How about marching for leisure as well as jobs?

[eridani]

http://www.thenation.com/blog/175870/americans-are-working-too-damn-hard?rel=emailNation#

Americans work almost five weeks more a year than our contemporaries in Europe. Family leave is still unpaid under federal law, and the big bosses’ lobbies are working like mad to scuttle paid sick days legislation coming out of states and cities.

So we’ll march. We’ll march for jobs but where do you line up for the march for leisure?

The last time US labor unions marched for that, it was for the eight-hour day, after the depression of 1884. Their banners called for “eight hours for work, eight hours for rest and eight hours for what we will.”

The “what we will” part seems to have fallen off the map in the 1930s—and we’ve had no reductions in work hours since, Duke Professor Kathi Weeks told GRITtv in an interview this week.

The American labor force is the smallest it’s been in twenty years and that’s not changing. Globalization and computerization are shrinking the demand for US labor. Job sharing and a shorter work-week make sense economically and socially.

Even by raising the topic, Kathi Weeks hopes that we might begin to think more critically and imaginatively about “the possibilities about a life that’s not so relentlessly subordinated to work.”

[Joe Shlabotnik]

1. I'm on board with that.

Our work ethic is sick. Its destroying people, culture and the environment.