Nothing doing

SOMERVILLE -- Throughout the 1990s, as magazine covers and books proclaimed how overworked, oversheduled, and generally stressed-out Americans were, Barbara Brandt had two reactions.

The first was wholehearted agreement: The author and activist had herself researched and written about what she calls the United States' "workaholic culture." The second was puzzlement: If there was such universal acknowledgment of the social damage caused by increased workloads and fragmented family life, why hadn't it kindled mass activism along the lines of the civil rights or environmental movements?

Such activism finally dawned last October in the form of a national Take Back Your Time Day that sought to draw attention to the fraying of community and family bonds caused by "time poverty." But getting Americans to log off, unplug, and unwind proved no easy task. "People didn't turn up for our events," admits Brandt, the Boston area coordinator of the Seattle-based Take Back Your Time movement. Something more than another conference, another workshop, was needed.

Enter the Massachusetts Council of Churches. Today, on the symbolic occasion of Labor Day, the council and the 1,700 Protestant and Orthodox congregations it represents will launch a quiet but direct challenge to the compulsive careerism and consumerism that have come to define contemporary life. In emerging as the first statewide religious organization in the country to officially throw its weight behind the Take Back Your Time movement, the council is acting on its "longstanding interest in and support for issues concerning Sabbath observance and the growing imbalance betwen labor and leisure in our society," explains the Rev. Diane Kessler, executive director of the council.

"We had been searching for new handles to deal with an old problem," she adds. "In the traditional sense, we are certainly concerned about religious observance, but we are also concerned about the common good." So Kessler got in touch with Brandt last fall after reading about Take Back Your Time Day. The result of their subsequent meeting is the Take Back Your Time/Four Windows of Time campaign. Information packets were mailed several months ago to member congregations urging worshipers to set aside four periods for rest, reflection, and "life-renewing activities" between today and Oct. 24, Take Back Your Time Day. During those four periods, there should be, as one flier mailed to churches puts it: "No scheduled activities. No buying or selling. No stress. No intrusive technology. No obligations. No work. No guilt."

It sounds simple, and it is meant to be. Organizers admit it will be hard to measure participation in something as amorphous as taking four "windows" of time. But the goal, Kessler says, is to get people to reexamine the quality of their lives and become more aware of the costs exacted by "the frenetic pace of our society." (She notes that the problem of over-scheduling has reached such an extreme that it affects not just parents but children.) Then, she says, the next step is to take long-term steps to restore a sensible balance between work and free time. Kessler says she hopes congregants will take the opportunity for prayer and spiritual contemplation, but adds that other fruitful avenues could be going for a hike, sitting on the back porch, sipping a cup of tea, and generally being "attentive to creation, and to what's happening to creation, to the quality of life around us."

"Here in American society, many of us in our 50s or 60s or 70s have a certain appropriate nostalgia for a quality of life that has been lost, and that has negatively affected families," Kessler says. "Many of us remember when we went to church on Sunday morning and then had a family meal afterwards and then took a deep breath and did things that were different from the rest of the week. In a 24/7 society, those rhythms and those patterns have been lost."

Frenzied, out of balance
But will the involvement of a religious organization change the character of a movement with secular origins? John de Graaf, national coordinator of Take Back Your Time, seems to have no worries in that regard.

De Graaf, a documentary filmmaker at the PBS station in Seattle, says he is "thrilled" by the initiative and by the involvement of the Massachusetts Council of Churches, because "they get at all aspects of the issue, not just the Sabbath aspect but the social justice aspect, how we need this for our families and our health." He adds: "We certainly hope that becomes a model that gets adopted by other faith communities, whether they be Christian, Jewish, Islamic, whatever. We think time is an issue for people's spirituality; we are so pressured that there really isn't time for these key spiritual things in people's lives."

There does seem to be agreement across sectarian lines that people's lives are out of balance. "We live such frenzied lives," says Rabbi Moshe Waldoks of Temple Beth Zion of Brookline, referring to American society in general. "It's so important to redefine yourself outside of just being a consumer demographic and someone who's going to spend a certain amount of dollars on the weekend at the mall." Waldoks says the concept behind the initiative fits well with the Jewish tradition, which places great importance on observing the Sabbath.

Erika Salloux of Cambridge, who runs a personal organizer company called Living Harmony, says part of the problem is personal technology run amok, so that people get faxes on the beach and walk down the street conducting business on their cellphones. An active lifelong Catholic, Salloux says she is involved with the Take Back Your Time movement in part because she is concerned that Catholics have "lost touch [with] the great tradition in the Catholic faith of mindfulness."

Peggy Hothem, a professor of recreation and leisure studies at Gordon College, a Christian college in Wenham, says the initiative should inspire people to take time for "reflecting on who they are, why did God create them, if they are believers, reflecting upon life, appreciating nature, families, relationships. A time for being instead of just doing, sort of stepping away from the rush, seeing the value of people, seeing the value of one's spiritual life."

Costs of `hidden overtime' As a college student in the late 1960s, De Graaf recalls hearing in a sociology class that the United States would face a significant problem by 2000 -- too much leisure time. Twenty-hour workweeks and seven-week vacations were prophesied. "We got none of the time that we were promised," he says. In fact, sociologist Juliet Schor has found that from 1973 to 2000, the average US worker added nearly 200 hours per year to his job schedule. Moreover, according to the Take Back Your Time handbook, US workers have "by far the shortest paid vacations in the industrialized world."

But the nonpartisan movement's legislative goals remain in the formative stage: to enact limits on mandatory overtime, to require companies to provide a minumum of three paid weeks of vacation each year for all workers (organizers say 25 percent of US workers receive no paid vacation), to require paid family and medical leave, and to make Election Day a national holiday. Getting the issue on the public-policy agenda might be easier in a presidential election year when, according to de Graaf, pollsters have found that the lack of free time is a big issue for swing voters, especially women with young children.

For all their concerns about the all-devouring nature of many jobs nowadays, organizers emphasize that the Take Back Your Time movement is not anti-work. "It's about restoring the quality of life through focusing on the issue of time and how we use it," says Brandt, who sits on the movement's national board. "You want to use your time wisely and well, not just work until you drop." In Brandt's view, time poverty is a social justice issue so pervasive that even organizations with charitable goals force their employees to work too much overtime. "Some of the nonprofits are the worst offenders," she says.

Nonetheless, while organizers say employers should not escape blame for the time poverty that afflicts Americans, part of the problem is self-inflicted. In particular, de Graaf points to what he calls the "hidden overtime" of too much consumerism. "We are far more of a consumer society than other industrialized countries," he says. "We've consistently traded our gains in productivity for money instead of time. The Europeans made a different choice: They chose to take time off as they made gains in productivity."

There are signs of pressure on that practice. The New York Times, however, recently reported that some European countries -- concerned about remaining economically competitive -- are either lengthening the workweek or considering doing so. According to the Times, the longer vacations enjoyed by Europeans have not yet been affected.

So the choice of Oct. 24 as the date for Take Back Your Time Day seems fitting: The date comes nine weeks before the end of the year. It underscores the fact that Americans work 350 hours, or the equivalent of nine weeks, more per year than do European workers.

Among the Massachusetts organizations that have followed the Massachusetts Council of Churches' lead and endorsed the initiative are the Massachusetts AFL-CIO and the state chapter of the National Association of Social Workers. Kathleen Casavant, treasurer of the state AFL-CIO, says the union lent its support because "these are issues that affect all of us: the whole overtime issue, the issue of people working two or three jobs and not having time for their families or time to go to church." Casavant says union leaders hope to build momentum for legislation on Beacon Hill involving such issues.

Hard though it may be to quantify participation in the Take Back Your Time/Four Windows of Time experiment, it will be closely watched by adherents and skeptics alike.

"I don't think it's going to change our society in the next year or two," says Hothem. "I see it as a long-term investment. It's a way to get people to talk about why they live the way they live, and to say maybe there are choices to be made here, maybe I don't have to live as stressed a life as I live."

Don Aucoin can be reached at aucoin@globe.com.