| Oct. 24th: Take Back Your Time Day |
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Friday, October 24th, 2008 07:43:04 GMT |
| Finances |
Today (October 24th) happens to be "Take Back Your Time Day". I first heard about this a few days ago when I ran across an interesting article called Working to Live has Been Overtaken by Living to Work by Barbara Sumner Burstyn.
That article contains plenty of interesting info. According to it, Take Back Your Time Day (Oct. 24th) is the day when "the average American will have worked the equivalent of a full European work year." And, apparently, Americans "spend nearly nine full weeks more a year on the job than their counterparts in Western Europe."
The article also states that "Americans work more now than they did in the 1950s," (...) "more than medieval peasants did, and more than the citizens of any other industrial country."
I knew things were bad, as far as how much people have to work just to scrape by, but I didn't know things were that bad! I wonder if things have gotten even worse since that article was released - it's a bit old, dated September 22, 2003.
Here's another interesting article: PBS.org - Livelyhood - How the Weekend Was Won, by Joe Robinson, editor of Escape magazine.
I found this quote particularly interesting: "Opponents of a mandated vacation law always trot out the myth that it would hurt productivity. While the United States does rule in productivity, it's not by much compared to Germany, for instance. The difference in output per hour is almost negligible and Germans manage to do it in two months less work. Think about that one."
Lastly, here's the most official-looking website I was able to find related to Take Back Your Time Day: TimeDay.org.