Democracy Diary: Time Hunger and Being Stuck for 86 years

Or, why do we let the rich steal our time and money?

I’m on Day 8 of 12 days off work and already I can feel the end approaching. It’s a feeling I’ve started thinking of as time hunger, analogous to air hunger when I’m having an asthma attack: I start to gasp and gulp. There’s not enough. I need more!

I sewed this morning and finished two blocks - but that makes only 9 of 36 for this project. I remind myself that the joy is in the doing, not the completing - but completing things is nice. Getting to sew more would be nice. (1)

At the beginning of my break I spent almost two days reading in the studio, and by the afternoon of the second day, I got up to go swimming with the feeling that it was something I got to do and looked forward to, instead of just something I had to do as part of the project of, as our friend Mary says, waving her palm in a circle in front of her to encompass her whole body, “taking care of this.” (2)

And now here I am, on Day 8, finally with enough energy and mental space to write a Democracy Diary post.

I feel this way even though I’m relatively lucky. I have a job that is not physically taxing or dangerous, where I do not experience harassment, am well paid, and do work I enjoy. (Not as much as I’d enjoy not having to work under capitalism, but still). One in four American wage workers (and all of the unpaid caregivers) get no paid time off at all. The average private sector worker in the US gets ten paid vacation days and 6 holidays (it’s unclear in the sources I found whether this average is drawn down by including those who get none). By comparison, the 9 paid holidays and 24 vacation days I get per year are comparable to what workers in Austria receive - more than those in France (31) and fewer than those in Spain (39).

That’s not quite the whole story, though, because American workers put in about 400 more hours per year than our peers in Europe, Japan, and some countries in South America. At the same time, we work 690 hours per year less than workers in Cambodia, Mexico, and Myanmar (3).

Even the Wikipedia article giving the OECD data above hides the reasons for this, though: “In most countries, the weekly working hours are decreasing with increasing prosperity and higher productivity.” The implication here seems to be that increasing prosperity and higher productivity CAUSE more time off through some sort of natural law, like gravity. However, the real cause of decreased working hours has always and only been political: it’s a choice. And we could make a different choice.

In 1933, Senator Hugo Black’s 30 hour bill passed the Senate, but the Roosevelt administration worked against it, fearing it was too rigid and simplistic to be effective (the goal was to spread what work there was across more households). Instead, the National Industrial Recovery Act was passed (it turned out to be kind of a disaster and was abandoned soon after).

In 1938, the Fair Labor Standards Act set the work week at 44 hours, which was reduced to 40 hours in 1940.

86 years later, that’s still where it sits, for those lucky enough to earn a wage that allows them to work that few number of hours.

The encyclopedia explanation would have you believe this must be because there have not been increases in worker productivity, but that’s false: workers today are 400% more productive than we were in the 1940s. We’re 80% more productive than we were in 1979. But salaries have only gone up 29.4%. And we’re still working 1700 hours per year (in the US).

So where has the value of all that extra productivity gone? To the rich. They’ve stolen our money. And they’ve stolen our time. Because we let them.

(Translation: The rich are thieves. You don’t get rich through honest work. St. Denis, France, May 2023. Author photo).

Why do we (in the broad sense - we as human beings) do this? It’s the question I’ve spent the last ten years thinking about.

Frances Perkins, the Secretary of Labor who led the passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act, thought the 40 hour work week was just a way station on the way to a lower number. But we’ve been stuck here. For 86 years. It’s a long time.

Unlike the four days until I go back to work.

I’d better hurry up and do all the things I want to do to relax. (4)

1. There’s a lot that could be said about the gender and class implications of who gets to sew as a leisure activity vs. as paid employment. The same would be true of whatever leisure activity you prefer.

2. There’s a lot I could say here about wellness culture, and how being healthy is not a moral imperative, no matter what capitalism would have you believe. But. My friend Mary, who has an exercise routine that’s required if she’s to walk at all or even be able to get out of bed, says that, yes, that takes up a lot of her time, but being dead takes up all your time. Speaking of being dead, the rich live about 15 years longer than the poor - in other words, the rich steal about 15 years of time from the poor. And a lot of people die before they retire, so raising the retirement age steals time from more and more people.

3. Of course, this entirely leaves out discussion of the 5% of Americans who work more than one job and the 5-10 million working Americans who are underemployed: who want to work more hours but can’t get them. And let’s remember that about 40% of food bank clients have at least one household member working full time and 40-60% of unhoused people are employed full time.

4. There are things to be said here about productivity and capitalism and how cool the idea of a nap ministry is and that rest is important - and also things to say about whether rest requires sleep and immobility, or might involve doing other things, things we want to do that we find important but don’t have time and energy to do when we’re working for pay.