Bring Back the 40-Hour Workweek - and Let Us Take a Long Vacation

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http://www.truthout.org/issues_05/010206LB.shtml

 

Bring Back the 40-Hour Workweek - and Let Us Take a Long Vacation

By Joe Robinson

The Los Angeles Times

 

Sunday 01 January 2006

 

It was a great year for labor - if you worked at a call center in

India, made your living as a CEO or sold real estate to big-box

stores. But deep in Cubicle Nation, the average American worker

remained on a fast track to the Industrial Revolution, with soaring

workweeks, declining wages and health, pension and vacation benefits

vanishing faster than you can say job security.

 

Add to the siege outsourcing, cutbacks, the dismantling of

ergonomics rules and forced overtime - all while business is racking

up historic profits - and even a nearsighted dingo could see that the

trends are unsustainable for families, personal health, company

medical plans or an informed and involved citizenry. And completely

unnecessary.

 

As all the productivity research shows, we can get the job done

without finishing ourselves off. So let's fire some of the worst

habits that got us here and ring in resolutions for a " Sane Workplace

in 2006 " :

 

* Restore the 40-hour workweek. Almost 40% of us are working more

than 50 hours a week, not exactly what the Fair Labor Standards Act

intended when it set the 40-hour workweek in 1938. Chronic 11- and

12-hour days result in lousy productivity, expensive mistakes,

burnout, triple the risk of heart attack and quadruple the risk of

diabetes - and families without a quorum for dinner. Two-thirds of

people who work more than 40 hours a week report being highly

stressed. Job stress costs American business more than $300 billion a

year.

 

* Establish rules for e-tools. The e-invasion is burying us alive.

Human resources departments and individuals need to set tough-love

boundaries that would determine message urgency, limit reflexive

responses and establish no-send zones (i.e., no forwarding of

multi-forwarded e-mails and absolutely no work e-mail at home or on

vacation).

 

* Give face time the pink slip. In the knowledge/digital ages, it

doesn't matter where your body is; what counts is inside your head.

More telecommuting and flex schedules could save millions of dollars

in office costs and hours reclaimed from gridlock, while providing

workers much-needed flexibility, especially for time-crunched mothers.

 

* Legalize vacations. Almost a third of American women and a

quarter of men don't get any vacation leave anymore because, unlike 96

other countries, the US has no paid-leave law. Those who still get

vacations seldom get to take the whole thing. The average American

vacation unit in the travel business is now a long weekend. It's

barbaric. And myopic. Studies show that vacations improve performance

on the job, not to mention cut the risk of heart disease and cure

burnout. More than three-quarters of Americans say they would like to

have another week off, which they'd get with the three-week minimum

paid-leave law I've proposed.

 

* Provide guaranteed sick leave. No one should have to lose a job

because they get ill. But across this land, hardworking people are

getting fired simply because their company has no sick days and they

got ill. It's time to join 139 other countries and protect those who

can't protect themselves with a minimum sick-leave law. The Healthy

Families Act by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D- Mass.) and Rep. Rosa L.

DeLauro (D-Conn.) would provide seven days of guaranteed sick leave.

 

* Make Lou Dobbs Secretary of Labor. The CNN anchorman's dogged

coverage of outsourcing and the forgotten middle-class worker has

single-handedly kept the plight of wage earners in the public eye.

He's mad - why aren't more of us? - and not going to take it.

 

* Support a living wage. With the skyrocketing costs of gas, food

and rent, an increase in the minimum wage is long overdue. Consumers

need to support companies that pay a living wage, such as Costco, and

shun ones that don't.

 

* Hold the back pats. This year, make a point of not supporting

workaholic martyrs ( " I worked all night! I came in on the weekend! "

" Really? How lame. " ) who don't drive productivity but stress everyone

around them.

 

* Tighten the salary test. One of the main - and unacknowledged -

drivers of overwork is the expanding definition of salaried employees.

When the Fair Labor Standards Act codified the salary designation, it

was intended to apply only to top administrators and managers. Over

the last two decades, the classification has been stretched to include

more and more of us, particularly after new, elastic rules by the Bush

administration that could turn everyone from chefs to preschool

teachers into salaried workers. In addition, hundreds of thousands of

hourly workers, from burger flippers to insurance adjusters, are

misclassified as salaried. The explosion of salaried employees - now

40% of all workers (including a huge jump in salaried caregivers) - is

without doubt having major repercussions on divorce rates, child care,

civic responsibilities and drug sales. Wake up and smell the Paxil.

 

* Provide paid childbirth leave to all working Americans. Family

values start here. Only 40% of American workers are eligible for the

12 weeks of unpaid leave under the Family Medical Leave Act, and fewer

still are brazen enough to actually take the time off. There are 163

countries that offer paid family leave. The sterling bunch that

doesn't includes Papua New Guinea, Burkina Faso, Swaziland and the

richest nation on the planet.

 

At a time when the people who make the products and services -

without whom there would be no economy - are considered disposable,

I'd like to see political candidates in '06 do a head count and tally

the number of disaffected wage earners desperate for leadership. This

group includes not merely the 8% of private-sector workers who belong

to unions but a vast legion of American Dreamers, including

70-hour-a-week video game programmers, biotech engineers and

retail-sales moms pressed to the gibbering edge. One Republican

pollster has found that lack of time is the No. 1 issue for young

working mothers, more of a concern than Iraq and healthcare.

 

American workers have done their part, doubling productivity since

1969. How about producing a workplace worthy of them in 2006?

 

Joe Robinson is the author of Work to Live.