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Photo by Rich Gardner

In the midst of the run-up to and carry-on of the Iraq War, The Shalom Center and our partners in this effort turned to address that and set this aside. Now that we are experiencing mass disemployment, the other side of the coin [and I do mean "coin"] from overwork, is the time more ripe to make this a serious issue, with appropriate changes to take the disemployment side into more account?

Please take this as a serious question, not a rhetorical question. Please respond, either to awaskow@shalomctr.org or at the foot of the article in our website - or both.

Warm regards & shalom,
Arthur
FREE TIME/ FREE PEOPLE

Americans today work longer, harder, and more according to someone else's schedule than they did thirty years ago. We are all witnesses to the rise of an economy that instead of serving human needs, dehumanizes many of us.

Our religious traditions teach that human beings need time for self-reflective spiritual growth, for loving family, and for communal sharing. And the earth itself needs time to rest. Today's high-stress economy and culture - damaging to workers and toxic to the earth - preclude this sort of spiritual deepening.

We call upon our own spiritual communities to undertake a campaign for FREE TIME/ FREE PEOPLE - affirming our religious obligation to change the present patterns of overwork.

We call upon American political, economic, and cultural leaders

- to reduce the hours of work imposed on individuals without reducing their income;

- to strongly encourage the use of more free time in the service of family, community, and spiritual growth;

- and to make work itself sacred by securing full employment in jobs with decent income, healthcare, dignity, and self-direction.

We call upon religious communities to reach out to the labor movement, environmentalists, women's organizations, forward-looking business leaders, neighborhood and community-based organizations, and family-oriented groups to secure these changes in American life.

We ourselves will work to advance these goals of FREE TIME/ FREE PEOPLE, and will make available information on how individuals, religious congregations, other groups, and our society as a whole can take steps to free time for family, free time for community, and free time for personal renewal.

****************

For many of us, the hardest work we do is finding time to rest.

As the folk-singer Charlie King says, "What ever happened to the 8-hour day? When did they take it away? . . . When did we give it away?"

This is no anecdotal oddity of the driven baby-boomers. In The Overworked Americans, Juliet Schor reported in analytic detail how most Americans work longer, harder, and more according to someone else's schedule than they did thirty years ago. This life-situation crosses what we usually see as class lines: Single mothers who are working at minimum wages for fast-food chains feel desperately overworked, and so do wealthy brain surgeons.

Why is this happening? Because doing, making, profiting, producing, and consuming have been elevated into idols. While corporate profits have zoomed and the concentration of wealth has increased, real wages have remained stagnant for twenty years, and the pressure has intensified to work harder and longer, just to stay in the same place. Varied communities and cultures, eco-systems and habitats, regional economies and grass-roots citizenry have all suffered from the voracity of these idols.

At the root of our religious and spiritual traditions is a critique of these idolatries. We know that human beings need time for self-reflective spiritual growth, for loving family, and for communal sharing. And the earth itself needs to be nurtured by human communities that allow for it to rest, to renew itself from meeting human needs. Yet the workings of American society work increasingly to squeeze dry the time for spirit, family, and community.

What Americans need is Free Time to renew what it means to be a Free People:

- Free Time for hands-on childrearing and for loving rather than violent or disconnected family relationships;

- Free Time for neighborliness in neighborhoods;

- Free Time for personal spiritual growth;

- Free Time for active citizen participation;

In short, a self-renewing rhythm of time to help individuals and society heal from overstress and burnout.

"Free time" means not only the nourishment of freer individuals, but the nurturing of a free people - a society - that can take joy in family and community, govern itself democratically, achieve social justice, heal the environment, and seek its spiritual growth.

And Free Time has an effect upon work-time as well. To feel a sense of dignity at work and to feel that our work is worthy and sacred requires that we see ourselves as free human beings. Only people who have some time free from work to shape loving families, caring communities, and self-reflective spiritual growth can see their work as itself a worthy partnership with the Creator in co-creation of the world. Without that sense of dignity, rooted in economic as well as spiritual realities, work becomes ill-paid, ill-respected, dishonored, and degrading, rather than dependable, financially sustaining, meaningful, honorable.

Moreover, a society driven by work is likely -as ours does - to treat the earth, the air, the oceans as mere objects and tools of work and exploitation, rather than sacred aspects of Creation. Free Time is essential to the healing of the earth, as well as the healing of society.

Much of the public dialogue in America worries more about unemployment or "disemployment" than about overwork. But the two are intimately connected:

- Many of us, because many jobs are badly paid or are chopped up into "temporary" or "part-time" jobs by employers seeking to avoid paying benefits, feel forced to take two or three part-time jobs, each of them inadequate and ill-paid, in order to make barely enough money to meet our basic needs. In this way, "underwork" drives people into overwork.

- Where employers feel themselves not accountable to the public or the labor movement, some ignore or evade existing laws that restrict "overtime," and force workers into working longer hours for less pay than laws on the books provide.

- And many of us, when employers increase profits by "downsizing," find themselves working far harder and longer to replace one or two workers who have been dismissed.

Overwork is not the degradation of one social or economic class alone. From well-paid brain surgeons to single mothers serving fast-food hamburgers, many Americans feel driven.

If jobs with adequate income and dignity were available to all, no one would be forced into overwork. If our culture affirmed dignity more than greed, few would be seduced into overwork.

You can read the full statement here , with sections on the biblical origins of Free Time, its spiritual and economic aspects, and the path toward organizing support for social change toward "free time." For an entire section of articles on this question, click here. Please comment on the website and/or by replying directly to awaskow@shalomctr.org

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