The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 made the eight-hour day and the 40-hour workweek the law of the land. Another 70 years have passed since passage of the FLSA but the standard workweek remains frozen at 40 hours despite immense improvements in productivity and profound demographic shifts in labor-force participation.
(From the TBYT November newsletter)

The vision was that this would be the beginning of a gradual reduction in hours so that citizen have the time educate themselves. What happened? Two names: Taft Hartley. The Act named after the two Republican Congressmen rolled back short work hours and higher wages. It was the beginning of the undermining of the strengths of the union movement. We all pay with long hours for that…

And another interesting quote (hat tip):

Americans put in more hours at work than any other nation, surpassing even the workaholic Japanese.

Check out Taking Back Your Time for more info.

Another interesting stat: 25% of people in San Francisco voted for Prop 8.

Prop Hate did not pass because African-Americans voted for it. It passed because the Religious Wrong threw their money & time at it (see for example this article). Their effort included using Obama’s statement that he thinks that marriage should be between a man & a woman, which was plastered on Vote “Yes on 8″ campaign information. The forceful response by the Obama compaign - reiterating that Obama is against Prop 8 - did not overcome the lies from the Yes on 8 side.

Some more stats: If we had been able to convince 6% of the White Yes on 8 voters to vote “No,” Prop 8 had not passed. It would have taken 27% of African-American voters.

There are lots of people dealing with this, for example:

http://www.alternet.org/story/107474/
• An article in The Nation by Richard Kim
• The mission statement from Join the Impact indirectly talks about it
• Sherry Wolf busts the myth on AlterNet
• Adele Carpenter blogged about it
• Jamelle Bouie pushed back
• Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee writes about more Prop 8 myths
• Nancy Polikoff’s blog post

Adele Carpenter made these important points:

[Articles about African-American support of Prop 8] displace blame away from those who actually have the power to consistently deny others civil and human rights, and instead, charge that when communities that have long been disenfranchised and alienated from political processes participate, that the results with be negative for LGBT people.

I have not seen anything from the LGBT community that is actively trying to address the unfortunately often blatant racism that has come forth from the statistics you cite. Also, I have not seen any analyses that try to look at why African-Americans tended to vote “Yes on 8:” was it confusion, lack of awareness, religious indoctrination, or homophobia. Probably “all of the above” but to what extend can the homophobia be explained without the religious influence?

And, as a data cruncher, I am also wondering what is behind that 70% number. As far as I know it’s based on exit polls - was the sample of African-Americans asked representative or is there some bias in here?

Now many are organizing. I guess November 4th provided them with a wake up call. I love the energy! Yet, I am concerned that all this energy is devoted toward the wrong goal.

The Join The Impact website - created after Prop Hate passed - is full of statements like this:

We live in America TOO! We deserve legal protections from our government and marriage provides 10,000+ legal protections that are not awarded to our families!

and this

Full equality for ALL. [...] At JoinTheImpact, we are all inclusive.

I guess, they don’t realize that they are leaving out families with their narrow focus on marriage. Families like:

• Single parent households
• Senior citizens living together and serving as each other’s caregivers (think Golden Girls)
• Blended and extended families
• Children being raised in multiple households or by unmarried parents
• Adult children living with and caring for their parents
• Senior citizens who are the primary caregivers to their grandchildren or other relatives
• Close friends or siblings living in non-conjugal relationships and serving as each other’s primary support and caregivers
• Households in which there is more than one conjugal partner
• Care-giving relationships that provide support to those living with extended illness such as HIV/AIDS.

That’s a lot of people to leave out from a movement that purports to be all inclusive.

Don’t get me wrong. I think that the passage of Prop 8 is despicable. So are the various flavors of Defense of Marriage Acts. All they are defending is discrimination. But that discrimination goes beyond the LGBT community. They discriminate against any other form of family other than the wife-husband-children family of yesteryear.

It is time to abolish those 10,000+ rights automatically bestowed upon marriage instead of expanding the pool of people those rights are conferred upon. We need to look at the needs and find ways of meeting those needs that value all families, no matter what shape or form they take or how many people are in the family. Only a movement that looks at all options, that moves beyond marriage and fights for alternatives, can claim to be truly inclusive.

Overall, 45% of Americans are unmarried (never married, widowed, or divorced) - that’s 43% of men and 47% of women. By age 40, this number has dropped to 41% of women and only 29% of men (35% of all Americans 40 years and older). The always single above 40 make up about 10% of each gender.

The report is an attempt to take back the claim on moral values from the right and make them our own. The authors argue that “values - our deeply held beliefs, the principles
that guide our thoughts and actions - infuse our lives with meaning.” And that “the cry for values-based politics, on both the left and the right, is about a search for inspiration and meaning.” The Challenge to Act is also a call to incorporate a vision into our activism. IWPR points out that

Progressives working for change sorely need such forward-looking vision. We rely heavily on statistics and policy analysis to do our talking for us; we too often assume that these tools alone can convince people to agree with our prescriptions for change.

Data is important but facts & figures are not very inspiring. Instead, we need a vision that is informed by our values (and the facts). Only that can truly motivate and inspire us to fight for change.

What are those values? Based on more than 120 interviews, the authors of the report determined that women activists are driven by this core set of moral values:

• Community, where people from all walks of life gather to define and pursue the common good
• Family, which offers life-giving relationships and shared care-giving
• Equality, which gives us all the opportunity to pursue our own chosen goals and paths
• Power, which ensures that public life includes and responds to diverse voices
• Compassion, which is a sensitivity to the emotions and experiences of others that requires us to eliminate injustice and respect the complexity of others’ life choices
• Balance, which allows us to negotiate the multifaceted nature of our lives without sacrificing our most cherished goals and ideals
• Practice, which enables us to bring our values to life through action

Wow! I agree with those values! It is great to know that there are core values that do not at all sound religious. This is consistent with what the authors of the report found:

This diversity in our values and their sources means that we cannot identify a shared set of “women’s values” that is innate or universally embraced by all women. Indeed, women who come from many walks of life have different experiences, ways of looking at the world, and belief systems. Our research has found, however, that even in the midst of their significant differences, progressive women activists often articulate a core cluster of values.

Maybe these are really progressive values, not (just) women’s values, despite the authors’ claims to the contrary: “our research focuses not just on progressive values but on a particular set of progressive values that often motivate women’s activism.” I have a hard time believing that progressive men are not motivated by this same set of values. The report does not make clear how these values motivate women more than they motivate men. Carol Tarvis has pointed out the danger of claiming that women are somehow morally superior, thus, it is not very likely that women have a set of values that is different than that of men. Our values are likely more informed by our experience as human beings than by our gender. Nevertheless, looking at values is an important part for building a progressive movement that can counteract the religious wrong’s claim on the framing of issues using their regressive values.

Who are the women they interviewed - I am particularly interested in knowing if they included atheists (my radar turned on when the press release mentioned “faith based”) and single women (a group all too often left out)? According to the report:

These women live and work all over the country. They come from every major racial and ethnic group; over half are women of color. They are Christian and Jewish, Muslim and Hindu, Buddhist and Unitarian. Some are atheist. They are rich and they are poor; they are national leaders and grassroots activists.

Okay, so the non-believers are covered. What about the unmarried? Well, they are not mentioned, at least not in the section that gives a top level introduction to the women (p. 2-3). The word “unmarried” does not appear in the rest of the report (although the word “married” does not show up either). The word “single” only appears coupled with “mother,” as if the only single women are single mothers (although, to be fair, the report does point out the fallacy of marriage promotion to “cure” poverty; yet marriage itself does not seem to be challenged). That hardly feels inclusionary. As Page Gardner points out, progressives need to deliver on the hopes for change that led unmarried women to the polls (hat tip to Bella DePaulo. With a marital status gap of 37-points in favor of Obama, the unmarrieds can really no longer be ignored (you’d think). Unmarried women contributed strongest to that gap (with a 44-point gap vs. a 27-point gap from unmarried men). These gaps suggest differences in values by marital status (and gender, though the gender gap indicates only 13-point female preference in favor of Obama). It would be tremendously interesting to find out what, if anything, unmarried women and men value that is different from married people. The marital status gap in voting suggests that unmarried people are more progressive. It also would be important to understand why unmarried women who were undecided flocked to Obama: The marital status gap in polls was smaller than it was based on actual results (of course, this could be a result of differing methodologies). (It’s interesting to note that even when looking at the swing - the change in Democratic votes between 2004 and 2008 - unmarried folks are still clearly supportive of Obama.)

Overall, the IWPR report gives plenty of food for thought, though it’s ignorance toward marital status suggests that the discussion around values has just begun. It would have been nice if their research would have been informed by these statistics because I am sure there are values behind them that would be interesting to explore and are important in keeping unmarried people motivated for a progressive agenda.

So, I was excited to receive an email from The We Campaign. They are making the same connections (not too surprising to me since it seems so blatantly obvious). I decided to honor their call to write a letter to the editor. Here’s what I wrote - hopefully we’ll be able to read it in the San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday:

With the economy in trouble, some people are claiming that we cannot also deal with other issues we’re facing, especially global warming. This is a dangerous and short-sighted approach. Al Gore is proposing an approach to Repower America that would provide 100% clean electricity within 10 years (see the plan at repoweramerica.org). In addition to addressing global warming and our dependency on oil, this plan creates new jobs, reduces energy costs, and eliminates our need for fossil fuels while injecting our economy with much needed new projects. We not only can address more than the economy by working toward a sustainable future, we have to. Any other approach will simply continue our path along the vicious cycle of greed and destruction.

If you agree, please add your letter to the hopefully continuously growing pile of letter to the editors!

You can also read Al Gore’s op ed piece in the New York Times in which he outlines his Repower America Plan.

There is also an interesting guest post at the Wall Street Journal blog from the authors of the Baseline Scenario, all highly trained & experienced economists. They suggest that it’s time to reinvest in the “real” economy:

This [reality of the current economic] situation, while unfortunate in the aggregate and a tragedy for many vulnerable individuals, actually presents a major opportunity for the United States.

The opportunity is to transform the economy by moving resources (capital and people) out of financial services and into manufacturing, technology, and other activities based on “real” (i.e., non-financial) innovation. This switch plays to a number of strengths in the United States: people (and capital) move relatively easily compared to other countries; we have great depth in the development of technology (our engineering schools lead the world); we are very good at creating new companies (many have tried to replicate Silicon Valley; few have even come close); and, if managed well, we will continue to have the deepest and most flexible capital markets in the world.

Of course, this also requires a new emphasis on science education, something they don’t mention although they call for renewed emphasis “on spreading technology-related skills through the population.”