"I think it's terribly important for any human being really to have a time for silence and for things to slow down just a bit. I always feel now we are going faster and faster and faster than the whole rhythm and patterns of nature."

-- The Prince of Wales, September 2005

We are pleased to announce the September 2005 newsletter. Once again, this is a big one, so you might want to scan the contents to see what interests you most.

Nonetheless, we think there is some great stuff in here, including information about what you can do for this year's Take Back Your Time Day, and some great reports from our second North American conference. So pull up your beverage of choice and take a little time to check this out!

• Take Four Windows Of Time For Rest, Relaxation & Renewal!
• San Jose, California's Plan For Four Windows Of Time
• Time To Care Agenda: Endorse It Today!
• Take Back Your Time Day 2005
• Take Back Your Time Day Events
• Download Free Posters To Promote Your Event
• Other TBYTDay Activities: Stage The Take Back Your Time Play!
• Want To Get Involved With TBYT?!
• 2005 North American Conference Report
• Changing Labor Laws In Canada
• Nickelodeon Encourages Play: Will Go Off Air...
• Take Some Time To Go Kayaking With Your Monkey
• Letters
• A Few Thoughts Post Hurricane Katrina From Catherine O'keefe

JOIN OUR NEW PROGRAM BETWEEN NOW AND TIME DAY!

TBYT is very excited to announce the launch of the TAKE 4 WINDOWS OF TIME program. You may remember that this program was developed in 2004 as a pilot project by the Massachusetts Take Back Your Time Committee in collaboration with the Massachusetts Council of Churches, a fellowship of 1,700 Protestant and Orthodox churches throughout Massachusetts. It was in fact, one of the most successful programs MCC has ever sponsored!

Now we're encouraging all Americans and Canadians to Take Four Windows of Time. To participate in this program simply take 4 WINDOWS between now and October 24th, Take Back Your Time Day -- by yourself, or with your family or friends -- for rest, relaxation and renewal. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, we are also reminded of the importance of taking time to remember and to grieve.

Possible activities might include: a candlelight dinner with no television, a walk with no i pod, sitting on the beach watching the waves, or sitting in the forest or at a place of worship for an hour of contemplation. These are just a few suggestions, let us know what you come up with.

To learn more about the program, visit the 4 WINDOWS OF TIME page of our web site where you will also find a downloadable two-page FLIER, a POSTER, and a FEEDBACK FORM to print out and mail in.

We have two more 4 WINDOWS OF TIME posters in the works and will be emailing you the links to those in the next few weeks.

LETTING US KNOW what you've done or what you're doing for your 4 WINDOWS is very important, so please remember to mail in your FEEDBACK FORM (LINK) or send an email to lisa@timeday.org. Reporters will be asking for local participants, so please send an email letting us know what you're planning and where you're located.

We also encourage you to take the 4 WINDOWS OF TIME program and make it your own. TBYT Board member Richard Hobbs sent out the materials you can access through the link below to members of HUMAN AGENDA (a diverse and active social justice and community group in San Jose, CA) encouraging them to participate in the 4 WINDOWS program and offering suggested activities.

Click Here To View The Human Agenda Materials Sample Materials

In addition to launching the 4 WINDOWS OF TIME program, this fall we are also focusing on gathering support for our TIME TO CARE six point public policy agenda, which calls on political leaders for action in the following areas:

• Guaranteeing paid childbirth leave for all parents. 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.

• Guaranteeing at least one week of paid sick leave for all workers. Many Americans work while sick, lowering productivity and endangering other workers.

• Guaranteeing 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.

• Placing 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.

• Making Election Day a holiday, with the understanding that Americans need time for civic and political participation.

• Making it easier for Americans to choose part-time work. Hourly wage parity and protection of promotions and pro-rated benefits for part-time workers.

We have posted a downloadable ENDORSEMENT FORM on the PUBLIC POLICY page of our web site and hope that you will look it over, download it, sign it, send it in and encourage others -- including organizations you are affiliated with -- to do the same.

Click here to learn more about the TIME TO CARE AGENDA.

Help us win more free time for all Americans and endorse the TIME TO CARE six point policy agenda today!

OUR THEME: 40 IS ENOUGH!

Board member Richard Hobbs of San Jose, California, proposed the theme we'll be encouraging for this year's TAKE BACK YOUR TIME DAY activities: 40 IS ENOUGH!

This year's TAKE BACK YOUR TIME DAY marks the 65th anniversary of the day in 1940 when the 40-hour workweek became the law of the land. Trouble is, 65 years later, with productivity quadruple what it was then, most Americans are working more than 40 hours a week. But if 40 hours was enough to support a family then, it certainly should be now.

We're encouraging public discussions about how to take back the 40 hour week. We believe that:

• Well-paid but long-hour salaried workers should be given comp time for time required of them by their employers that exceeds the 40-hour standard.

• Time and a half overtime premiums for hourly workers must be protected and strengthened, not weakened as they have been recently. It must not be made easier to declare workers managers and therefore avoid paying overtime. Time and half must be protected for any work beyond 40 hours a week (and 8 hours a day where contracts call for that), not so workers can earn more but because the overtime premium is a deterrent to compulsory overtime being required by employers. Ultimately, we would like to see all work hours over 40 be a voluntary decision and currently, our Time To Care Agenda calls for a cap on compulsory work hours at 48 per week.

• No American (or Canadian) should need to work more than 40 hours a week to support a family above the poverty line. If the minimum wage had expanded as much as the salaries of corporate CEOS, it would now be around $25 an hour! Even if it kept pace with the cost of living, it would now be more than $8 an hour. Yet the Federal Minimum Wage is still only $5.15 per hour, about half that of most European countries and Australia. We support efforts to achieve a living wage that means anyone working 40 hours per week should not be living in poverty.

We encourage you to create discussions around this theme as part of your TAKE BACK YOUR TIME DAY activities and to let us know what people had to say about these issues. We'll be sending out a new press release about this theme soon. Please help get it to your local press.

If you are planning a TAKE BACK YOUR TIME DAY event at your workplace, with your community or faith group, or on your campus, please let us know and we'll post it on the web site.

Need ideas for an event or for materials to pass out and post? Click these links to visit the PLAN AN EVENT and CAMPAIGN MATERIALS pages of our web site.

And remember we have terrific looking posters to help promote your event and Take Back Your Time Day 2005. Ranging in theme from TIME IS A FAMILY VALUE to the AMERICA NEEDS A BREAK to AN HOUR A DAY COULD KEEP THE DOCTOR AWAY, to VACATION, AN ENDANGERED SPECIES to our HOME ALONE AGAIN dog posters our HASTE MAKES WASTE environmental posters and of course MEDIEVAL PEASANTS WORKED LESS THAN YOU DO, these are a simple, fun and effective way to get our message out and to generate discussion.

Click Here To View & Download Posters

Katy Fitzpatrick, a sophomore at Drew University in New Jersey, wrote "The Real American Dream: A Play for the Take Back Your Time Movement" as part of her course work last fall. The play was performed for the first time publicly at the TIME TO CARE conference (to wild applause) and Katy is now making it available to TBYT community.

This is what Katy wants you to know about performing the play:

The play tells the story of Michelle, a successful technology consultant, who becomes frustrated with her frenetic lifestyle. As her confusion and emptiness grow, she begins to question her choices and those of her largely unknown neighbors. The play had its debut performance at the 2005 TBYT Conference and was very well received after having had only 45 minutes of rehearsal. The number of actors, the complexity of the props, and the setting of the script are flexible. Please tailor the play to fit your event -- changing lines, adding relevant statistics, and shifting the story to address time poverty issues in your community is encouraged! If you use the script, I request that you send me an email at kfitzpat@drew.edu describing what you did, the response, and any other feedback you would like to share. If you have questions about potential usage or would like production ideas, you can also contact me at kfitzpat@drew.edu. Thank you!

Click here to download the Take Back Your Time Play

Interested in getting more involved with Take Back Your Time? Here are three ways you can help our efforts:

• BECOME A LOCAL CONTACT

  An easy but important way you can help the campaign is to become a local contact in your area. It doesn't commit you to being the sole organizer in your community, but simply requires that you be available to pass information from the national campaign to your community and vice versa. Send an email to lisa@timeday.org to sign up!

• SHARE YOUR STORY

  Reporters often want to put a local face on their stories, if you are willing to share your experience of taking back time with the press, please send an email to: lisa@timeday.org.

• SEND US YOUR TIPS FOR TAKING BACK TIME

  We are always being asked for tips for taking back time. We have our list but would like to hear yours. Send your tips to lisa@timeday.org and we'll publish them in the next newsletter.

We are pleased to report that TIME TO CARE, the second annual Take Back Your Time North American Conference was a success! Participants came from across the country, Canada and Europe to discuss personal, cultural and policy solutions to time poverty and to organize the Take Back Your Time campaign. And while the organizers still have something to learn about pacing, the expertise, commitment and energy of the attendees and speakers really made it a productive and energizing event.

Here's what several participants had to say about the conference and the ways they hope to help bring TBYT's message to their communities:

"It was a terrific conference, terrific people, I absolutely loved it. I have started to campaign to get my little corner of WEA as an endorsing organization and my first presentation was well received."

-- Art Busch, Washington Education Association

"I valued the interdisciplinary nature of the contributors and audience participants. It was great to sit around the table with economists, political theorists, theology and leisure studies professors, political activists and others. The discussion was educational and inspirational. My plan is to contact The National Recreation and Parks Association about the possibility of using our materials at their 2006 conference in Seattle."

-- Cathy O'Keefe, TBYT Board member and Professor of
Leisure Studies at the University of South Alabama

"Lots to value, but first place goes to "Meeting the other participants." Close second was learning from the speakers/participants, in particular learning of the wide breadth of interests in different faces of the problem. This made the issue more complex for me -- and will lead to a better understanding of how to go forward. In particular, the variety of women's issues, from leaves, part-time work, fringe benefits, etc I'm going to make an effort to write an occasional Op Ed or other essays for local papers. My main thrust, though, will be to educate the environmental community about how cutting work canlead to cutting consumption of stuff, and thus reducing environmental pressure."

-- Eugene Coyle, Berkeley, CA

"It was a great conference and I came away both exhausted and energized."

-- Nicola Dones, Labor Project for Working Families

The conference received quite a bit of press coverage locally in Seattle and these two pieces appeared in the daily papers:

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!

KATE BORKOWSKI ENTERTAINS WITH SONGS ABOUT TIME

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!

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!

We'd like to say a special thanks to our speakers! to our volunteers! and to our conference sponsors:

Kevin McDougald sent us the following information regarding changes in Canada's labor laws. Canadian Federal Labour Standards Review Commission will be accepting and publishing public submissions on how Canada's labour laws should be changed (including on the subject of hours of work and paid vacations) until mid-October. They will pass their recommendations on to the federal Labour Minister in early 2006.

For more information visit the Commission's web site: www.fls-ntf.gc.ca/en/index.asp

This summer, Nickelodeon encouraged kids to get up and be active with an on-air campaign on Nickelodeon and Nick Jr., featuring interactive interstitial programming and brand new spots that incorporate healthy messaging. The campaign will culminate on October 1 with Nickelodeon's second-annual Worldwide Day of Play, part of the network's "Let's Just Play" initiative, where Nick will go dark for three hours to empower kids around the world to learn about active, positive lifestyles and make better, healthier choices." Check out this link....

I saw my first kayaking monkey last week. He was out floating the Wolf River with his friend (whom he made do all the paddling). But despite all the hard work his owner had to do to get them downstream, I suspect they both had a blast.

It was a beautiful spring day on the river. There was plenty of sunshine, and the river was running hard after some of the recent rains. The Wolf River of northern Mississippi begins in a little pond near Holly Springs, where it flows to the northeast and soon crosses the Tennessee state line before it takes an abrupt turn west and heads toward the Mississippi, joining it in downtown Memphis.

The initial channel where we put in, just downstream from LaGrange, Tennessee, was moving quickly. After a few miles the river became harder to recognize as its Ghost River Section approached. The spooky-sounding name for this section comes from the way the river seems there: chimerical and enigmatic. The channel seems to disappear between a maze of baldcypress trees and their knobby knees. In the sunken forest, the river appears to be everywhere, and nowhere, all at once.

After this spectral section the river spreads out into a half-mile wide lake, reminiscent of the Okefenokee Swamp (another of my favorite haunts), and wading birds such as great blue herons and egrets were all around. Deep in there, despite our relatively close proximity to roads and farms, was nary a clue that civilization was near.

At the end of the "lake" the river quickly reforms into its channel, and many downed trees, serving as "strainers" in the brown water, present themselves as obstacles to the paddler. It was there, in the last of the placid waters ahead of the channel, that we finally passed by our simian friend and his one-man crew, hours after they had passed us upstream. They were just hanging out in the still waters, soaking up the last bits of a good day.

As we passed by man and monkey, we entered the swift waters of the final section before takeout. It was not a minute later that one of the big baldcypresses split the channel we needed to make on river left, and sure enough, we broached the canoe on it.

From there, simple physics took over as the current pushed the boat up the trunk, and the upstream gunwale dipped below the river's surface. The unplanned swim was refreshing. And I as looked up, nose-high in the Wolf, I saw our new paddling buddies again, they had slipped into a nearby eddy to make sure we were going to be okay. After I assured them that all was well, they both smiled (at least I think the monkey was smiling), and effortlessly slipped back into the channel, disappearing downstream.

At the takeout, we saw them for the last time. And again, the monkey made the guy do all the work when it was time to put the kayak and gear away. Their arrangement of labor must have been satisfactory though, as the fellow didn't seem to mind a bit.

Now there are cat people and dog people (I'm more of the latter), and there are folks who keep birds, fish, rabbits and such as pets, but I've only met a few monkey people in my day. And I'm definitely not a monkey person. In fact, I find pet monkeys a bit unnerving. However, by the end of the day, after several encounters with the hirsute boater and his owner, they seemed more like any other folks you might see out on the water. And like most paddlers you meet, they both just seemed glad to be out for the day.

I guess that's a big part of life -- just getting out for the day. We all need to take some time to get away from the grind, monkeys too. Both CNN and The Chronicle of Higher Education recently have featured articles discussing research which shows the corrosive effects of our "always on" modern environment, with effects ranging from high stress to actual loss of thinking power. It seems that what we really need in these busiest of times are not more opportunities for wireless communication, but more opportunities for unwired contemplation.

And this seems like a particularly good week to shut down your computer, turn off your cell phone and seek some fun and relaxation. There are many ways to do it -- whatever floats your boat, so to speak -- whether your good times come in the form of an outdoor concert, a relaxing meal, a walk around town, or a river trip with your favorite monkey.

The busy life can get us down, but it doesn't have to. In the end, it really is all up to you.

Thanks for this great piece to Matt Zuefle, who teaches at the University of Mississippi

From Black Hawk, CO:

In spite of presently recovering from brain surgery, I made a commitment to head up a County-wide movement to get involved in "Take Back Your Time" in our County right after Labor Day this year. The main focus is to move to an "Election Day" for everyone, beginning with four-hour shifts with the same costs as eight-hour shifts.

This idea came from working in c-stores for years. The operation wouldn't be stopped altogether since the stores were operated by 24/7 rules, but each clerk could have any four hour-shift they wanted, (including overtime when they thought they needed it). This worked out amazingly well for everyone. The clerks decided among themselves and had most of the day off, no matter what! Just an idea

Meanwhile, the concept is new to Gilpin County where most of the residents are driving to Denver each day, with more time spent in vehicles, never mind the rising costs of fuels to run them!. With the cost of childcare, etc,

It's hardly a break-even gig with many parents, but they don't see a way out. Just pedal faster -- and hope?

Catherine O'Keefe is a TBYT Board member, Professor of Leisure Studies at the University of South Alabama, and resident of Mobile, AL. Last year, Cathy lost her home to Hurricane Ivan. This year, on higher ground, her family fared better.

There's a term called "forced leisure" that applies to what's happening right now.  People are sitting around, mostly still in shock, with nothing to do and tons of anxiety and worries. One could hardly call this free time leisure. It is a forced time off situation. It contributes to meaninglessness and dependence. It also frustrates relatives and friends because they can't get leave to attend to their loved ones.

My situation is a good one. I was hoping to take a week to care for my mother who is under the surgeon's knife as I write this e-mail. But since we've been out of school for a week, the pressure to be in my classroom today was too great. I'm scrambling to find coverage for my classes so I can get to Atlanta next week. Thanks to everyone for their concern - we're expecting a cruise ship with 1800 people in our harbor in the very near future. Needless to say, this will be no vacation for them!

We're just so glad you're OK, Cathy, and heartbroken for those who are not.