Time Is All We Have. We Can’t Let the Boss Take It From Us.
Unions fight for more pay for workers. But workers also need to have time for themselves and their friends and families. Overtime pay and raises can't replace what we need more than anything else: our time back.
Longer hours working leads to narrower lives. (Lenin Estrada / Unsplash)
When Frank Carrico talks about why he and his coworkers at the Heaven Hill Distillery went on strike, he talks about family. “I missed out on my kids’ activities” because of forced weekend shifts, he says. “I missed out on a lot, and I don’t want the young people coming behind me to have that happen to them.”
When we spoke, the distillery workers had just come off a six-week strike demanding to maintain a forty-hour week, Monday-Friday, with overtime pay beyond that.
Workers at Frito-Lay struck this summer to end “suicide shifts”: back-to-back twelve-hour shifts with just eight hours’ break in between. More time between extra long shifts was also among the demands that led film and TV crew members to authorize a strike. Textile workers in Italy struck to end eighty-four-hour work weeks (and won big).
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