i'm your host valerie to rico and tonight we're going to take a detour from our monthly series christianity in the public square to talk about time our guest is john de graff he's a movie a documentary producer and author and the executive director of take back your time he's going to talk to us tonight about his perception that americans are actually literally killing themselves with the long hours we work to be able to buy all of our stuff thank you very much for joining us tonight it's a pleasure to have you here pleasure to be on the show thank you valorie so john when i first approached you about the show we were thinking about doing a show on consumerism it fits the season we hear constantly speculation about consumers in to be pulling out their pocketbooks this year particularly or not we've heard horror stories about people being trampled and injured or even killed and in the quest for cheap goods but you insisted that talking about time was even more important tell us why well it's not the consumerism isn't in them important thing and i've written a book affluenza about that subject and i've been very very concerned about it but i think we in some ways have to emphasize the ways in which americans have been hurt by our focus in this country on producing and consuming stuff and i think the most serious way that we suffer from that is time poverty and overwork in this country and the hours that we work in comparison to other rich countries other industrial countries and so forth are really extreme and numbers can you kosher make sampo sure roughly americans work about three hundred hours more per year than the average western european well that's three hundred out as rough weeks or so eight nine weeks difference of some some countries the difference is five hundred hours when you're looking at the netherlands or norway or countries like that but you know we get the payback for that doesn't that make us more productive isn't that why we're out in front economically it makes more productive if we look at the total annual production of stuff yes it doesn't make us more productive by the hour and there are a number of  european countries where people are actually more productive per hour than we are what do you make of that well i think we were burned down at the end of these these long workdays and so forth but we keep doing it we do have the grossest domestic product in the world is no question about that we we produce the most stuff and yet if if that's all the competition rides on then i guess we're number one but we're also number one in a lot of other things that aren't so good you know we're saying we're we're paying a price for that yet we're not if it's not free we're paying a huge price for it and we're paying a price in several areas we can go in each one of them but health is for fundamental we're also paying a price in in family let's start with community ok well one of the things that we see as we work longer and longer hours that there is less time to volunteer and be a part of our community and we've seen some declines along that along that line not in terms of the number of americans who volunteer actually probably as many americans volunteer today as ever but they volunteer for much shorter periods of time little bit here a little bit there to kind of long term the timing right you know i do that and i but doesn't that mostly have to do with with having families in which there are two working adults i think you know as a parent i had the luxury of having time off when my kids started school and i was struck for the first time in my life by how much of what function in our community in our society was because there was part of the population that could go to the bank during the day time that could kind of fill gaps in the school system that could sit on nonprofit boards etc etc absolutely true a generation ago about one third of moms were also in the workplace today it's about two thirds if we look at families as a whole depending on who statue look at families two parent families are spending anywhere from seven five hundred to seven hundred more hours per year in the workplace with a lot of time that's in the workplace and that's time taken away from the time they can spend at home now i don't want to suggest by that at all that i think the man should be working and women should be staying home with the kids i think we ought to be able to find some ways to balance that for example if it was possible for one parent to to provide for a family with with the kids and everything on a forty hour schedule a generation ago why is it that we in a country that's now at least twice as rich in terms of what we can produce our productivity the kind of stuff that we turn didn't even exist it's a combination of two things it's a combination of the fact that we do want more and we have been encouraged by advertising to believe that the good life is the goods life and the morse more stuff the better and that's what makes the american dream but it's also  part and parcel of the fact that since the mid one nine hundred seventy s inequality in the united states has expanded by leaps and bounds so when you say inequality you're talking about this the divide between rich and poor the gap between rich and poor which was somewhere in the middle roughly among industrial nations in one thousand nine hundred seventy is now by far the widest of all industrial nation the widest the well the industrial absolutely we now have a situation where one percent of the american population is earning as much income in a year as the bottom fifty percent together so ios who are making four hundred times as much as the average worker where they made thirty times as much in one thousand nine hundred seventy all of this the result of a philosophy that said you know what we want to do is we want to grow this economy by cutting taxes and taking on getting rid of regulations and privatizing all these things and then won't suddenly happen to be this sort of trickle down to everybody nothing trickle down everything gushed up it went on the bottom to the top six months ago i could have argued with you that that was good good for everyone that that deregulation you know creates more efficiency invites more ingenuity and creativity but it's kind of hard and i am right now kind of hard now you see the house of trickle down falling down i mean it's true you know that the church of market worship is collapsing and it's a darn not a moment too soon in fact it's way too late we've got of turn this around we have to have a philosophy that is not about the you're on your ownership society which is has been the current philosophy but is this is the that says we're all in this together we sink or swim together doesn't mean that everybody's going to have exactly the same income but when we have these kind of wide gaps gaps it's really not good for anyone and it has huge impacts on health and other things which i can go into and we should you know one of the things i get frustrated by is the fact that people seem to forget that economic enterprise is for the purpose of serving human well being and that for the most part it has been a tremendous it has served tremendously in that regard we do not live like our our cave dwelling ancestors and we have much longer life spans we have much happier lifespans we have many more options but there's all of these other you know of course anything that that powerful for good also is powerful and destructive ways and and we have done so little recently to look at the question of is our economic activity serving human well being yeah and when i criticize market fundamentalism which is really what this is about this church this church thing i am not in that sense anti capitalist what i think we need back in one thousand nine hundred sixty eight when the czechs rebelled against the russians they there they demanded socialism with a human face what i think we need today is capitalism with a human face and we have some good examples good models of that when we look to some of the countries in western europe what do those what does capitalism with a human face look like w capitalism of the human face for one thing understands that people need leisure time as part of their lives that we are not built as human beings to simply work all the time and then consume all the time that we're not working every other almost every other country in the world for example starts kids out on the right track because they give their parents some time to spend with those kids paid by law there are only four countries in the world today the do not that's there is there is no more now in terms of rich countries most of those countries not only give mothers considerable amount of time off they also give fathers a considerable time when to turn back about that because i can't help but think as embarrassing as that is that there must be a lot of places where that is time off in name only you know i kind of think about the broad swath of people who are working in latin america working in africa it's just hard for me to believe that women are actually getting paid time off well it's true i mean it certainly doesn't apply to everyone in those countries and there are ways that but an amazing number of people actually do get these things maybe a little bit less on that end of things but for instance vacation time and things like that you know i've been in brazil i've been many places in latin america and workers actually get time off you know sometimes just the whole business closes down and things like that and a lot of them do get the family and when we look at it it's hard to compare apples and oranges to compare us with countries who are desperately poor but when we compare ourselves to the other wealthy countries in the world there are very few people who fall through the cracks workers do get these benefits wouldn't wouldn't the folks that you're calling the people who worship at the at the free market alter wouldn't they say that is socialism in those other countries where they can call it when they want i don't believe in socialism because these are countries that are fundamentally capitalist based the great majority of the economy is based on businesses and those businesses happen to be taxed more than businesses in this country and more money goes into various kinds of safety nets and infrastructure and public transportation and all those kind of things but those things also benefit those businesses it's no accident really that  it's the united states that whose business suffers from the enormous trade deficit it's not germany or the european countries that provide these kind of things somehow they're able to compete very well in the global economy the germans have the largest trade surplus the other european countries have large trade surpluses the reason is because the state as a whole provides for things like health care in those countries here we want businesses to do that and it's an insane way to do it quite quite frankly that's the kind of thing that makes our business is noncompetitive not giving people some attorney lever some vacation time you mentioned health and i know there's been conversation about whether one of the problems in terms with our competitiveness is the fact that health is on the backs of the employers that we haven't found a way to kind of equitably create a health care system that allows people to move between jobs that allows the risk to be distributed that allows us to simplify the whole for profit model but you also are have been talking about the you are saying that our work ethic that thing we inherited from the puritans is actually causing us health problems are there specific kinds of is there data is there research about specific kinds of health problems the date is tremendous and there's some new data that's coming out there will be coming out actually in the next two days frankly from the centers for disease control just enormous impact of overwork for example on coronary disease but we can look at a number of things here's an example if you live in your western europe today you have only about fifty five percent as much chance as as an american of developing heart disease hypertension or type two diabetes when i would after the age of fifty that's an enormous thing that has tremendous impact we know that eighty percent of our health care budget is spent on treating just those diseases those are a lot of diseases though that people talk about being related to obesity i'm not a health expert but isn't that just about the fact that americans are fat or part of the fact that americans are fatter has to do with the fact that we don't have the time to exercise we don't have the time to eat properly we eat a lot of fast food because we're in a hurry we do all of those kind of things it has to do with a lot more things though than obesity one of the things we know is that for example the most important thing you can do for your health is to have strong relationships and connections with other people it's a given in the schools of public health that connection is important we americans are all becoming the loneliest people on the planet the average american now say says they have only two friends that they really can count on to tell their problems t and a quarter of americans say they have none at all out and anywhere where it counts i'm a psychologist right and well we see this we see depression here at levels double average those in western europe whether it's anxiety or depression or those kind of things we see heart disease and these other things at double the levels i mean that that's there's an enormous impact of that we have almost double the levels even of people in the united kingdom who are also getting fairly obese they don't have very good diets they you know the fact that the they live longer and are less likely to have heart attacks has nothing to do with the fish and chips it has to do with the fact that they socialize much more with other people they exercise more and their lives are less anxious and stressed because they have a social safety net that they can count on and they have time off to get four five six weeks vacation all of these kind of safety valves that are absolutely essential to people who are working these kind of hours well and what i've noticed about exercise when i've been over there is that it's not like i don't get the sense that people go to gyms and workout more than we do it that they walk place and walk places exactly right well or bicycle although not so much in the kingdom but  continental europe people really bicycle you know the netherlands i mean you know you see an eighty year olds on bicycles in the netherlands it's a common thing which i guess does die right back into your time frame in that the doctor or the dutch work less than anyone in the world the norwegians are a close second and one of the reasons why the dutch work less than anyone else in the world is because they have laws they have what they call the hours adjustment act which allows anybody in the netherlands no matter who they are to reduce their hours of work and their will keep their hourly salary their benefits will be pro rated so they're going to make a little less money and they're going to have a little less benefits and they keep their health care that's an enormous you know they're not going to lose their job they're not going to lose their livelihood it's not frightening you can say maybe i'll work three or four days a week maybe i can afford to do that i'll take a little less income as long as it doesn't throw me out on the streets well that law is now spreading to the rest of europe it's a huge step forward we would never consider such a thing and yet ironically i can't help thinking how great that might be at a time when our unemployment rate is skyrocketing if people had permission to work fewer hours to live a little more simply oh yeah but to be with you know to be with their kids to be in their gardens to and have then what it does to create space for other people to work yes in fact there's no reason in the world why we couldn't go to a thirty hour thirty two hour work  for eight hour day days today with very little cut actually in income we'd probably have to reduce income a little bit but actually our productivity per hour would be would be higher and it would probably we'd probably be producing what we didn't thirty six hours before so if we if we went to two for a four day week that would have some great advantages in terms of energy savings in terms of the congesting the street the highways other kinds of things but we don't want to go to four day weeks with ten hour days because number one people aren't productive that long and number two when they have those long days comes very difficult for families with small children and other people to take their responsibilities and during those days of work people are to be even more likely to use the fast food not exercise do all those kind of things we need four eight hour days at least as an option for people who don't have to enforce it right now want to tell people you can't you can't work but if we could give that as an option we could open up many more jobs we would have people who are healthier and happier and yet when i when i talk to people who are in business where there actually are job sharing opportunities what i hear is there's a lot of efficiency lost that having two people at twenty hours a piece is not equivalent to having one person in forty hours well i've heard the opposite talk to the seattle times for example where they've had this kind of thing and where the editor told me that he basically thinks he vary from different someone's job but again i'm not necessarily suggesting going to twenty hours i'm just suggesting that we don't necessarily need to maintain and besides that i mean who works even a forty hour we can be more the average is now becoming forty five forty forty six work is care carried home people are doing doing you know being expected to be on call on the weekend they're being expected to be on call when they're on vacation if they get any vacation i mean it's it's you know we're talking now people we have along with a couple of other countries we've just about we're just about on top for the number of people working over forty eight hours well so you know it's it's  staggering and we just as you say let's stop let's think about this is this good for us this is good for our children is this good for our health we don't understand the cost to our society of doing this is far greater than the cost would be of turning that around the cost for example of not having vacation by law in this country is far greater in terms of the health costs the productivity loss all of the depression all of those kinds of things that it would be to simply do it plus people lie they lie to get time off they take they do take leave they make only excuses and and then what that does is it creates at shea it changes the relationship between employer employee absolutely absolutely and it shouldn't be necessary and you know when you say look at vacation for example which is clearly a subject that that i've been interested in people people laughed the vacation with us lets the slacker thing it couldn't possibly matter vacation is hugely important people who don't take regular vacations if they're male are at least thirty or forty percent more likely to have heart disease they're twenty some percent more likely to die of any cause early if they're female they're fifty percent more likely if they're female they're twice as likely to suffer from depression if they don't take a vacation for six years or more they are eight times as likely to suffer from heart disease and depression and these these are staggering numbers and people don't even are not aware of them there so they are staggering numbers they cost us they cost our system so much and we all pay the cost so business things all i'm going to get away with not giving vacation to people and stuff like that from my bottom line but meanwhile those social costs are handed to all of us you know same thing like wal mart doesn't provide health insurance and the state of california or somebody else has to pay for it this whole we can't allow that to happen and you know we all pay more we all pay more for instance when we don't do something as simple as family leave and look hard it was in the state of washington to get a piddly five week family leave bill through which still is not being funded i mean it's still you know so hard to get that through but we all pay more for that what we find out is that when you don't give family leave to parents kids are way more likely now they're way more likely even to die  they live there they bond more poorly they do less well in school they are sicker they're more likely to suffer from a d h d and other kinds of things they're more likely to get in trouble over the long run canada that you know canada right next door they give parents a year off parents can share a year of paid leave when they have a child the canadians have found that doing that saves them so much money on children's health that they're not talking about expanding that even further john you're saying we could learn something from the canadians really learn something from a whole lot of other countries and that's something i think we're ready to do i think that's one of the hidden messages of the barack obama victory is that we're tired of a president who just tells us we're number one we don't have to pay attention to anything else we've seen what happens our economy is falling like it like the house of cards i think it's so exciting to have a new president now where we see around the world people are really excited about this they like us again and we can like them in return and part of that ought to be for both of us to learn from each other america has good ideas other people want to learn things from us we're  better than many countries when it comes to solving issues of diversity and other things but we are not nearly as good when it comes to things like work life balance and those are the kinds of things that i'm talking about we're running out of time here i'd like to hear something about your organization take back your time all take back a campaign around for six years our website is time day dot org we celebrate take back your time day on october twenty fourth it falls roughly nine weeks before the end of the year and was symbolic the number of weeks more than americans work it's also the so what you're saying is those nine weeks are the amount of time that the average european or get going eighty and use that word again would have offered if they had worked the number of hours that american had by that time because canadians are somewhere between america and europeans but but we also found out that october twenty fourth is the anniversary of the date in one thousand nine hundred thirty eight when congress passed the fair labor standards act which gave us the forty hour work week and the minimum wage and was actually supposed to give us a vacation law as well but that part that part got dropped so seventy years ago now we think the time has come in seventy years we ought to be able to work less than forty hours not more you know have a minimum wage that's a living wage for people instead of less than what it was in the one nine hundred sixty s and we ought to have a cation time well and we have a bunch of other things too but you know this is this is a place to start people say well cost will cost too much the real issue is it costs way too much not to do these things our families are suffering time is a family value our health is suffering our communities are suffering our environment is suffering we need to think about this and now we're in a position in american history where we can have a transformation to deal with these things time as a family value i love that what is and how do i mean how do you have a strong family how do you have connection and relationships without time somebody somebody in the industry needs to explain that  am sitting here tonight on a friday evening and i am to know what you're talking about yeah i think we've both got kids who are doing their own thing yeah well at least mine is old enough now  yeah but absolutely and you know and it is a struggle and i think time i admit i mean it's been much easier for me to to live ecologically and simply and not be a big consumer i'm not a big consumer it's much more of a struggle for me to not overwork and do those things i think in some ways we're also culturally trapped in that well and you know we're sitting here voluntarily we've taken time because this is something we value deeply independent of whether we're getting paid for it independent of our day to day kind of workload we have choices which also is related to mental health and i think part of what you're talking about is the fact that a huge number of people in this country feel like they don't have that luxury that they're working to the point that they're utterly exhausted they don't have time to be spend with their kids they don't have time to enjoy and they many of them don't even have the time to kind of do anything other than snap at them that's right and they have very little control in their work and control is another big part of stress in our heart disease and so forth and if you don't have much control in your work then it's all the more important that you have some kinds of safety valves like time john thank you very much for being with us my pleasure thank you