Tyranny of Time - An American’s Letter to Europeans on Time Poverty by John de Graff

“It isn’t easy being an American these days. Sure, there are still those out there who envy our big houses, monster cars and conspicuous consumption. We still have the grossest domestic product. Oh, and I almost forgot, we have ‘freedom’ fries . . . . We’ve got the biggest gap between rich and poor of any industrial country, the lowest life expectancy and poorest health (despite paying far more per capita for health care than anyone else does), the highest levels of crime and incarceration . . . . we US citizens are the workaholics of the industrial world, putting in, on average, about 350 more hours on the job per year than you Western Europeans do. That’s about nine full work weeks more. Each year.”

“We are materially satiated (except for the very poor, for whom two jobs barely keep the wolf from the door) and time-starved. We marry our jobs and live to work, with destructive impacts at all levels of our society . . . . Workplace stress and burnout cost our economy $344 billion a year. Eight out of ten of us say we’re often stressed at work. Only 23% come to the job refreshed on Monday mornings . . . . We’re tired in America, dead tired . . . . When we’re not on the job, we’re working in other ways, the kind of labour the late Ivan Illich called ’shadow work’. We spend more time shopping, struggling through the aisles of over-choice, or trying to decide between dozens of nearly identical telephone plans, pension plans, and health plans, or erasing spam on our computers, or commuting through gridlock, or navigating through voice-mail hell. Unpaid overtime, all of it.”

“. . . . with no time to cook, we reach for calorie-laden ‘fast’ and ‘convenience’ foods and watch as levels of obesity and diabetes skyrocket; our family dinners have all but disappeared. Family vacations are endangered species here, too. Yet time is a family value, without which our bonds weaken and break; we vote less, volunteer less, and grow increasingly ill-informed, easy marks for thirty-second commercials and simplistic political advertising; ando we use more throwaways, recycle less and have the biggest ecological footprint on the planet.”

“We want to know how you won six-week vacations. We average about two weeks, and 37% of US women earning less than $40,000 a year get no paid vacation time at all . . . . We want to know how you - and 163 countries around the world, actually - won paid family leave to care for infants and sick relatives. We get none at all . . . . We want to know how you won restrictions on the length of the working week - a forty-eight-hour maximum under the European Union Work-Time Directives. Our employers can force their workers to work as long as they wish, as long as they pay overtime premiums (and many even avoid those) . . . . We want to know how some of you have won part-time parity laws that allow people to choose part-time work without losing healthcare, or key benefits, or equal pay per hour, or the right to promotions.”

“We understand that Europeans have made a vital choice that we in the US have failed to make. While we have traded all of our gains in labour productivity for higher wages (in fact, we are working longer now than we were a generation ago), you have chosen to trade at least a portion of your gains for time instead of money and stuff . . . . You have chosen to work to live, while we live to work.”

“Don’t sacrifice your health, your families, your communities and your environment on the altar of economic growth, as we are doing. Fight to keep your dreams of time to live and love and play, of time to enjoy long dinners and wine and conversation and companionship . . . . The god of growth is a false god whose worship will lead to hell on Earth. Already, if the rest of the world were to suddenly adopt the US standard of living, with its ecological footprint of twenty-four acres per person, we’d need five planets. For the sake of sustainability alone, we must determine to trade productivity for time instead of stuff.”

Full article at Resurgence Magazine

Keywords : capitalism, economic growth, ecosocial crisis, consumerism, materialism, work, overworked, time poverty
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