An article about days off and such

[conuly]

Here.

As Demands on Workers Grow, Groups Push for Paid Family and Sick Leave
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

Tanya Frazier, the office manager of a 50-person payroll management company in Burbank, Calif., received a call last September from the elementary school her daughter attends, telling her to pick up her flu-stricken 9-year-old.

But when she stayed home from work the next day to care for her daughter, she was fired.

Just why is a matter of dispute. Ms. Frazier said she was shocked, because she had missed work only a handful of days that year. Her boss, Jerry Schwartz, said in an interview that he was tired of her taking so many days off.

Now Ms. Frazier's case and others like it are being used by a Seattle-based coalition known as Take Back Your Time and various advocacy groups to argue for more paid time off for American workers. Saying that too many workers feel overstressed by demands on their time, the groups are calling for a broad shift in attitudes that would allow Americans to devote more time to their families, to spirituality and to their communities.

Take Back Your Time and its allies are seeking legislation in 21 states to give workers paid sick days or paid family leave to take care of infants or seriously ill family members. In Washington State recently, the group earned a preliminary victory when committees in the House and Senate passed a bill calling for five weeks' paid family leave for workers, which would be financed by having workers pay a tax of two cents per hour worked, about $40 a year.

Take Back Your Time is optimistic about a victory in Washington State, but it is less confident about winning on paid family leave in many other states. If the group makes progress in several states, its leaders say they plan to begin pushing state legislatures to guarantee workers three weeks of paid vacation each year.

Women's groups are also promoting paid family leave and paid sick time. Spurred by the National Partnership for Women and Families and by 9 to 5, the National Association of Working Women, several dozen Democratic members of Congress are planning to introduce a bill this month that would guarantee workers seven paid days off each year for when they or their children are ill.

"A lot of people are shocked when they hear that almost half the work force doesn't have paid sick days," said Debra Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women and Families. "There's something about paid sick leave that's almost as American as baseball and apple pie."

The groups argue that these are rare issues that can unite liberals and conservatives: those on the left interested in better working conditions and those on the right who want to promote family values.

"These are issues that cross party lines," said John de Graaf, national coordinator of Take Back Your Time, a left-leaning coalition of public health specialists, family and women's groups, environmentalists, union members and church groups. "There's a lot of potential Republican interest. This is completely about family values. People need time to have strong marriages, strong families and strong communities. When people don't have enough time, families can break down."

Liberals and conservatives are finding that they share common ground when it comes to changing attitudes on issues like having parents spend more time with their children. But for liberals, earning conservatives' support for legislation mandating vacations or paid sick days is not easy, making the battle in Congress and in many states an uphill struggle. Conservatives' corporate allies generally oppose such proposals. "Our members are decidedly against mandates from the federal government," said Patrick Lyden, a lobbyist with the National Federation of Independent Business.

Catherine H. Myers, executive director of the Family and Home Network, based in Virginia, said a preferable solution, instead of enacting mandates, would be for parents to quit or to reduce their paid employment to spend more time caring for their children. "When we consider what our children really need, how can we afford not to give them our time?" Ms. Myers said.

The Bush administration and many conservatives favor a different approach to helping overstretched workers: a bill on comp time that has failed in the past two sessions of Congress. Under current law, most employees who work more than 40 hours a week must be paid time and a half, but under the proposal, an employee who works more than 40 hours in one week could choose between overtime and comp time.

Many Democrats and labor unions oppose the bill, saying that it would cut workers' wages by pressuring them to give up paid overtime and that it would give managers too much control over when employees take comp time.

According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, American workers put in 1,792 hours on average in 2003 - three full-time weeks more than British workers and nine weeks more than French and German workers.

United States Census data point to increased stress on women. The average middle-class married woman works 500 hours, or 12.5 weeks, more per year than in 1979.

"The No. 1 concern that women have today - even more than security - is a lack of time," said Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster.

Take Back Your Time and the Massachusetts Council of Churches worked closely last fall with the Lord's Day Alliance, an Atlanta-based group, to urge congregants through fliers and sermons to take "four windows of time" over a month to relax and spend time with their families.

"We're very concerned about the 24/7 commercialization of our society and people feeling stressed from working so many hours," said the council's executive director, the Rev. Diane Kessler.

The Lord's Day Alliance, which has long promoted observing the Sabbath, helped finance the campaign and hopes to spread it to other states.

"The needs are the same whether you're poor or rich, Republican or Democrat. You need time to be set aside," said Tim Norton, executive director of the Lord's Day Alliance. "From a Christian perspective, from purely a religious perspective, we believe that the Bible clearly teaches, Old Testament and New, that God created this rhythm of life that must include down time, a time to set aside and basically stop."

W. Bradford Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia who has written extensively about evangelicals, said bridging the divide over how to give Americans more time will not be easy.

"Many hard-working, rank-and-file evangelicals would support legislation guaranteeing paid sick days or paid vacations," Professor Wilcox said. "But evangelical leaders will not go along with these ideas because their close allies in the business community are so firmly against it."

Todd Rakoff, a professor at Harvard Law School who has written about Americans' time squeeze, said, "There is something here that could be bridged, but someone has to grab hold of this issue and figure out a way to make political capital out of it."

Comments

[leora.livejournal.com]

Time spent in school is not all of their time that is controlled. When I went to school I was expected to do homework over every single break other than summer, and some schools assigned work over the summer. Children need some vacations, and going 9 months straight without a single break is not healthy. Plus many children do not have summers free, but are expected to do various things. Older children often need to work during the summer break.

[conuly]

Children don't go nine months straight without a single break. Aside from various half-days, school trips, federal and Jewish holidays, they get winter breaks, mid-winter recesses, spring breaks, and other holidays.

[leora.livejournal.com]

No, that's my point - they don't. Many teachers figure out how many days off you have and assign more work to meet that time. How do you think I went 9 years of my life sleep-depped? I always had work to do during my breaks, other than summer. And I spent my weekend desperately trying to catch up on sleep. And from what I see with my nephews, they are only pushing to increase the homework load on younger students.

Homework is being condemned by many as classist, since it broadens the divide between rich and poor. The rich kids can afford to take the time to do it. The poor kids are often working or taking care of siblings. I was rich, but even so, I was given so much work to do that I did not have any breaks in high school other than summer. None.

My journals from that time period are very boring. Constant litanies of me being exhausted and hungry. Because I spent years with it being the norm to not have enough sleep and not be allowed to eat, because I was in school.

I also had a part-time job babysitting. Which wasn't strenuous, but used up time. But I really didn't feel I could drop it as I used the money I made to buy food, and I really needed the food. This is not unusual. Lots of kids are in situations like this. It's just most of them deal with it by blowing off school,and I was dedicated. I seriously believe this is a significant contributing factor to why I am now crippled.

[conuly]

That doesn't mesh with my recollection at all. There wasn't really overwhelming amounts of homework, or much homework at all. Granted, I never did my homework anyway, but it never was very much, and certainly not enough to leave people tired. And we didn't really get more over the break either. We got some (but never over summer, which always strikes me as bizarre), but often that was only, say, two day's worth of homework for a one week break.

[leora.livejournal.com]

I was priveledged and went to a "good school". It was a public school that was very highly esteemed. This is how I came to overhear two girls talking in a high school chem class about one of the girls having had a nervous breakdown.

What bothers me is that this is usually seen as what we're aiming for. Afterall, I went to a good school, got good grades at good courses, learned a lot, got into and graduated from a good college. Beautiful happy sucess with a hard-working good kid. This is the model we praise. But it's stupid, and it's easy to start to view it as right. I do believe kids need to be educated and challenged, but some places are tkaing this too far and turning it into sucking all of the time and life out of children.

When I subbed in good schools, the main thing that hit me was how much energy the Elementary School students had and how utterly exhausted the high school students were. It's not happening everywhere, but it is happening. And it's another thing that I feel is wrong. Everyone - young or old - needs breaks. And children are especially vulnerable because their parents have the ability to schedule them without their consent. Yuppie parents often overschedule their kids.

[conuly]

I went to Stuy. The first year they moved into the new building, three people jumped from the fifth floor outside area. That's why it's been closed ever since. People have been hit by cars crossing West Street (students are only ever allowed to use the bridge now, not that anybody seemed to remember this fact after orientation), and I suspect that this may not have been completely an accident - though the traffic on that street is killer.

And, if anything, the teachers were more lenient with homework due to their belief that, after all, we were at Stuy, the other teachers were probably overworking us anyway.

(Of course, that didn't stop the overachiever-types there from doing extra work anyway, but that's all their fault if they do more than the assignment asked for)

[leora.livejournal.com]

That's cool. :) I'm sure there are good schools out there that actually do teach a lot without overwhelming the students. I just know there are schools out there that are taking up unreasonable amounts of time. And it wasn't all time spent learning, because dropping down a level generally wouldn't help. It was time spent proving you knew the work. Some of it was time spent learning, and I approve of that. But far too much time spent proving you knew what you were doing.

I remember one of the assignments I never finished was for math class. We had a little notebook and about a dozen practice tests for the standardized test we'd have to take at the end of the year. We were supposed to do all of the practice tests over the course of some period of time. This is overkill. We still had other work and assignments and were also supposed to do multiple complete practice exams on our own time.

[cumaeansibyl.livejournal.com]

Honestly, part of that exhaustion has to do with the ridiculous way they work scheduling in public school systems. Why on earth do little kids start school at 9 when they're usually up at 6 or 7 AM naturally, while adolescents -- who are pretty much medically proven to be night owls -- end up having to start school at 7:30? It doesn't make sense to me. I wouldn't have been nearly as tired at school if I'd been able to start at 9 instead of 7:30, even if I had the same amount of work otherwise.

Also, I do think your experience is somewhat atypical. I went to a decent public high school -- that is, it had good funding and good teachers, but it wasn't designed for higher achievers -- and we didn't have nearly as much work as you're describing.

Finally, I don't think that having schools schedule more breaks is the answer to parental overscheduling. Parents need to start thinking of their kids as children, not in terms of their future college admissions applications.

[conuly]

Even if schools keep the school year the same length, they *do* need to spread out the vacations more evenly. I agree with leora on that part (though not on her wholesale view that kids are overworked and in school too much). There's no sense in getting a two month vacation! Two one month vacations, maybe.

[eofs.livejournal.com]

There's a movement in England to split the school year into 5 terms, instead of the three we currently have with the 6 week summer holiday.

[leora.livejournal.com]

There are schools that do that. They tend to be called year-round schools and they exist in the US. They have smaller vacations but more of them and don't break over summer. They're great for the middle class, not as good for the poor and potentially not as good for the extremely wealthy.

The middle class can generally afford to handle the kids during breaks. But the poor will have serious problems finding ways to afford the supervision needed for their child. And I think many of the schools have different schedules for different kids, so if you have multiple kids on different schedules, they could be home on different weeks, so that's a real hassle to deal with. It's easier to just ship kids off to day camp over the summer so you can keep working and have your kid supervised and fed.

For the extremely wealthy, a long break provides for opportunities that can be wonderful and hard to provide during short breaks. A trip to an exotic locale, for example. Various forms of exploration. You can supplement your child's education with all sorts of things - if you choose to and can afford to.

But I do think, in general. shorter breaks more often is the way to go. And those involved in such schools say they need to spend less time reviewing information and can thus spend more of their time teaching new information. Apparently kids typically come back from summer break having forgotten a lot, and even if some kids don't, you have to get the class as a whole caught up before you can move on.

[leora.livejournal.com]

I agree that school scheduling is not a cure for parental overscheduling. I was talking about a cultural ideal that I view as harmful, which is to cram as much work and activities unto children as possible.

While my experience was atypical, I do think it is a minority that is significant, given that my sister is disturbed that she is seeing the same trend at her children's school, even though it is a school district on the opposite coast of the US. I also see the same attitude in the teaching community on LJ, of - how much extra work should I give during school breaks? If you accept the meme that any is acceptable, you are taking away the break nature of the break, and it's just a matter of how much of a child's break you're eating into.

[lakidaa.livejournal.com]

I;m currently in a pretty good Highschool, and they do the same thing. Handing out too much work and making us do unneccessary work over the 'breaks'.

(Summer reading is bad, but it's tolerable to the DEMON PACKETS we have sometimes)

When I was in Middle school, one of the worst, there was no work at all (this is where I learned my nasty schoolwork habits.)

Right Now, I have to finish a report for english, do some programming work in Java (ARGH.), finish Lab Work in Chemistry, and Catch up on Algebra notes.

Then, on Monday, I have a math test, a programming quiz, a Latin quiz, and three dollars says that I'll have something in chemistry.