It's About Time!
New "It's About Time" Coalition Challenges Presidential Candidates On Critical Issue For Swing Voters & Working Americans
By John de Graaf
Copyright © 2004. All Rights Reserved.
Reprinted here by permission.

Increasing workplace demands are threatening families, communities and health, and America's political leaders need to seriously address this critical issue. That's the message from the "It's About Time" Coalition which is launching a campaign urging candidates in the 2004 Presidential election and all other candidates for public office to put their family values policies where their mouths are. Organizers say polling research shows that the issue of overwork and time-strapped families has rocketed to the top of the agenda for critical swing voters.

The "It's About Time" Coalition, which brings together organizations including working mothers and work-life balance and paid-leave advocates, has issued a call for a "Time to Care" agenda to ease the vise grip working families are caught in -- between spiraling work hours and vanishing paid leave. We are proposing long-overdue protections for Americans drowning in the working trenches, including paid parental leave, paid vacations, paid sick leave, and limits on compulsory overtime, access to flexibility and pay equality for part-time workers.

"This is a voting issue. Day in and day out, Americans are forced to choose between work and health -- and mothers in particular are harshly forced to choose between their own health and their children's health," says Tracy Geraghty, a Napa, California, mother of two small children and a leader in the coalition. "President Bush has taken up this issue in his campaign for re-election, and now it's time for Senator Kerry to let the American people know where he stands and what he plans to do to give families relief and help work-life balance in this country."

Protections are needed in a workplace where outsourcing, downsizing, and a volatile economy have created a race to the bottom, which has resulted in shrinking sick leave, vacation leave, and increasing numbers of all-hours salaried employees. These wrenching changes in the way America works are creating havoc at all levels of our society and must be addressed by the presidential candidates and the Congress.

One working mother put it this way in an email posting to Work to Live, one of the coalition members: "I get no sick time, vacation pay, or paid days off. I also get no insurance benefits. I know my kids always ask why we can't go anywhere or do anything. I would love to have a vacation. I haven't had one in 2 years and counting now. It's a cycle that needs to end. HELP US!!!"

"It's long past time to address the increasing pressures Americans face in balancing work-time demands and the time required to adequately care for their families, communities and health," says Ann Crittenden, founder of Mothers Ought to Have Equal Rights (www.mothersoughttohaveequalrights.org) , and author of The Price of Motherhood. "Americans just don't have time to care and it's hurting all of us."

"There's no rest for the weary," adds Joe Robinson, of the Work to Live campaign (www.worktolive.info). "Summer is over and many Americans got no vacation time at all, as paid leave is being eliminated at more and more companies. A quarter of Americans get no paid leave anymore. Time off is medicine. It can cure burnout, and decrease the risk of heart disease. We'd all be healthier and, studies show, even more productive if our right to time off was recognized by law."

"This is the unacknowledged elephant in America's family room," says Gretchen Burger, national staff person of the Take Back Your Time campaign (www.timeday.org), another coalition member. "Neither political party has addressed the issue of overwork and time poverty in any serious way."

"President Bush has spoken of the need for more family time," argues Judith Stadtman Tucker, founder and editor of the online journal MothersMovement.org (www.mothersmovement.org). "But his current proposal, substituting comp time for overtime pay, actually offers employers incentives to require more overtime work, not less. We need legislation that really does give families more relief from overwork."

According to Take Back Your Time national coordinator John de Graaf, "Every other industrial country takes the need for time to care seriously. Our Canadian neighbors just passed a law guaranteeing a year of paid parental leave at partial pay when children are born. England has laws guaranteeing parents access to flexible work hours and shortened work days. Europeans are working nine full weeks less each year than Americans do. It's time for America to catch up with the rest of the world."

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About The Author

John de Graaf has been writing and producing award-winning television programs for several decades. In addition to Affluenza and Escape from Affluenza, the highly acclaimed PBS documentary series, he also produced Running Out of Time, For Earth's Sake: The Life and Times of David Brower, Circle of Plenty, Green Plans, and Genetic Time Bomb, among many others. John is also the co-author of the book Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic with David Wann and Thomas H. Naylor.

E-Mail: jdegraaf@kcts.org
Web Site: Take Back Your Time Day