Conference Ponders How to "Take Back Your Time"
By Shirleen Holt, Seattle Times
Time's Not On Your Side? This Conference Might Be For You. Take Back Your Time in Seattle this week.
By Athima Chansanchai, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Robert Bernstein kept with tradition and served as the official TBYT conference photographer. He has posted the photos and you can now view them at the Shorter Work Time site www.swt.org or directly at www.swt.org/seattle2005. THANK YOU, ROBERT!
On the opening night, young Seattle-based singer-songwriter Kate Borkowski entertained us with her music including her wonderful songs: "A Good Piece of Pie" and "Living on Borrowed Time." To learn more about Kate, her music and her soon-to-be released CD, please visit her web site at www.musicbykate.com. And when she becomes a big star, remember you read it here first!
On Saturday night playwright Katy Fitzpatrick, a student at Drew University, and 13 readers staged the debut performance of Katy's play “The Real American Dream: A Play for the Take Back Your Time Movement." The performance was terrific and now Katy is making the play available to the TBYT community. For more information about the play and to read it, see the September 2005 newsletter.
We are working to put together the conference materials. In the meantime, we offer you the following two summaries of the conference: a sneak preview of a piece written by Ritzy Ryciak and John de Graaf for the October edition of Porch Magazine: Conference Energizes Take Back Your Time Movement and a piece by conference attendee Greg Wright for the Glendale Focus: WRIGHT ON: Take Back Your Time, Take Back Your Life!
CONFERENCE ENERGIZES TAKE BACK YOUR TIME MOVEMENT
By Ritzy Ryciak and John de Graaf, for Porch Magazine
It was early August and President George Bush had just begun his five-week vacation in Crawford, Texas. How very...dare anyone say it...French of him!
While many liberal critics tossed barbs at Bush for taking time off the job, the hundred plus activists at the second annual North American "Take Back Your Time" conference -- gasp! -- supported his choice. But they wished that the rest of us could have a little time off too.
Americans are so vacation deprived our own commercials are making fun of us. At the conference, three clever TV ads rolled by on a big screen.
Pan left to your neighborhood funeral parlor.
"We'd like to thank America's workers for proving that you have what it takes to drive yourself into the ground," declares a pasty funeral director in one TV spot. "Just remember, if you work yourself to death, we'll be there for you," adds another black-clad mortician.
Similar commercials featured a corporate executive and a spokesman for the pharmaceutical industry, proudly claiming that burned out workers are boosting their bottom lines. Their message was morbid and direct, forcing viewers to think about how they spend their time and why.
At the conference, Joe Robinson, a Take Back Your Time board member and founder of the "Work to Live" campaign, cheerfully presented the ads, produced for Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida, and broadcast widely on prime time television. Robinson believes Universal's corporate ad campaign is asking the same questions as the Take Back Your Time movement. "Our ideas have relevancy," he says. "These commercials bode well for our message."
They also direct viewers to a web site: www.iwantmyvacation.com that pulls no punches. "Forgetting your toothbrush on vacation is one thing. But forgetting your vacation altogether? 26% of Americans take no vacations at all. Are they martyrs? Or masochists?"
The site lists the average annual vacation days for several countries around the world: Italy (42); France (37); Germany (35); Japan (25); and finally, the United States at the very bottom with only 13.
The message of both the commercials and the Take Back Your Time conference is that we are working too much. But the August 4 -7 2005, conference offered more than 25 different workshops and ironically, was anything but leisurely. "We're spending 24/7 trying to solve the American time dilemma," joked one attendee.
Keynote speaker Bill Doherty, a professor of Family Therapy at the University of Minnesota, offered insight into "overscheduled kids," a phenomenon created by parents who feel constant competitive pressure to develop their children's future marketability and thus spend large chunks of time driving to music lessons, sports training and academic enrichment programs.
And if "all work and no play make Jack a dull boy," added Canadian author Bruce O'Hara, they also prepare him poorly for the latter part of his life.
"Our standard North American model for the second half of life is that you work 40 hours a week until your 65th birthday and then you 'retire'," O'Hara pointed out. "Retirement is seen as a time for a permanent vacation. There's just one problem with this idea: many work-obsessed Americans and Canadians have never learned to enjoy leisure or find meaningful activities off the job.
The result, O'Hara warned, is that seniors commit suicide more than twice as often as the general population and consume more anti-depressants than any other age group. The only solution is a culture that values both employment and free time, including time for both leisure and community-building volunteer activities, starting as soon as individuals enter the work force.
"Take back your Time is about restoring balance" and "reawakening and reinvigorating the concept of community," added Seattle city councilman Richard Conlin.
Conlin reminisced about Seattle before the hi-tech boom arrived. In those days, when the sun shone in the drizzly city, employees took time from their work-day to escape outside. "It was a refreshing way of life," Conlin remembers. But for the great majority, it is only a distant memory.
And that sets the United States -- and to a lesser degree, Canada -- sharply apart from most other industrial nations. Jon Messenger, a senior researcher with the International Labor Organization in Geneva, Switzerland, shared shocking statistics to drive that point home.
Americans work nearly nine full weeks (350 hours) longer per year than workers in Western Europe, getting a little over two weeks of vacation per year, while Europeans average nearly six.
The reason for the difference, Messenger argued, is clear: legislation. Workers enjoy more free time in those countries where public policies guarantee them opportunities for it.
Nearly every industrial country in the world provides paid childbirth leave, paid sick leave and paid vacations for everyone. The US is a notable exception in all these cases. Even Canada requires at least two weeks paid vacation and a whopping twelve months of paid childbirth leave -- at 55% of salary. The US guarantees nothing and workers are left to fend for themselves.
"I frankly think that the information about what is happening in other parts of the world is the white lightening of this movement," offered Brian Derdowski, a conference attendee and former Republican King County (Seattle area) Council member. Compared to our counterparts in Europe, "Americans are being taken to the cleaners by our corporate leaders," Derdowski added, shaking his head. "It sure speaks to me in a major way."
Derdowski observed that one of the unique aspects of the Take Back Your Time movement is that it integrates personal and cultural values with practical ideas for policy reform, including a six-point "Time to Care" legislative agenda that has won support from many other organizations.
"It synthesizes our personal lifestyle choices -- what do we need to have healthy and balanced lives? -- and combines those value choices with public policy, such as paid family leave," he said.
Several European attendees at the conference defended their choice of more leisure time even if it means a "lower" material standard of living.
"The Dutch chose to be losers but in the end we are winners," offered Jeanine Schreurs, a leader of the voluntary simplicity movement in the Netherlands. "According to American standards the Dutch are lazy," she continued, noting the importance that the Dutch place on rest and spending time with family.
"They say we don't have the right spirit because we tell our boss it is Friday evening and we want to stay at home and not at work," she added. "According to American standards this is the wrong mentality. It is a loser's mentality. If you want to be a winner you have to be willing to give your time always. Be available to your boss every second of your life. We just don't buy that."
One Dutch law, soon to be extended to the entire European Union, allows workers to cut their work hours to part time, while keeping the same hourly salary and pro-rating their benefits (they continue to receive full health coverage).
The Dutch now spend fewer hours on the job than citizens of any other nation, and the most time socializing with friends and family. Recent studies show they are healthier and happier as a result. "These regulations offer conditions for a more balanced life," concluded Schreurs.
"How much fun would it be to play a game of football if the other team came out with brass chains?" asked Bruce O'Hara. "Capitalism only works when you have a combination of cooperation and competition--when you agree to compete within certain rules that protect quality of life."
Conference attendees left with renewed energy and direction for the Take Back Your Time campaign.
CHECK OUT PORCH MAGAZINE, A WONDERFUL NEW PUBLICATION ABOUT THE QUALITY OF OUR LIVES PUBLISHED IN NELSON, BRITISH COLUMBIA!
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WRIGHT ON: Take Back Your Time, Take Back Your Life!
By Gregory Wright, for The Glendale Focus
Dateline Seattle: One of the most important gatherings in this summer's jam-packed conference calendar was held in a surprisingly hot Seattle early in August, the third annual Take Back Your Time Conference: "Time To Care: Best policies and practices for work, family, and community balance and personal well-being." This new movement, loosely and "leisurely" coordinated by a Seattle-based coalition, concerns itself with the main stuff that our lives are made of: time. The Take Back Your Time (TBYT) advocates in essence are telling the overworked denizens of the industrial world, and of the most overworked country of all, the United States, to Take Back Our Lives. People are more than employees and productivity engines, TBYT tells us, even those workaholics who "live to work" instead of "working to live" (which, after all, was the original evolutionary purpose of work, yes?).
The TBYT folks have advanced a six-part "Time To Care" Public Policy Agenda to restore work-life balance in the United States. The agenda's six points are Guaranteeing paid childbirth leave for all parents, Guaranteeing at least one week of paid sick leave for all workers, Guaranteeing at least three weeks of paid annual vacation leave for all workers, Placing a limit on the amount of compulsory overtime work that an employer can impose, Making it easier for Americans to choose part-time work, and Making
Election Day a holiday.
These broad policy ideas -- all of them taken for granted in other developed countries -- really speak to the great collective need for "time poverty" relief of millions of Americans. These policy ideas are not political bills, but are ideas for action, reforms for Americans to demand and legislators to design specific legislation around. The TBYT folks point out that these ideas are the ultimate Family Values program, a counterpoint to the relentless privatization of our nation and our culture, a way to win more free time for Americans as members of families, communities, and a nation.
America is coming up short on every one of these points:
Paid Childbirth Leave: 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.
Paid Sick Leave: Guaranteeing sick leave for all workers will increase productivity (not to mention individuals' health): too many Americans work while they are sick, endangering other workers ... and, yes, productivity.
Paid Annual Leave: A full 28% of all female employees, and 37% of women earning less than $40,000 a year, receive no paid vacation at all.
Limiting Compulsory Overtime: Overtime work is shredding family life and personal pursuits for many millions of us. Employees need to have the right to accept or refuse overtime work without threatening their jobs or standing at work, a right that workers in every other industrial nation now enjoy.
Helping Americans Choose Part-Time Work: Some of us want to work less. Part-time workers need and deserve hourly wage parity and protection of promotions and pro-rated benefits, just as our European friends enjoy now.
A new National Election Day: Voters in many nations go to the polls on weekends, or enjoy substantial guaranteed paid time off to vote. If democracy is an important enough value for our country to start a war to bring it to Iraq, isn't democracy important enough for Americans to practice with more attention and purpose than as a task to fit in between picking up the kids and dropping off the dry cleaning after a hectic
commute on a frenzied Tuesday in November?
There are many benefits for Americans and America and even our suffering planet in these ideas. Better health, improved diets, happier families, safer highways, reduced pollution, community participation, and even pets relieved from chronic loneliness and neglect are some of the spectrum of good things that the Take Back Your Time "Agenda To Care" can deliver.
Take highway congestion, road rage, car accidents, and global warming pollution from gasoline combustion: the TBYT Work-Life Balance agenda of a shorter work week, flextime, job-sharing, more vacation time, and family leave offers another approach to congestion relief. A specific idea raised at the TBYT conference would deliver a lot of congestion relief: a new 36-hour (later a 34-hour) work week of four instead of five days, for those workers who would prefer this arrangement -- and one day less commuting per week. That's a 20 percent reduction in commuting, an activity that for many of us is more aggravating and enervating (and more dangerous) -- and is harder "work" -- than our work! A shorter work week, if supported by we the people and acted upon by our political leaders and corporate overlords -- will make many people's lives happier and saner, will vastly reduce our global warming pollution, and even increase our collective creativity and productivity.
Or take the special stress on women that America's time-crunching culture increasingly exacts. One of the many statistics at the TBYT conference: the average middle-class married woman now works some 500 hours, or twelve and a half weeks, more per year than in 1979.
Europe is a model of government policies and commonly accepted cultural norms supporting personal time rights. Which might be why a "smear Europe" campaign is rearing its head in a series of questionnable anti-Europe assertions of "conservative" think tanks, corporate apologists, and right-wing commentators. Representatives from the International Labor Organization, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, and the Information Center for Simplicity With Style in the Netherlands, among others, debunked the idea that Europe's more family-friendly, person-centered approach to life is taking a toll on the region's economic success and general prosperity. In fact, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, gross domestic product per hour in France is actually a bit higher in France than in the U.S. -- but per person is well below that of the U.S., because French workers spend more time with their families. Europeans work less than Americans, and their economies grow at a slower rate (and exact approximately half the environmental damage) than America's because the Europeans want it that way.
"This movement really is about family values," says John de Graaf, national coordinator of the Take Back Your Time movement. "People need time to have strong marriages, strong families and strong communities."
More information about Take Back Your Time can be found at the TBYT website, www.TimeDay.org. "Time Day," by the way, is October 24th, the day of the year on which the average American has already put in as many work hours as the average European will have completed at the end of the year! We Americans really need to examine our collective "time famine" and the ways that we as average citizens, employers, and policymakers can turn things around and win a more balanced life for ourselves and our children. This year, Time Day will also be the 65th anniversary of the start of the 40-hour workweek in 1940, thanks to the work of Franklin D. Roosevelt, his colleagues, and the U.S. labor movement. We Americans really need to examine our collective "time famine" and the ways that we as average citizens, employers, and policymakers can turn things around and win a more balanced life for ourselves and our children.
Some other websites, created and maintained by the authors, experts, advocates, therapists, and activists at the conference, with more information on these matters include:
