, so shut up and work overtime."

They tell us that corporate leaders in Europe are holding up the United States as the model of a healthy industrial economy.

Don't buy it. Don't sacrifice your health, your families, your communities and your environment on the altar of economic growth, as we are doing. Fight to keep your dreams of time to live and love and play, of time to enjoy long dinners and wine and conversation and companionship.

The god of growth is a false god whose worship will lead to hell on Earth. Already, if the rest of the world were to suddenly adopt the US standard of living, with its ecological footprint of twenty-four acres per person, we'd need five planets. For the sake of sustainability alone, we must determine to trade productivity for time instead of stuff. As Alain Lipietz, an economist for the French Green Party, put it: "We are today paying the debt for the material growth that characterised the postwar 'Golden Age': disfigured landscapes, polluted air and water, erosion of the ozone layer, the greenhouse effect. Since the Third World needs significant growth of its material production, only a reorientation of the overdeveloped countries towards a model of development centred on the immaterial growth of free time is capable of guaranteeing our common future."

We cannot limit growth without shortening work hours, except by abandoning millions to unemployment and involuntary leisure. If these millions see no choice but growth, however unsustainable, or permanent joblessness, they will opt for growth - and who could blame them?

The Right to Time was the rallying cry of the first labour movements. "We want bread and roses too" - and by inference, the time to smell them - demanded the weary women of Lawrence, Massachusetts, when they marched from their dark, satanic mills in 1912.

Then, the call for the Right to Time was essential so that millions of workers might have a life. Today it is still essential for that reason, but also so that our planet itself may live. Today, it is essential, too, for the health of our minds and bodies and families and communities, for our children and our pets and our forgotten elderly.

As Christmas approaches, millions of us will rush to buy quickly forgotten gifts for friends and family. We would do better to stop rushing and remember that there's no present like the time.