America not enjoying the fruits of its labor

By Jim O’Neal
The Gazette

IOWA CITY – As citizens of the most affluent society in history, Americans have the resources to live lives rich in leisure.
If we made wise choices, personally and collectively, we could spend most of our time loving, learning, enjoying nature and savoring the arts, says University of Iowa professor Benjamin Hunnicutt.
Instead, he says, we gravely overwork ourselves. The average American works almost 200 hours a year more than he or she did in 1973. And Americans work nine more weeks each year than Western Europeans.
At the same time – not coincidentally, Hunnicutt says – millions of Americans are out of work.
Hunnicutt argues that we need to reorder our lives and overhaul our social structures to bring the promise of leisure to fruition.
Hunnicutt, a professor in the UI’s Leisure Studies Program, organized a symposium on overwork held Friday at the Iowa Memorial Union on the UI campus in conjunction with the national “Take Back Your Time Day.” Friday was nine weeks from the end the year, symbolizing the 350 additional hours Americans work each year.
The symposium included a panel discussion and presentations by Hunnicutt and four other academics on such topics as parenting, play and consumerism.
Hunnicutt, who holds degrees in history and philosophy, said the United States has failed to reap the potential benefits of the Industrial Revolution with its time-saving “machine slaves.”
“People looked at the coming age of leisure with great hope,” he said in an interview with The Gazette. “The wealth would be a wealth of time.”
Through the end of the 19th century, Hunnicutt said, most laborers and professionals shared a sense that work is a means to an end, a way to sustain life and obtain the leisure to truly enjoy it.
“The place where I’m going to realize my humanity is not in my work, but in my time – time spent with family, time spent in nature,” he said.
He noted that economist John Maynard Keynes, extrapolating from a long downward trend in the average length of the workday, predicted in 1930 that by 1980 the average person would work only two hours per day.
Keynes and other thinkers, he said, “had a leisure vision that the future would be a good future, that the quality of life … consisted more of increased leisure, freedom from work, freedom from necessity, than in more stuff to buy.”
The treasure of time, he said, has been squandered on stuff and stolen by corporations.
Since the early 20th century, businesses have promoted spending, buying ads that disseminate and deepen the belief that merchandise brings happiness, Hunnicutt said.
At the same time, government leaders and economists have come to equate economic health with infinite growth – a definition that he said demands perpetual expansion of human want.
This rise in consumerism and frenzied devotion to market growth have fostered a change in cultural values, including corporate rigidity regarding work hours and a sense of resignation on the part of workers.
“Leisure is trivialized,” he said. “We’ve lost a sense that there’s something more to the ‘American Dream’ than to buy more stuff. That ‘something more’ is living your life.”
Hunnicutt advocates a six-hour workday, widespread job-sharing and a purposeful downshifting from excessive work and consumerism to simplicity and freedom.
“Rather than have one person unemployed, let’s have three people work less,” he said.
One participant in the symposium, Graceanne Hatt, 49, of Cedar Rapids, left a lucrative career as a financial planner and tax adviser to become a full-time student at the UI. She hopes to someday work for environmental justice.
She said she never misses the luxuries she gave up.
“I have lived more of life in the past two years than I did in the previous 20,” she said. “You can’t buy that with money.”

On the Net
Benjamin Hunnicutt’s Web site: www.shorterworkhours.com
The Simple Living Network: www.simpleliving.net

Caption:
Ben Hunnicutt
UI professor
This story ran in The Gazette of Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, Iowa, on Oct. 25, 2003.