Reduced Work Hours
In the United States we work longer hours than people in any other industrial country, and we suffer the consequences of lack of time for health, family, friends, lifelong learning, civic engagement, rejuvenation, community, relationships, and self and social realization. Human Agenda believes that we all have a commitment in our lives to reproduce the needs of society through our participation in the production of goods or the delivery of services, but we need to be paid sufficiently to live a full and sustainable life at reduced work hours. A reasonable number of work hours is critical to the development of self, family, community, and society.
Human Agenda works with Take Back Your Time, a national movement to provide the time infrastructure for human development. Human Agenda subscribes to the Time to Care agenda (visit TimeDay.org) as well as the need for sustainable wages to allow everyone the possibility of working to live, instead of living to work. Take Back Your Time Day is celebrated on October 24 each year to point out the equivalent of nine weeks (Oct. 24-Dec 31) that Americans work and that Europeans don’t.