Take Back Your Time Day

Take Back Your Time: Fighting Overwork and Time Poverty in America

John de Graaf
National Coordinator for Take Back Your Time Day

Second Annual Take Back Your Time Day - October 24, 2004.
What is it? Take Back Your Time Day 2003 was a nationwide initiative to challenge the epidemic of overwork, over-scheduling, and time famine that now threatens our health, our families, our communities, and our environment. This year the focus is on a two-part model project – Take Four Windows of Time and Public Policy Advocacy.

Why should you care? Are you, or your friends or relatives, working more now but enjoying it less? Does your family’s schedule feel like a road race? If so, you’re not alone. Millions of Americans are overworked, over-scheduled, and just plain stressed out.

It starts at work. We’re putting in longer hours on the job now than we did in the 1950s, despite promises of a coming age of leisure before the year 2000. In fact, we’re working more than medieval peasants did, and more than the citizens of any other industrial country! Mandatory overtime is at its highest levels ever, in spite of a recession. On average, we work 350 hours, nearly nine full weeks, longer than our peers in Western Europe do. Twenty-six percent of us got no vacations at all last year while the Europeans AVERAGED six weeks!

• Overwork threatens our health, reducing time for exercise and encouraging consumption of calorie-laden fast foods. Job stress costs our economy $200 billion a year.
• Overwork threatens our marriages, families, and relationships as we find less time for each other.
• It weakens communities as we have less time to volunteer.
• It reduces employment as fewer people are hired, then required to work longer hours.
• It leaves many of us with little time to vote, much less be informed, active citizens.
• It reduces our security, contributing to accidents large and small.
• It even leads to growing neglect and abuse of pets.

And finally, it contributes to the destruction of our environment, encouraging use of convenience and throwaway items and leaving us without time even to recycle. Every environmentalist knows that on a finite planet, unlimited economic growth is unsustainable. Already we’d need four planets if the whole world duplicated our lifestyle. We need to offer free time rather than more money and stuff as the reward for increasing productivity.

We’re not against work; in fact, we understand that useful and creative work is essential to happiness. But American life has gotten way out of balance. Producing and consuming more has become the single-minded obsession of the American economy, while other values, such as strong families and communities, good health and a clean environment, active citizenship and social justice, time for nature and the soul, are increasingly neglected. Wouldn’t you like a balanced life too?

On Friday, October 24, 2004, thousands, perhaps millions, of Americans will take the day or part of it to join in hundreds of activities to initiate a much-needed national conversation about work/life balance and how we can reclaim it.

www.timeday.org

Take Back Your Time 2004

Our society is out of balance. We need time for our health, our families, and our communities. We need time to slow down and time to re-create balance.

Re-create Balance
Overwork and a relentless pace of life have a negative impact on health, families, economic justice, safety, community life, civic participation, spirituality, workplace quality of life, the environment, and personal well-being.

• Since 1973, the average U.S. worker has added an additional 199 work hours to her/his annual schedule;
• Long working hours for some of us mean unemployment for others;
• U.S. workers have the shortest paid vacations in the industrialize world and 26% of American workers get no paid vacation.

Take Four Windows of Time
Resist the relentless pace of life for yourself and your family. This fall, between Labor Day (September 6, 2004) and Take Back Your Time Day (October 24, 2004), choose windows of time to resist excessive work hours and extracurricular activities. Choose four times (four Wednesday evenings or whatever times fit your schedule) to engage in slow, quiet, life-renewing activities to:

• Rest body and mind (with music, laughter and sleep);
• Reconnect with family and community (call a loved one, visit an elder);
• Revive energy for life (plant trees, cook slow foods, play games);
• Renew your spiritual life (write in your journal, walk in the woods, pray or meditate).

Public Policy Advocacy
Resisting excessive work hours and an over-scheduled lifestyle has public policy implications. As part of this Take Back Your Time observance, encourage and promote some of the following legislative initiatives that offer creative solutions to these problems:

• Make Election Day a national holiday
• Paid family leave
• Minimum annual three-week paid vacation
• Limit employer-mandated overtime

Take Back Your Time Day
www.timeday.org