Our Virtues Are Killing Us

For somebody who is basically lazy, I picked the wrong profession. And I did it on purpose I reasoned that if I did not find a job where showing up on time verged on moral necessity, I wouldn’t show up at all. The truth is I would really rather just stare up at the sky for no apparent reason or rub my dog’s belly than work. Pretty unAmerican confession.

Part of the reason so much of our popular culture makes reference to work and the ups and down is because well…. That is what we do. Americans work. It becomes our frame of reference for how we see ourselves and others socially. How we measure ourselves and how we judge others. And it would be great and inspiring if every single America was working because it was their absolute fucking passion, not their job.

Americans put in more hours at work than any other nation, surpassing even the workaholic Japanese. We average nine more weeks of labor per year than our working counterparts in Western Europe, who get at least 20 paid days of vacation each year

My old homeland isn’t quite the mega paradise my faded memories insist it is….

Canada and Japan are near the bottom of that list, with a legal minimum of 10 vacation days, while the United States has the dubious distinction of being the only industrialized nation that does not have a mandatory minimum of vacation time. In fact, out of the world’s 195 independent countries, 137 have some kind of vacation/annual leave legislation in place.

I have blogged about this topic before but I think it deserves another visit. Why? Because we are entering an era of sacrifice, dwindling resources, and a well intentioned new administration that will be unable to deliver on a lot of promises. And the fact is if Americans are going to have to “make do with less” then perhaps we should all consider also doing less ourselves, at least in the free market.

The article I am drawing from here focuses on an activist who tries to raise the work/vacation issue and finds that he gets rebuffed and told….

De Graaf says that the Obama camp responded with “definite interest,” although he can’t yet share specifics. De Graaf considers time-famine — and the need for mandatory vacation time for all Americans — a bipartisan issue, although he says he’s aware that Republicans are more likely to object to national legislation.

Even some Democrats, he admits, think he is over-dramatizing the situation: Aren’t there more pressing social justice issues for us to worry about? Poverty, health care and ethnic/gender disparities, to name a few?

“I’ve been told by a few prominent progressive activists that, while they’re personally supportive of what we’re trying to accomplish, they’re not willing to get involved because this is really a white, middle-class issue,” he says. ” ‘You couldn’t be more wrong,’ is what I tell them

In reality, John De Graaf finds just as much support for his ideas in low income communities, so vacation time is not some wedge issue but a universal one. Imagine that it isn’t just the disappearing middle classes that can recognize they are getting burned out with little return, lower income people want family and personal time as, well. Huh. how dare they.

My guess is that low income people get tired of being told they have to be accountable for what happens in their communities by other people who actually have vacation time.Planting little community gardens to offset crappy grocery stores, volunteering to take some older folks to the doctor, or volunteering at a local day care actually takes free time and when you are working three jobs that might be a challenge. “Improving yourself” takes free time. People in “high risk” communities generally have jobs and that might be a shock to suburbanites who equate poverty with joblessness. Why wouldn’t poor Americans have just as much stake in wanting mandatory vacation time as the middle class. Now it sounds like I am suggesting that low income Americans should be using their vacation time to do things like volunteer, not relax. No. What I suspect is that low income people actually have even less free time than those in upper income brackets. They have fewer days off and no vacation time. They aren’t paralyzed by depression or hopelessness as much as they are exhausted.

Free time and paid vacation time are in fact issues that cut to the heart of social justice across the class spectrum. We need mental energy to come up with solutions about poverty, health care and ethnic/gender disparities. Americans don’t have that right now. We don’t have the mental energy and the extra time exactly at the moment when we need it most.

The article ends with a little reminder…

Things haven’t always been this bad. Workers’ lives have gone from bad to better to bad all over again. The Industrial Revolution brought extreme working conditions and 14-hour days. The late 1800s saw the beginning of an epic workers’ battle for the eight-hour workday. As it turns out, Oct. 24 marks the 70th anniversary of the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established the 40-hour workweek and the minimum wage in the United States. Most Americans don’t know that the original wording of the bill also guaranteed mandatory vacation time for all workers

Our new president doesn’t just have to deal with the hangover caused by the last eight years of untreated toxicity. There are promises made long ago that were never fulfilled.