Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic
Page 27
“Buy Nothing Day has exploded,” says Lasn. “It’s becoming a truly international celebration of frugality and living lightly on the planet, and of voluntary simplicity.” Lasn believes the spirit of Buy Nothing Day must catch on as an effective vaccine
against affluenza, because the North American lifestyle is simply unsustainable. “Overconsumption is the mother of all of our environmental problems,” he says.
CREDIT CARD CONDOMS
When the producers of Affluenza included several of Lasn’s uncommercials in the program, viewers got to see them on PBS. Many found them to be one of the highlights of that program. But when John and his co-producers tried to create an uncommercial of their own—a fake public service announcement (PSA)—to include in the follow-up program, Escape from Affluenza, they were required to remove it. Otherwise, PBS wouldn’t show the program in prime time.
The fake PSA—“a public service announcement from your heirs”—promoted a little protection device against affluenza called a credit card prophylactic. It’s a little envelope to store your credit card in with a warning on the outside. “Before you buy, ask yourself: Do I really need it? Can I borrow it from someone else? Are the materials in it reusable or recyclable? How much time will I need to work to afford it?” An older woman tells a young friend to “practice safe shopping” using the prophylactic. “And remember,” she says with a smile, spoofing American Express, “don’t leave home without it.”
PBS refused to allow the PSA in Escape from Affluenza because programmers would have to alert local stations to the reference to credit card prophylactics. The programmers were convinced that fifty or more local PBS affiliates in conservative rural areas wouldn’t air the program because in their markets, condoms are taboo. PBS knows its audience. But call it what you want, we think the credit card condom is a great idea that can help people think twice before spending.
VACCINATING KIDS
To be truly effective, vaccination programs for affluenza will have to start with children, especially now, when marketers have them squarely in their crosshairs. At least three Web sites provide valuable advice in this area—Don’t Buy It (www.pbskids.org/dontbuyit), a site created by PBS to help kids understand how advertising manipulates them; Consumer Jungle (www.consumerjungle.org), a Wenatchee, Washington, site that offers activities for teachers, parents, and high school age kids to help them become savvy consumers; and ShareSaveSpend (www.sharesavespend.com), created by Nathan Dungan, the Minneapolis author of the excellent book Prodigal Sons and Material Girls: How Not to Be Your Child’s ATM.
The first two are cleverly produced, interactive sites, while Dungan’s promotes what we think is a healthy philosophy. It starts with teaching children the value of giving, then shows them how to save money and, finally, how to spend it wisely when they need to. We recommend all three sites, and you can probably find other good ones with a little searching.
MEDIA LITERACY
In many schools around the country, teachers help their students protect themselves from affluenza-carrying commercials by teaching them to analyze how media messages manipulate them. The concept is called “media literacy,” and in the Age of Affluenza it may be as important as learning to read. Students dissect television ads to discover the psychological techniques the ads use to persuade them to buy. They analyze what needs each advertisement suggests the product might fill, then ask if there are better, less-costly ways to meet the same needs. Increasingly, enlightened school districts require media literacy courses.
Often, the most successful combine ad analysis with video production workshops so that students learn directly the techniques that make television effective. When Malory Graham taught media literacy in Seattle, she received support from the county’s solid-waste division to teach video techniques to high school students and then have them produce their own PSAs promoting recycling and sustainable consumption. Even though Seattle has one of the best recycling rates in the United States, increased consumption means that landfills are still growing—recycling can’t keep pace with the accelerating rate of waste.
Graham’s media literacy and production classes combined the opportunity for hands-on production, which is very exciting for the students, with a greater understanding of the impact of their consumption. “I think it’s harder for advertisers to manipulate students who’ve gone through a program like this,” says Graham.2
Around the country, many students who have been exposed to media literacy are also learning about the deplorable wages and working conditions in factories that make some of the products and brands teenagers have been taught to desire. They demonstrate against child labor and sweatshops in other countries where their products are made, and they refuse to be walking billboards for global corporations.
“Today’s teens and preteens are going to be tomorrow’s revolutionaries,” predicted trend watcher Gerald Celente a decade ago. “They’re going to be very antimaterialistic.”3 Unfortunately, his prediction hasn’t come true yet. But it still might if the kids get vaccinated against affluenza.
CHAPTER 28
Political Prescriptions
Our country is set up structurally to oppose
voluntary simplicity.
—MICHAEL JACOBSON,
Marketing Madness
We are today paying the debt for the
material growth that characterized the
postwar “Golden Age”: disfigured landscapes,
polluted air and water, erosion of the
ozone layer, the greenhouse effect. Since the
Third World also needs significant growth
of its material production, only a reorientation
of the overdeveloped countries towards
a model of development centered on the
immaterial growth of free time is capable
of guaranteeing our common future.
—ALAIN LIPIETZ,
French Green Party economist
Sit down and pour yourself a cold one. This chapter is a little longer than most.
In the previous chapters we’ve been exploring voluntary personal, community, and workplace strategies for beating the affluenza bug. All are necessary and will help keep the disease in check for millions of people. But sometimes an epidemic reaches such proportions that political action is called for, usually in the form of a quarantine. We believe that point has been reached in the case of affluenza.
Thomas even wants the quarantine to begin around his state, Vermont. He’s been leading a campaign called the Second Vermont Republic, which actually calls for that state to secede from the United States, to protect its unique quality of life. Vermont may be less infected by affluenza than any other state. It’s almost Wal-Mart-free, and few other big-box stores or tacky mini-malls mar its quiet beauty. Vermont towns still have the feel of permanence and livability; citizens still participate regularly in public forums; everybody in the state has a guaranteed right to health insurance. Shopping locally and buying wholesome food is encouraged. Many Vermonters, like Thomas, who moved there because of Vermont’s quality of life, want to prevent their good life from being overtaken by affluenza.
But we can’t all live in Vermont, so we’ve got to figure out policies to turn back affluenza in every part of the country.
Despite twenty-five years of bad-mouthing that has left the American public deeply cynical about whether government can ever do anything right, we believe it can play an important role in helping create a society that is affluenza unfriendly, or, to put it in more positive terms, simplicity friendly. We line up squarely on the side of those who say our social ills won’t be cured by personal action alone.
Just as the symptoms of affluenza are many and interconnected, so must be public efforts to quarantine it. There is no silver bullet that by itself will do the trick. It will take a comprehensive strategy, at all levels of government from local to federal, built, we believe, around several key areas of action:
▪ reducing annual wo
rking hours—trading money and stuff for time
▪ restructuring the tax and earnings systems
▪ instituting corporate reform, including establishing responsibility for entire product cycles
▪ investing in a sustainable infrastructure
▪ redirecting government subsidies
▪ formulating a new concept of child protection
▪ instituting campaign-finance reform and finally,
▪ generating new ideas about economic growth
BACK TO THE ROAD NOT TAKEN
First of all, if we want to put a lid on the further spread of affluenza, we should restore a social project that topped organized labor’s agenda for half a century, then suddenly fell from grace.
In 1912, when thousands of women walked out of the textile mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts, in a famous strike, they carried banners that read We Want Bread, and Roses Too. Bread and roses—symbols for the material and nonmaterial sides of life. The Lawrence strikers needed bread—higher wages. They could barely afford to feed themselves at the time. But they also knew they needed roses—shorter hours of work, allowing time for families, art, love, beauty, spirit: time to “smell the roses.” Until World War II American labor always fought for both higher wages and shorter hours, for both bread and roses. But somehow, after the war, we got what was called “bread-and-butter unionism.” Notice the difference. Suddenly, the unions were only about wages; the roses were left to wilt. But now, Americans need roses more than ever.
Since the Second World War, Americans have been offered what economist Juliet Schor calls “a remarkable choice.” As our productivity more than doubled, we could have chosen to work half as much—or even less—and still produce the same material lifestyle we found “affluent” in the ’50s. We could have split the difference, letting our material aspirations rise somewhat but also taking an important portion of our productivity gains in the form of more free time. Instead, we put all our apples into making and consuming more.
Our friends in Europe made a different choice. They took a big part of their gains in labor productivity in the form of time. In his book Happiness, British economist and House of Lords member Richard Layard shows that, as a result, general happiness in Europe continues to increase while in the United States it stagnated after the 1950s. At the same time, general health in every European country is better than that in the United States.
Established as law in 1938, the forty-hour workweek is still our standard (though most full-time American workers average closer to 45 hours a week). By law, we could set a different standard, and we should. It need not be a one-size-fits-all standard, like a thirty-hour week of six-hour days as proposed in the 1930s (and more recently in a 1993 congressional bill written by Democratic representative Lucien Blackwell of Pennsylvania) or a thirty-two-hour week composed of four eight-hour days, though for many working Americans either of those choices would be ideal.
More important, perhaps, is to get annual working hours—now averaging about 1,850 per year1 and exceeding those even of the workaholic Japanese—under control.
Were the average workday to be six hours, we’d be putting in only about 1,500 hours a year, about the norm in western Europe. That’s an additional 350 hours— nine working weeks!—of free time. So here’s a suggestion: Set a standard working year of 1,500 hours for full time employees, keeping the forty-hour a week maximum. Then allow workers to find flexible ways to fill the 1,500 hours.
FLEXIBLE WORK REDUCTION
Some excellent international ideas for shortening working hours can be found in Anders Hayden’s little-known but important book, Sharing the Work, Sparing the Planet.
Any of these scenarios could be voluntarily agreed upon between worker and employer, but shorter-hours legislation would include stiff employer penalties for work required beyond the 1,500-hour maximum per year.
Polls have shown that half of all American workers would accept a commensurate cut in pay in return for shorter working hours.2 But the cut needn’t be based on a one-to-one ratio. Workers are more productive per hour when they work fewer hours. Absenteeism is reduced and health improves. Therefore, as W. K. Kellogg recognized in the 1930s, their thirty-hour weeks should be worth at least thirty-five hours’ pay and perhaps more. In fact, in the 1990s, Ron Healey, a business consultant in Indianapolis, persuaded several local industries to adopt what he calls the “30-40 now” plan. They offer prospective employees a normal forty-hour salary for a thirty-hour week. Increased employee productivity has made the experiment successful for most.
THE ‘TAKE BACK YOUR TIME’ CAMPAIGN
But to combat affluenza, we ought not fear trading income for free time. Beyond the reduction to 1,500 hours per year, legislation could ensure the right of workers to choose further reductions in working hours—instead of increased pay—when productivity rises, or further reductions in working hours at reduced pay, when productivity is stagnant.
In the short run, we need immediate legislation to provide time protections for American workers that resemble those that virtually every other industrial nation takes for granted. The Simplicity Forum, of which John is a Steering Committee member, has launched a national initiative called Take Back Your Time (www.timeday.org). The Simplicity Forum has joined other organizations, including Mothers Ought to Have Equal Rights (www.mothersoughttohaveequalrights.org/) and Work to Live (www.worktolive.info/index.cfm), to propose a six-point Time to Care legislative agenda:
▪ Guarantee paid childbirth leave for all parents. Today, only 40 percent of Americans are able to take advantage of the twelve weeks of unpaid leave provided by the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993.
▪ Guarantee at least one week of paid sick leave for all workers. Many Americans work while sick, lowering productivity and endangering other workers.
▪ Guarantee at least three weeks of paid annual vacation leave for all workers. Studies show that 28 percent of all female employees and 37 percent of women earning less than $40,000 a year receive no paid vacation at all.3
▪ Place a limit on the amount of compulsory overtime work that an employer can impose, with the goal being to give employees the right to accept or refuse overtime work. Hundreds of thousands of workers hardly ever see their families, and several recent industrial strikes have centered on eliminating this employer prerogative.
▪ Make Election Day a holiday, with the understanding that Americans need time for civic and political participation.
▪ Make it easier for Americans to choose part-time work. Provide hourly wage parity and protection of promotions and pro-rated benefits for part-time workers.
FALLING BEHIND THE REST OF THE WORLD
Asked about the longer-vacations idea, a staff person for presidential candidate George W. Bush, said, “That sounds great. We need that here.” But of the candidates themselves, only Ralph Nader actually endorsed the idea.
On July 2, 2004, during an appearance on PBS’s Now with Bill Moyers, Republican pollster and strategist Frank Luntz observed that a majority of “swing” voters were working women with young children. Luntz said his focus groups revealed that “lack of free time” is the number-one issue with these voters. “The issue of time matters to them more than anything else in life,” Luntz declared.
Yet President Bush paid only lip service to the issue, commenting on it in his speeches but offering no real solutions. And John Kerry, the Democratic candidate, failed to address it at all. “Shut up and work overtime” seems to be the message from American politicians of both major parties.
American public policies protecting our family and personal time fall far short of those in other countries. A recent study released by the Harvard School of Public Health, covering 168 of the world’s nations (www.globalworkingfamilies.org), concluded that “the United States lags dramatically behind all high-income countries, as well as many middle- and low-income countries, when it comes to public policies designed to guarantee adequate working conditions for families.
” The study found that
▪ 163 of 168 countries guarantee paid leave for mothers in connection with childbirth, and 45 countries offer such leave to fathers. The United States does neither.
▪ 139 countries guarantee paid sick leave. The United States does not.
▪ 96 countries guarantee paid annual (vacation) leave. The United States does not.
▪ 84 countries have laws that fix a maximum limit on the workweek. The United States does not.
▪ 37 countries guarantee parents paid time off when children are sick. The United States does not.
The Take Back Your Time campaign believes that:
America can do better. We believe there is no compelling reason for the world’s richest country to lag so far behind in so many areas when it comes to work/life balance. It is time for the United States to join all other industrial nations in guaranteeing that our nation’s tremendous productivity be used to allow Americans freedom from overwork, stress and burnout. Such stress relief will make Americans happier and healthier, and reduce the pressures on our health care system, lowering costs for all. It will also make us more productive. Studies show that job performance goes up after breaks and vacations. A healthier workplace will save money for American business, too, which loses $300 billion a year in job stress-related costs.4
WORK SHARING WHEN RECESSIONS COME
Plans for spreading work around by shortening hours should begin now for another reason: When the next recession does come, will we simply say, “Sayonara, tough luck” to those whose jobs are lost? There is a better way. Say a company needs to reduce production by 20 percent and believes it must lay off one-fifth of its workforce. What if, instead, it cut everybody’s workweek by one day?