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Point of View with Barb
Sumner Burstyn - September 22 2003
Working to Live has Been
Overtaken by Living to Work
Published
On Dissident Voice
From the perspective of North America, New Zealand sometimes looks
quaint and naive. The recent announcement that the Government is
setting up a steering group to co-ordinate policies to promote a
work-life balance is a great example.
A government not only acknowledging that its people work too hard
but doing something about it? In this day and age? Unbelievable.
But only when you compare it to the United States, where the overwork
ethic has become so bad that this year October 24 has been dubbed
"Take Back Your Time Day".
That's the day the average American will have worked the equivalent
of a full European work year. Take Back Your Time Day is a nationwide
initiative to challenge the epidemic of overwork, over-scheduling
and time famine that the promoters believe threatens health, families,
relationships, communities and the environment.
In fact Americans work more now than they did in the 1950s (remember
how all those mod-cons were going to free up your leisure time?),
more than medieval peasants did, and more than the citizens of any
other industrial country.
Americans, caught in the vice-grip of spiraling work hours, spend
nearly nine full weeks more a year on the job than their counterparts
in Western Europe. Even the standard two-week holiday is almost
a memory.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it has now become
8.1 days after the first year, jumping to 10.2 days of holiday after
three years. While Australians get four weeks a year and the Chinese
three, 13 per cent of US companies provide no paid leave at all.
But what does all this time deprivation do to a person? For one,
it keeps you so busy you can't think, not in any depth, not with
any acuity and not about a lot more than what to mindlessly consume
next (after all, mass production requires mass consumption).
Volunteer and other social functions decline in a work-obsessed
society. And as time for family and friends is extinguished, so,
too, are foundational relationships.
And you can't sleep. The National Sleep Foundation says the reallocation
of time and prioritization of work has a direct effect on sleep.
Those who work more sleep less, it says. The result is a nation
of fractured, sleep-deprived people.
But it's the children who suffer the most. For the kids of "over-workers"
it means extra hours in every day being "on", their creativity besieged
by their time pressure, their lives spent fitting into their parents'
stretched schedules.
And if parents aren't taking holidays, neither are the children,
at least not the kind of family-centered holidays on which great
childhoods are built.
Of course the Government's plan to set up the work-life balance
steering group to address these issues before they become endemic,
before we become mired in the work-to-live society, has met the
usual chorus of disapproval.
The National Party employment spokeswoman, Katherine Rich, called
it an example of social engineering. She is worried it could end
up hurting business.
"Even the concept of work-life issues sounds very Orwellian, this
idea that the Government can somehow extend its tentacles into areas
that it hasn't before," she said.
And she's right. It may end up hurting business. But the impact
of the alternative is far more wide-reaching and damaging to the
cohesion of our society.
And it is social engineering. But the real naivety is to think
that allowing business values and goals to run the country is not
social engineering. Clearly it is.
The alternative is the American system, a society engineered and
run by corporate kleptocrats, aided and abetted by the very governments
they have bought.
In that world, workers are minions, too exhausted to think, let
alone vote or care much about the results. A populace too tired
and stressed to protest.
For those of us living on the cusp of America, and crossing its
borders regularly, it is clear it is a nation in distress. People
don't travel and they hardly take time out, except to shop.
Unless they're unemployed, and there you have the motivation behind
the overwork ethic.
Fear of losing: your job, your status, your consuming ability.
The ironic fear of missing out causing you to miss out on a grand
scale, your affluenza finally killing you.
But that fear doesn't come naturally. It is the most effective
tool a corporate-run society can have and it is being sculptured,
molded carefully to fit so seamlessly around US society that Americans
are hardly aware they are wearing it.
Taking the wide view, our Government's plan doesn't look idealistic,
far-fetched or draconian. Instead, it is clear-headed and intelligent,
the far-sighted action of a Government with a vision for a society
that puts people first.
President George W. Bush calls the American way their "blessed
lifestyle". But then he gets three months' holiday a year.
Earlier this year, the President visited the Auschwitz and Birkenau
Nazi death camps in Poland.
It seems unlikely that he would have stopped long enough to read
the inscription over the concentration-camp gates: Arbeit Macht
Frei (Work Will Set You Free). It was a lie then and it's a lie
now.
ENDS
© Barbara Sumner Burstyn, 2003
Send your comments to:
Barbara Sumner
Burstyn.
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