[Pen-l] an article that may be up Sandwichman's alley (or deli)

[Jim Devine <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

The New York Times/March 1, 2009

A Slowdown That May Slow Us Down
By SHAILA DEWAN

Atlanta — Recessions have a way of upending the established order of
things. For decades, Americans have worked longer hours, with fewer
vacations, than people in most other industrialized countries. Now,
suddenly, those who have managed to avoid unemployment are being asked
to work less.

Among employers trying to stave off layoffs, “furlough” is the
buzzword. State and local governments, universities, architectural
firms and concrete factories are begging workers, or in many cases
forcing them, to take unpaid time off. President Obama has praised
“the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see
a friend lose their job.” In California, 235,000 state workers are
taking off two days a month. In Atlanta, City Hall is now closed on
Fridays. In January, 6.9 million Americans were working part time
“because of slack work or business conditions,” more than double the
number two years before, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Yet if these times were less freighted with economic anxiety, might
not many workers starved for personal time jump at the deal Atlanta’s
nearly 5,000 employees have been given? They work one hour longer
Monday through Thursday, and then they get a three-day weekend,
reducing their work time, and pay, by 10 percent. Time is, after all,
a form of wealth — but this country of workaholics accustomed to
unbridled consumption has generally chosen money over time. Furloughs
might work as a kind of recalibration — a market correction, if you
will — of that age-old imbalance. Those who can afford them might
actually come to like them.

Of course, for those already struggling to get by, furloughs can be a
rude shock, pushing workers to look for a second job when jobs are
scarce.

In New York’s Suffolk County, only 115 of 10,500 employees availed
themselves of a voluntary furlough program in the first half of 2008 —
enough to pay for five jobs, said Steve Levy, the county executive.

Any acquired taste for such “free” time may not last when the economy
picks up again, but there’s always a chance. Duriya Farooqui, the
director of performance management for the City of Atlanta, said the
arrangement was one that she herself had sought in her job hunt. “I
suspect that there’s a whole cohort of working parents that would opt
for this scenario even in a completely balanced and functioning
economy,” said Ms. Farooqui, part of a two-income family with two
small children.

John de Graaf, the executive director of Take Back Your Time, an
organization based in Seattle that advocates reducing overwork and
“time famine,” says he hopes shortened hours will stick. “It may not
ultimately be a sacrifice,” he said. “It may be exactly what they need
to do to be happier and healthier.” He said he would prefer an
increase in paid vacation and parental leave, of course, but to his
thinking, involuntary pay cuts are a good solution to shrinking
budgets if they save jobs.

Setting aside, for a moment, acute financial worries, furloughs might
also help answer larger questions underlying the economic crisis: What
will America look like when it is over? Will we resume being a nation
of spenders instead of savers? Will we be content with smaller houses
and fewer things? Weren’t we working too much, anyway?

“Hopefully something about this recession might help us to begin to
think about what the important things in life are,” Mr. de Graaf said.

Already some workers have reacted to the furloughs with more stoicism
than bitterness.

While a single mother in Sacramento complained that the state
furloughs would force her to give up smoking, her only luxury,
furloughed employees around the country have said that they see small
sacrifices as necessary to prevent larger ones. Another California
employee was using the time off to watch her daughter ride horseback.

There is a counterargument, though. Critics who support the idea of
shorter workweeks in theory say a recession is not the time to force
them on workers. Stagnant wages, said Thea Lee, policy director for
the A.F.L.-C.I.O., have already made time off unaffordable. “Normally
you would expect that as society gets wealthier, their wages rise; and
as their wages rise, people work less,” Ms. Lee said. “Since we’ve
ruptured that connection between wages and productivity growth, people
have no choice but to work more to maintain their standard of living,
and even that hasn’t been enough.”

In an ideal world, said Juliet Schor, an economist at Boston College
and the author of books on labor, leisure and consumerism, shorter
working hours would be voluntary, and workers would be compensated for
any increased productivity. But even forced furloughs could provide
more time for family, community, learning and volunteering, unless
people must scramble to fill the time with a second job. Smaller
paychecks, she said, would “dampen down the competitive consumption
that’s associated with the high-hours economy,” leading to a
sustainable way of life.

Employers, too, may find collateral benefits to furloughs. Studies
show that reducing work hours can increase productivity per hour.
Atlanta has recorded fewer sick days, and work crews have saved time
because they set up and break down four times a week instead of five,
said David Edwards, a policy adviser to Mayor Shirley Franklin.

Such results have precedents. During the Great Depression, Kellogg’s
instituted a 30-hour workweek that was so popular vestiges of it
lasted until the mid-1980s. Within two years, productivity had reached
40-hour levels, said Benjamin Hunnicutt, a professor of leisure
studies at the University of Iowa and the author of “Kellogg’s
Six-Hour Day.” Morale improved, and 85 percent of workers liked the
change despite the lower pay, he said.

Other studies have shown that vacation, leisure time and shorter hours
reduce stress and physical ailments like heart disease — though those
ills can pile up again if you can’t pay the mortgage or the car
mechanic.

Given the potential benefits in productivity and morale, why don’t
American companies embrace shorter hours? One major reason is health
care, a per-worker expense, said William A. Niskanen, an economist at
the libertarian Cato Institute. “So much of the compensation these
days is health care, and that’s independent of how long you work, so
the cost per hour goes up.”

Another reason may be cultural. “In the 19th century, leisure was seen
to be the place where we would realize our humanity, where we would
come into our own,” Professor Hunnicutt said. “Now, leisure is
suspect. It becomes suspect after the Great Depression, after the
Second World War,” as companies positioned work, not family, as the
center of life. Shorter workweeks, he added, were viewed as feminine,
and extra leisure time was viewed as a woman’s domain. “I found a
strong gender bias in Battle Creek,” he said of the town in Michigan
where Kellogg’s is headquartered. “Men began to identify strongly with
‘full-time’ work — this is what real men do, and if you don’t center
your life on the job, you can’t lay claim to your masculinity. Women
held on to an older concept of organized labor, that work was a means
to an end.”

Unions and liberal economists have often focused their efforts on
paid, not unpaid time off, to bring the United States in line with
other Western countries. To that end, Dean Baker, the co-director of
the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, has
proposed a stimulus measure that would give companies two years of tax
credits for offering more vacation, sick leave, maternity leave or
personal time, of up to 10 percent of their normal work year, or
$2,500.

Without such incentives, however, workers are still torn between
wanting their pay and liking their time, said Gayla Dodson, another
Atlanta employee, who manages solid-waste crews. “It’s sad and it’s
hard,” she said, “but in another sense it’s bringing people together.
My family, we spend more time together, my friends, we spend more time
together.” Without money for nightclubs or dinners out, she said, “you
can’t be as busy because you don’t have as much luxury.”

Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
-- 
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own
way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
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