Do you remember predictions, confidently made back in the 1950s, about working Americans gaining much more leisure by this stage in our history? As a result of new technology and greater productivity, we would spend considerably less time in our workplaces and become free for travel, activities at home with our families, and cultural events.
Unfortunately, it hasn’t turned out that way. Employed Americans are spending longer hours on the job than in the 1950s. The promised age of leisure has become a time of incessant labor. We are working nearly nine full weeks longer each year than do the residents of Western Europe.
Some of our fellow citizens are disturbed enough about this situation that they have organized to change it. Under the title “Take Back Your Time Day,” they are planning a campaign to raise consciousness about the harmful effects of overwork.
The first event in the “Take Back Your Time Day” campaign will take place on Thursday, September 25th at 3 Church Street, Cambridge, opposite the Harvard Square Theater, at 7:00 p.m. One of the speakers will be Juliet Schor, a professor at Boston College and author of The Overworked American.
This event anticipates a national campaign that begins on October 24th with a lunch-hour rally at Faneuil Hall in Boston. October is to be called “National Work and Family Month,” thanks to a resolution sponsored by Ted Kennedy and Orin Hatch and passed by the United States Senate. A new book, “Take Back Your Time: Fighting Overwork and Time Poverty in America” edited by John de Graff, will provide added firepower to the campaign.
By comparison with the citizens of France, Germany, and other European countries, we take much shorter vacations. They average five or six weeks annually, while we get just over two.
It may seem inconsistent for me to praise longer vacations after the recent debacle in France. Anyone who saw the photo of the president of France and the mayor of Paris at a city cemetery for the burial of 57 old people who perished in the heat and whose bodies were never claimed, will not soon forget what happened. Neglect of these victims and others like them happened in part because so many younger French people were away on vacation for a full month.
However, the problem did not arise because they took vacations but because residents left the cities en masse, leaving too few care-professionals, family members, and neighbors to look out for those in peril from the heat. The vacations were desirable but not everybody should have been away at the same time.
Concern about overwork may also seem ironic in a time when so many Americans cannot find employment at all. In the past two years, our country has lost some two and a half million jobs, leaving many of us out of work. To make matters even more painful, many of these people have given up as hopeless the search for paid work.
Organizers of the new campaign have compiled a list of harmful outcomes caused by overwork. It threatens one’s health, with an estimated $200 billion lost to our economy through job stress and burnout. It threatens our marriages, families, and relationships. And it reduces employment prospects since fewer people are hired and are made to work longer.
You may wonder what American overworking has to do with older people. I believe it to be a subject on which we elders have something important to say. So does Juliet Schor who told me: “people in older generations have a much deeper understanding of the issue.”
Many of us who have retired or changed gears and entered into a different work mode have discovered the value of enhanced leisure. Finding more time for ourselves and others has unlocked for us entrance into new arenas of creativity. We have surprised ourselves by laying hold of creative powers we did not know we had.
Especially does this new freedom free us for spiritual discovery. We can experience the rewards of exploring our own interior and of finding God or ultimate meaning in new ways. Thus we may relate more vibrantly to Rabbi Abraham Heschel’s words: “Just to be is a blessing; just to live is holy.”
Leisure can free us to appreciate the Sabbath or our own version of it. I keep in mind the example of former neighbors who used to observe faithfully both the letter and the spirit of this special day of the week.
The father of the family, Dr. Michael Rothberg, shared with me some of his feelings and those of his wife and children about this day of leisure: “Our lives really center around it. It’s something that is always there, something that you can look forward to. It’s a time to be with the family and to be reflecting on spiritual matters.”
American society desperately needs more of this contemplative spirit. Perhaps we elders can help show the way.
Richard Griffin