The Fight for Fifteen. (photo: FightFor15.org)
he
long-shot United States Democratic Party presidential candidate Bernie
Sanders has been telling the large and angry crowds attending his
rallies that American workers put in the longest hours in the
industrialized world. He’s on solid ground. According to the
International Labor Organization, “Americans work 137 more hours per
year than Japanese workers, 260 more hours per year than British
workers, and 499 more hours per year than French workers.”Eighty-six percent of employed U.S. males and 66 percent of employed U.S. females work more than 40 hours per week. In many U.S. professional sectors, work weeks of 60 to 70 hours and more are not uncommon. Add in brutal commutes and extensive car travel related to the nation’s sprawled-out residential and shopping patterns and it’s no surprise that hundreds of millions of U.S. citizens face a critical shortage of free time.
It’s nothing new. Workers in the U.S. overtook their Japanese counterparts in total annual employment hours back in the early 1990s.
Why is this a problem? Overwork appears only briefly in Sanders’ stump speech. He cites it as an indication of the nation’s savage economic unfairness: more and more wealth and income has been flowing out of ordinary working people’s households and into the hands of the wealthy few in a time when U.S. labor productivity continues to rise and workers spend more time on the job than their counterparts in Europe and Japan. It’s outrageous.
Beyond the fairness issue, workers, journalists and academics have long reported that the unexpected decline of American leisure in the neoliberal era has taken a terrible toll on working people’s physical, emotional, and mental health. Overwork and the related vicious circle work, spend, and debt are critical factors in the endemic high-stress of American life and the low life span of Americans compared to people in other wealthy nations.
At the same time, Sanders might also want to mention that overwork and the loss of free time has a significant negative impact on the citizenry’s capacity for self-rule. Free time is among other things a democracy issue. In my experience, social and political movements in the U.S. founder again and again on the shoals of time-shortage and exhaustion: people simply lack the leisure and vigor required for meaningful activism and resistance. Without a reasonable abundance of time off the capitalist treadmill and “for what we will,” grassroots movements for social justice, environmental sustainability, and popular sovereignty cannot thrive and succeed. For what it’s worth, the 19th century pioneers of the U.S. labor movement talked and wrote about the demand for shorter hours – early American unions’ top issue by far – largely in terms of how overwork stole from citizen workers the time and energy essential for meaningful participation in the great experiment in popular governance that had supposedly been launched by the American Revolution.
Overwork is a democracy issue in another sense: it is not the working class majority’s choice. As the economist Juliet Schor noted nearly fifteen years ago, the long hours experienced by “the overworked American” (the title of her widely read first book) reflect U.S. employers’ preference for compensating workers (however imperfectly and it if at all) for productivity gains with money instead of with free time.
Public opinion polls have long showed that most Americans would choose more leisure time over more money. They would, that is, if the choice was given to any significant degree. It isn’t. It isn’t because of the employer class’s preference for slack in the labor market – the bosses’ longstanding reluctance to face the enhanced marketplace bargaining power that the working class enjoys when employment is more widely shared out (as it would be if hours for individual workers were reduced to a reasonable level).
The business class’s ongoing war on unions – so fierce that the percentage of U.S. workers enrolled in unions has fallen from 35 percent in the mid-1950s to 20 percent to less than 12 percent today – is a strong related contributing factor. Organized labor has always been the leading and most effective historical force pushing for reduced working hours.
Their preferences for leisure over cash aside, U.S. workers who receive any extra rewards from their employers generally receive more money, not more free time. This encourages them to buy more stuff to more “efficiently” enjoy the comparably slight leisure time they get, something that feeds a “vicious circle of work and spend” (and borrowing) whereby people constantly work (and borrow) to “keep up with the Jones” – that is, to maintain social status as defined by the purchase of ever bigger and higher quality, suburban homes, SUVs, refrigerators, televisions, VCRs, vacuum cleaners, and the like.
There is no great mystery about what policies we need to overcome overwork and thereby help restore temporal space for democracy in the U.S. Some are quite direct: a significant upgrade in the U.S. minimum wage (which would make it possible for more working class households to forego second and third jobs); the re-legalization of union organizing to bring back the labor movement (“the people that brought you the weekend,” to quote a clever bumper sticker); the enforcement of rules on overtime pay; mandatory work-sharing to balance out the work week and provide jobs for the unemployed; giant federal jobs programs to build new environmentally sustainable infrastructure and create decent employment options. A re-expansion of the American social safety net would give millions of workers alternatives to long hours of low-wage work.
The single-payer universal, government-provided health insurance system that Sanders advocates – Improved Medicare for All – would have an especially welcome indirect leisure-enhancing impact. Besides freeing low wage-workers of the necessity of working second and third jobs to meet the outrageous costs of health insurance on the private market, it would release millions of workers from their current cringing dependence on employers for their own and often their families’ health insurance.
Workers are unlikely to fight for shorter hours (or anything else) when they put their own and their families’ health care at risk by daring to resist employer demands. At the same time, single-payer would also take away a major structural incentive pushing employers to extract as much work as possible out of each of their full-time, benefit-receiving workers: the high costs of employee health care, equivalent to 40 percent of total compensation of salaried employees and paid per worker, not per hour worked.
Of course, Americans who want more time for leisure and, perhaps, democracy should buy less unnecessary stuff, something that will help them exit the rat-wheel of work and spend while helping the cause of livable ecology.
Sanders might want to pay more attention to time as a democracy issue. As he says in his campaign speech, if he were to semi-miraculously beat the high odds against his bid for the presidency (the U.S. election numbers guru Nate Silver gives him an at best 1 in 20 chance), his victory would be hollow without a great popular movement to push the progressive agenda after the election. Such movements require workers and citizens with the time and energy to engage in such activism, as the founders of the American labor movement knew.
Comments
+6
#
2015-09-08 00:39
Paul Street ends with this:
“Sanders might want to pay more attention to time as a democracy issue. As he says in his campaign speech, if he were to semi-miraculous ly beat the high odds against his bid for the presidency (the U.S. election numbers guru Nate Silver gives him an at best 1 in 20 chance), his victory would be hollow without a great popular movement to push the progressive agenda after the election. Such movements require workers and citizens with the time and energy to engage in such activism, as the founders of the American labor movement knew.”
After laying out a lot of important facts about the state of living, he essentially says, “Even if Bernie gets elected, it won’t matter. There won’t be anyone who will be there with him. No time for that! And besides, he only has a 1 in 20 chance of winning anyway, so forget about it. You Bernie backers are wasting your time, so just put your tails between your legs, shut up, accept your neoliberal fate, and go home.”
Continued below
“Sanders might want to pay more attention to time as a democracy issue. As he says in his campaign speech, if he were to semi-miraculous ly beat the high odds against his bid for the presidency (the U.S. election numbers guru Nate Silver gives him an at best 1 in 20 chance), his victory would be hollow without a great popular movement to push the progressive agenda after the election. Such movements require workers and citizens with the time and energy to engage in such activism, as the founders of the American labor movement knew.”
After laying out a lot of important facts about the state of living, he essentially says, “Even if Bernie gets elected, it won’t matter. There won’t be anyone who will be there with him. No time for that! And besides, he only has a 1 in 20 chance of winning anyway, so forget about it. You Bernie backers are wasting your time, so just put your tails between your legs, shut up, accept your neoliberal fate, and go home.”
Continued below
+10
#
2015-09-08 00:40
Continued
Read Paul Street’s views on Bernie at teleSUR going back to May (here is one of them http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/The-Silly-Season-Reflections-From-Iowa-20150613-0019.html) when Bernie first declared. There is not a positive thought about Bernie there. In fact I did not see anything positive at all in my fast reading there. He reads the negative political situation in this country very well and has a lot to say about the control the power elite have. (He includes the Clintons as a primary driving force of the “New Democrats” or neoliberals, that fool the voting public.) To Paul Street, Bernie is a shepherd herding us Progressives into the sHillary camp.
Whether I am being naive or not, I will support Bernie, in spite of all the concern trolling that people like Street produce. People like him have already quit, and are content to go home and whine. His is a self fulfilling prophesy. If I am wrong, prefer to go down swinging. I always have.
Go Bernie!
Read Paul Street’s views on Bernie at teleSUR going back to May (here is one of them http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/The-Silly-Season-Reflections-From-Iowa-20150613-0019.html) when Bernie first declared. There is not a positive thought about Bernie there. In fact I did not see anything positive at all in my fast reading there. He reads the negative political situation in this country very well and has a lot to say about the control the power elite have. (He includes the Clintons as a primary driving force of the “New Democrats” or neoliberals, that fool the voting public.) To Paul Street, Bernie is a shepherd herding us Progressives into the sHillary camp.
Whether I am being naive or not, I will support Bernie, in spite of all the concern trolling that people like Street produce. People like him have already quit, and are content to go home and whine. His is a self fulfilling prophesy. If I am wrong, prefer to go down swinging. I always have.
Go Bernie!
0
#
2015-09-08 09:51
Merlin,
Great comment.
I am so sick of reading this kind of absurd article by Paul Street and others. The people who write them are searching for something to criticize about Bernie - he doesn't say enough about this or about that, never mentioning all of the excellent things he does say. It is so obvious that they don't want him to succeed.
Bernie just made a policy speech about supporting unions and making it easier to organize. Why not a single word about this, which directly addresses the problems he is supposedly ignoring.
I wish these people would just go away!
Great comment.
I am so sick of reading this kind of absurd article by Paul Street and others. The people who write them are searching for something to criticize about Bernie - he doesn't say enough about this or about that, never mentioning all of the excellent things he does say. It is so obvious that they don't want him to succeed.
Bernie just made a policy speech about supporting unions and making it easier to organize. Why not a single word about this, which directly addresses the problems he is supposedly ignoring.
I wish these people would just go away!
+2
#
2015-09-08 05:50
People put up with it
because life outside of work has become so culturly impoverished. Video
games, television, the 'news', and cities full of souless big box
stores and chain restaurants. In the US work is more interesting than
life.
+2
#
2015-09-08 06:21
No (bleep), Sherlock.
Not even very well written. The stats are interesting and not
surprising, but a source would be nice. The last time I checked,
official BLS numbers on hours per week appeared to be averaged over all
workers, including part-timers.
"They only call it class war when we fight back." And if we don't fight now, especially the current set of proposed "trade agreements" (TPP, TTIP, and TISA) that are not about trade but about ceding national sovereignty to corporations (seriously), they won't call it anything.
"They only call it class war when we fight back." And if we don't fight now, especially the current set of proposed "trade agreements" (TPP, TTIP, and TISA) that are not about trade but about ceding national sovereignty to corporations (seriously), they won't call it anything.
0
#
2015-09-08 08:19
Yes! The Americans are working more than
the British, French, and Japanese, and that is why the average Americans are so stupid.
Accepting everything the authorities
tell them, they are so tired.
No time for reflection, they are so tired.
No time for revolt, they are so tired.
And what ever you are adding, they are
so tired.
the British, French, and Japanese, and that is why the average Americans are so stupid.
Accepting everything the authorities
tell them, they are so tired.
No time for reflection, they are so tired.
No time for revolt, they are so tired.
And what ever you are adding, they are
so tired.
0
#
2015-09-08 09:12
LONG SHOT NO WAY - Bernie is going to be the next president.
Feel the Burn!!!!!
Feel the Burn!!!!!
