Lights out for long hours?

The Free Time/Free People campaign, launched last year by Rabbi Arthur Waskow's Shalom Center, has taken more of a spiritual approach in its call for more time off.

The campaign, which calls for an end to American overwork, also stresses the need for more free time for volunteer work, community involvement, and self-reflective spiritual growth. Plans are under way for a national, interreligious conference for 2002, likely to be held in Boston.

The Free Time/Free People campaign has been primarily inspired by the concept of Sabbath rest - the one day a week when all work-related activity should come to a halt. "This continues to speak to all human beings," says Rabbi Waskow. "The basic sense of Shabbat is the life rhythm of work and rest.... Working and doing are not the only important things in the world."

The push to log long hours on the job is not new. Neither is resistance to the trend.

The fight for shorter working hours in the US began in the 1840s. In increments, workers got their hours reduced to nine per day with Sundays off, and then - with the rise of the American labor movement in the 1920s and '30s - to eight hours. Under the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, American workers were also guaranteed overtime pay for hours worked above 40 per week. Soon, many workers were also taking Saturday off.

Opportunities for relaxation were a major component of American life until the decades following World War II, says Nancy Snow, associate director of the Center for Communications and Community at the University of California Los Angeles.

In tandem with the nation's competitive drive to build a world-leading economy, industrial unions began to see gradually waning influence. Membership, which hit a high of 35 percent of all nonfarm workers in the late 1940s, began to decline.

And America's work/life balance began to shift radically.

The race to "keep up with the Joneses" in the 1950s placed greater emphasis on the family breadwinner to work more hours in order to obtain more things.

Household appliances, electronics, and later, computers, were supposed to simplify our lives from the 1950s onward, but had the end result of cluttering our days with more activities and more gadgets to fix.

Then the length of work commutes grew throughout the 1960s and '70s as many families fled metropolitan centers for the relative safety of suburban communities.

In the late '70s, rising costs of living made it increasingly difficult for single-income families to live out the fabled American dream. Two-income families soon became more the norm.

The over-40-hour workweek truly became a facet of the American work life in the 1980s, writes Jill Fraser in her new book "White Collar Sweatshop" (Norton). During and after the recession of 1981-82, employees invested an increasing amount of time at the job amid large-scale layoffs.

Consumption also soared during much of the rest of the 1980s.

To make matters worse, says Ms. Snow, American society now associates time off with a lack of productivity.

"[It's] the perception that people [not at work] are just lollygagging around. When you're away from your job, you're seen as a drain on the economy," she says.

In contrast, the citizens and governments of European nations are still busy asserting their need for a work/life balance. Many are renowned for more generous vacation policies than those of the United States.

France is now adjusting to a nationally mandated 35-hour workweek. The unemployment rate has been dropping there. Meanwhile, Ireland is enjoying one of the world's highest rates of labor productivity despite a significant drop in the number of hours worked nationwide.

The key lesson to be learned from European nations might be that some payoff exists for giving employees more opportunities to rejuvenate themselves.

"We want to be fully present and alive in our work lives, and so it's important for us to have full, outside lives ... lives that fill us with energy and allow ourselves to bring our best to our work on any given day," says Tom McMakin, former chief operating officer of Great Harvest Bread Co., and author of "Bread and Butter: What a Bunch of Bakers Taught me About Business and Happiness."

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