Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, October 19, 1994 TAG: 9411150051
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A11 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GARY CROSS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Management charges that labor, taking advantage of the high demand for GM cars, forced the company to recall workers. The company wants to avoid hiring because, even with bonus pay rates, overtime is more cost-effective than hiring permanent workers with expensive benefit packages.
Naturally, the unions want GM and other big companies to restore jobs. After all, they have eliminated a quarter of their employees over the past decade. But it's not only altruism that leads these workers to strike against overtime. UAW officials explain that long hours are undermining safety and making employees sick. The lure of time-and-a-half pay has faded. Employees have been forced to work 60-hour weeks, including three Saturdays a month. Workers complain of burnout and repetitive stress injuries. Their spouses are fed up and they have no time to care for their children.
The GM strike points to a new phenomenon - a growing awareness among workers of the trade-off between high wages and family time. This is not an isolated case. In August, New York City correction officers demanded that the Giuliani administration cut back on obligatory overtime. They complained that members were being forced to serve 16-hour shifts for three or even four days in a row. Union official Peter Meringolo called overtime ``blood money,'' earned at the expense of family life. Last month, a USAir flight attendant was fired for complaining about being forced to work an overtime flight when she had a sick child to care for. She has brought her case to court.
To be sure, it's unusual for labor to protest long hours. The last time unions seriously pursued a national reduction in the work week was in 1938; they demanded a 30-hour week and settled for 40. Has something changed? One factor is the emergence of the two-income family. For both men and women, overtime can place an unbearable strain on a life already stretched to the limit. Today, overtime does not merely mean that the father comes home after the kids are in bed. Now it means that no one is home to watch the kids.
This dispute also points to a larger issue - a gradual but general assault upon the right to family time. Earlier in this century, shift work was rare. Husbands may have worked 48 or 50 hours a week, but most still had evenings with their families. Shops were closed on Sundays and in many places employers shut their doors on a weekday afternoon, so that employees could have the personal time that many others had on Saturdays. Several years ago, shopkeepers in a small Pennsylvania town gave up this tradition as a concession to ``progress'' (and, I suspect, to the competition from the neighboring discount mall). They had forgotten that free time was once considered ``progress.''
Our society preaches ``family values.'' Yet we also worship an economy that works around the clock. We treat each other as individuals who function only in the marketplace. We buy and sell each other's time without recognizing that we also have families and the responsibilities that go with them. Even the trade unions seem almost embarrassed to support family time. The women's movement has been slow to respond as well. By focusing on job security and equal opportunity, perhaps these groups have ignored a real problem of ordinary men and women - balancing the needs for time and money.
Of course, many wage-earners seek overtime. And I cannot imagine that Americans would be willing to go back to mall-free Sundays. But let's be honest with ourselves: We cannot have family values without family time. Personal life should be treated with the same honor that we give to profits, purchasing power and work.
Gary Cross is professor of history at Pennsylvania State University and author of ``Time and Money: The Making of Consumer Culture.'' He wrote this for Newsday.
-L.A. Times-Washington Post News Service
by CNB