Time Without Work
by Walli F. Leff & Marilyn G. Haft

Here is essential reading for CLAWS members and sympathizers. We have taken the liberty of highlighting (in bold and italics) some of the ideas quoted here which are most relevant to our mission.

The authors of Time Without Work traveled across the USA in order to collect personal stories from people from all walks of life, in an attempt to find out about what it's like not to work in a society where working is such an intrinsic part of our identity. They interviewed work-at-home spouses, volunteers, office workers and construction workers who've been laid off, retired people, welfare moms, and many others.

Unemployment statistics are hardly enough to tell the whole story. This book takes an honest look at the way we define ourselves by what we do, and examines the larger repercussions of such thinking as well as the impact on individual lives. In their conclusion they assert that "only profound economic and political changes can solve this country's complex labor problems."

About their findings after completing the interviews, the authors state:

"We found that people who seemed to be making the most of their experience not working had a transcendent attitude toward money: they were not obsessed by money and did not consider it of prime importance in their lives. Their point of view was rooted in a secure belief that things woudl fall into place one way or another--that one simply would not starve or go homeless or be obliged to become a different sort of person just because of a few dollars.

By no means were the people who had this attitude all financially secure. A good number who did not know where their next month's rent was coming from displayed not the least worry about money, while some people who were, in a word, rich, had great anxiety when we raised a merely hypothetical discussion about reduced income.

The people who had a transcendent attitude toward money had not buried their heads in the sand refusing to deal with money problems in a realistic way. They were not immune to worry when nothing but the lonely thud of a few copper pennies could be heard in the bottom of the piggy bank. Nor did their outlook doom them to a stark, spartan existence. In fact, many felt that good food well prepared, travel, and living in a comfortable, aesthetically pleasing environment were essential for feeding the spirit and they made it a lifestyle priority to have these things. The prime resource they had available was that they had rejected the prevailing social value of permitting one's life to be determined by economic considerations. The people with a transcendent attitude had a strong sense of who they were, what they believed in, and what they wanted to do, and did not permit money to interfere with their essential principles or goals. Transcending money as the organizing principle in life can spur a wealth of creativity."

Commenting on our concept of "free time", they state:

"This society cultivates a basically negative concept of free time by default, viewing it as time free from work. And work is so consuming and wearing, that most people's so-called 'free' time is actually accounted for, assigned to keeping the body fit, the house together, and personal business afloat. Scattered hours left over are jealously kept empty for recuperation."

How do our fears about job loss and deprivation keep us trapped? Here is their perspective:

"The fear of deprivation--of being without money, without housing or fuel for heat or transportation, without an identity or deprived of self-esteem--has already been stimulated and is being pandered to shamelessly by those interests which stand to gain the most from it. If such fear, the classic mechanism by which exploitative control is emplaced, were to spread on a large social scale, it would make us alarmingly vulnerable to authoritarian control."

In a chapter aptly titled "Toward a Natural Way of Working", the authors provide a much-needed positive outlook for those who are "not working":

"Considering how hard it can be to get along in this society without working, even rigid adherents to the work ethic might see that those who refuse to spend away their energy for the enrichment of a few strangers who control the workplace might be making their choice not from parasitical laziness, but from courageous, if off-beat, self-respect."

Referring to Karl Marx's concept of alienated labor, Leff and Haft have this to say:

"Alienated labor is a far cry from work that is self-managed and integrated into the whole of life. By no means is it a 'natural' activity. To do it requires a strong incentive, a strong fear of the consequences of refusing to do it, or the resigned belief that to risk doing something economically less secure is not worth the trying."

On "The Work Ethic's Checkered Past":

"Forming identity through occupation or profession is as much a product of industrial society as wall-to-wall carpeting and rush hour traffic jams. And just as they have accepted slow-moving lines of cars as part of daily life, people caught up in the routines of modern life have also taken work-based identity for granted. "What do you do?" we are asked when we meet somebody new. We have been confronted with one or another form of that question since childhood, when we were expected to have a ready answer to the question "What do you want to be when you grow up?" But work-based identity is not a universal part of the human condition, nor has it ever been."

The heart of this book is the interviews, where each person is quoted in their own words (no editing). This makes for some very poignant and moving accounts. For example:

"In addition to food, clothing, and shelter, you need love and you need work in order to feel fulfilled. Now, work doesn't have to be wage-slavery employment, but you need work. I could find things to do that I would call work, but I need to pay rent and buy food. Clothing has to be bought and shelter, too, so you're faced with the necessity of combining your work with a job, and a job is not the same thing as work. Most people don't even have the privilege of finding that out, but if you manage to find yourself some unalienated work, you can understand what I mean."

"My education limited the possibilities I would consider. It never crossed my mind to do anything except as a salaried employee of some company, which is absurd. It took me a long time to realize that the reason I have trouble finding the solution to the problem is that there isn't a real solution: the game is rigged against me. A few people can win, but if enough people do win, they'll change the rules again so that it becomes harder."

"The main function of education is to lead people to expect a better deal than society has any intention of giving."

"No matter how well qualified you look on your resume, after your second year out of work they say, "There must be something wrong with this person if he hasn't been able to get a job within this time. I don't know what it is and I don't want to take the trouble to find out, but obviously there must be alcohol or drugs or he hears little voices or something."

"I'm very privileged when it comes to deciding what to do to make money--I have choices, I have options. There are millions of people who don't have that luxury--who have to worry about having a roof over their heads or don't know where their next meal is coming from. Their only option is a job and jobs are a scarce commodity these days. When people have that sense of desperation, any kind of job looks desirable. I'm very sympathetic to people in that situation, but I don't look upon working that way.

You could probably say I don't believe in work. I consider work an artificial concept. People should not have to fight to do the kind of work that is done in factories. I don't think work like that corresponds with human dignity. As much as I identify with the need for workers to have better conditions, I feel that the problem is, rather, a much larger, complex, overall one of changing the whole productive system of the society and changing our ideas of work."

"I was always ambivalent about teaching in the university. I believed that I was lending credence to a system that really did not deserve my support or the support of the students. I found it hard to identify with the role of the university as a factory--an assembly line--producing uniform products for the larger, post-university institutions of society."

"It has been ten months since my last full-time job and I've become absolutely terrified at the thought of going back to work for a company. You get terrifically caught up in the con. It's like walking on the side of the street where everybody's coming in the other direction and you have to move over, otherwise you're going to be mowed down."

"You fight it, then one day you realize that you're worried about being late to the office. It's not because you're worried about losing your job; somehow you get conditioned to feel these things, so you get caught up into it, even though you don't want to."

"Most people opt not to be in control--maybe not consciously--and they turn over the control of their lives to someone else. To me that is scary."

"When I was working I was regimented. You get up, you go to work, and you come home and forget about what you did. You fill in the time idly until you have to get up and go to work the next day. You live for the weekend and try to cram as much enjoyment as you can into two days because you know the next five are just a drag."

Leff and Haft have documented a way of thinking that CLAWS would like to spread. In their conclusion, they state,

"Building a humanistic and progressive new system will be very difficult if the public does not have readily available to it information about both relevant and outmoded values concerning work and both adaptive and maladaptive reactions to not working. For only with such knowledge will large numbers of people come to believe that individuals can exercise control over their own lives."

CLAWS considers the dissemination of such information central to our mission as an organization, and is pleased to give Time Without Work an unhesitating five rating.