Time Is a Democracy Issue

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/32264-time-is-a-democracy-issue

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.