[atlarge-discuss] Fwd: Street / Labor Day Reflections: Time as a Democracy Issue / Sep 03 - Part 1

[Joey Borda **star*walker** <starwalker@gay.com>]

AtLarge Friends & Fella Toilers:

American Labor Day (Canadian as well) is just a few hours from being over. The enclosed piece has come to my notice that I wanted to pass on. The coloring and bolding and underlining are mine (for those of you fortunate enough to receive this via the list intact).

This content is very apropos of this day, and I think our long term efforts, as well as our short-term commitment to Internet democracy.

I have had occasion lately to express similar analyses and conclusions as the author, some on this list, but not nearly so well and so factually based.

I hope you all enjoy reading it as much as it delights me to pass it one... /s/ Joey

Monday, September 02, 2002 * 9:34 PM EDT USA

>ZNet Commentary
>Labor Day Reflections: Time as a Democracy Issue September 03, 2002
>By Paul  Street 
>
>The Overworked Work Harder
>
>The real outcome of the 2000 Presidential elections - a clear Gore victory if the votes had been properly counted and if numerous voting irregularities that especially discriminated against blacks had been prevented - is not the only piece of vital information relevant to the state of American democracy that got shelved by 9-11 and its aftermath.  
>
>Another piece of such information was released by the Brussels-based International Labor Organization (ILO) on the eve of America's Labor Day, 11 days prior to the jetliner attacks. "Workers in the United States," the ILO's chief labor market economist Lawrence Jeff Johnson found, "are putting in more hours than anyone else in the industrialized world." ILO's research showed that the average American in the prior year worked 1,978 hours, up from 1,942 hours in 1990. 
>
>Already in the earlier year, large numbers of Americans were complaining about being worked to death. Left economist Juliet Schor was writing her excellent and widely acclaimed The Overworked American: the Unexpected Decline of Leisure (NY: Basic, 1992).
>
>This amounted to an increase of nearly a week of work, counter to the trend in other industrialized nations, where the number of hours worked annually fell during the 1990s. The average Mexican, Canadian, Australian, and even Japanese worker was on the job approximately 100 hours less than the average American worker in the last year of the 20th century. Workers in Brazil and England worked 250 hours less than the Americans. Germans worked around 500 hours or 12 and a half weeks less than their counterparts in the USA. 
>
>Remarkably, of countries classified as "developing" by the ILO, only the Czech Republic and South Korea had longer hours than the United States. 
>
>These findings are ironic when it is recalled that much of the world celebrates its labor day on May 1st, the day designated by American trade unionists for massive demonstrations on behalf of shorter hours (the "Eight Hour Day") in 1886. In the "United States of Amnesia" (as Michael Eric Dyson calls the US), only a tiny few know about the American origins of "May Day," when Chicago's "Haymarket Martyrs" are honored in remote Andean villages for their sacrifices on behalf of shorter working hours. 
>
>No Reward for Increased Productivity
>
>Another seeming irony concerned the ILO's discovery that labor productivity grew at a considerably faster rate than in most other industrialized states since the mid-1990s. In a rational and humane society, increasing productivity would translate into reduced hours for an overworked population.  
>
>In a profit-driven society that is more capital- than people-friendly, however, such translation does not occur. In the United States, where less than one in ten private sector workers belongs to a union and where politics, culture, and public policy are most strikingly dominated by capital, the employer class is uniquely free to bypass the normal constraints, moral and otherwise, on "working people to death." The constraints are weakened further by the ongoing recession, which expands the reserve army of labor that capital uses to discipline those who are "fortunate" enough to have jobs. 
>
>The weakness of unions is pivotal. As Schor showed, consistent with the bumper sticker on my Ford (it reads "The Labor Movement: The Folks Who Brought you the Weekend"), no single institutional force has done more to limit American working hours, historically, than organized labor. 
>
>Time and Space
>
>Things are made deadlier still by the large amount of time many Americans spend getting to and from work as well shopping centers, schools, and various points of recreation and treatment. Thanks to the automobile-centered pattern of commercial and residential development known as "sprawl," tens of millions of Americans begin and end overlong workdays and spend scarce "leisure" hours sucking exhaust - stuck behind the wheels of ecocidal automobiles on vast stretches of faceless, overcrowded "freeway." They are overextended in space as well as time in dialectically inseparably ways.  
>
>Recently released Census figures for urban regions show that the average length of commuting time rose by 14 percent, from 22.4 minutes in 1990 to 25.5 minutes in 2000. According to the Washington DC-based Road Information Program, "the result of longer commutes is that people are spending as much as an additional working week traveling to and from work every year."  
>
>
>Working Ourselves to Death 
>
>American workers suffer numerous deleterious consequences from the vicious cycle of work, spend, and commute: chronic anxiety, insomnia, depression, physical and mental illness, and insufficient time to spend with friends and loved ones or in self-nurturing activities. Some investigators during the 1990s even found that the corporate employer had replaced the family, friends, and local community as the primary source of social identification and "nurturance" for millions of Americans. This was the key discovery of Arlie Russel Hochschild's widely read Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work, 2001). 
>
>It's a disturbing finding when we consider the real depth and degree of American corporations' commitment to their "family" of employee, revealed in recent scandals. 
>
>Not surprisingly, Americans resent the exceptionally large portion of their lives they are required to rent out to the employer class. A CNN Internet poll conducted after the release of the ILO report last summer received 6,994 responses to the question "are you working longer hours than you were 10 years ago." Sixty-four percent of poll participants chose the response "definitely and I don't like it."  
>
>The "overworked American's" sufferings are duly reported in a vast human resources and industrial relations literature, some of whose participants dare to question the real long-term efficiency of "working people to death." 

[continued in Part 2...]