In Defense of the Six Week Vacation

In my post below about my Mellon application, I’ve got a comment basically calling me out as a privileged academic for declaring that I intend to take six weeks’ vacation a year from here on out. Well, regardless of how much time I take off, I’m guilty as charged. I am a privileged academic. But wait! My brother, an auto mechanic, takes about four weeks of vacation a year. In the last six years (the time I’ve been employed as a prof), he has had significantly more true vacation than me. He also works my mad schedule of 50-60 hours a week (it runs in the family), so it’s a pretty good comparison. Maybe there’s something to this. Maybe we ought to look at the politics of the work week and the work year.

For the French (and Germans, and Dutch, and. . . ) it’s certainly not specific to academics or even the middle class, though there may be exempt job categories. Quebec, at least, has an amazingly progressive maternity leave policy that is available to people like my departmental secretary, who is currently on such a leave.(1)

Some links from a cursory websearch:
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0922052.html

http://www.nuvo.net/archive/2003/10/29/take_back_your_time.html

and of course, the Wall Street Journal complaining about short work weeks: http://www.careerjournal.com/myc/workabroad/20041123-sterling.html (though they do note that the EU, as a matter of policy, directs governments to give workers at least four weeks of paid leave; as far as I can tell, this includes department store clerks and assembly line workers).

A couple years back I published a review of Pietro Basso’s Modern TImes, Ancient Hours, an outstanding and terrifying analysis of the creeping expansion of work-time in industrial countries. I’ve linked it above, but let me pull a quote from its conclusion:

As it was in Marx’s time, so it is today. There is a basic conflict of interests between employers and employees over working time. It doesn’t matter if we’re talking about the widget business or the digit business. Capitalists know that more hours means more profit. It took a militant labor movement to get the working day down to the fictional “eight hour” length, and that’s why it will take a powerful movement to improve things today. Shorter hours for all working people ought to be at the center of any progressive social or political agenda. There is no humane alternative.

So yes, someone who works in a department store ought to be able to ask for six weeks’ vacation with a straight face. It would be right and humane if employers provided for that.

But there is also a politics to vacation time in academia and anywhere else there are salaried employees. Once an organization pays employees on salary, rather than hourly wage, that organization has a financial stake in maximizing the number of hours worked by said employee. If we assume a 40 hour workweek, for every eight employees who work 45 hours, the organization effectively gets the labor of an extra person. Now, granted, in universities you have dead wood and all that, so not everyone is working 45 hours (or more) a week. In teaching, one can submit class size to a similar analysis: the classes of 200+ students I’ve taught over the past six years are, on a per-student-basis, much cheaper than classes of 20, where it is actually possible to practice all the stuff they write about in progressive pedagogy books. All this is to say that it is in the interest of big organizations like universities to make the most of their investment in their salaried employees. (In fact, people who have written about the general decline in tenureable positions in comparison with adjunct and part-time faculty have argued that a speed-up for the remaining tenured and tenure-stream people is part of the reason that univerisites can cut faculty lines at a time when enrollment increases.)

Now, let’s look at those six weeks in context. Take a salaried worker who puts in 45 hours a week — maybe a couple 2.5 hour after dinner stints or a weekend afternoon to catch up. Let’s say the institution normally gives the person two weeks’ vacation a year. Since the salary is nominally for 40 hours a week, that means that over the course of a 50 week year, that person works 2250 hours, or the equivalent of 56.25 40-hour workweeks. Now, give the same person six weeks off per year: 2070 hours, or the equivalent of 51.75 40-hour weeks of work. It gets more complicated with waged workers, but if you figure out how much of those people’s time is spent making profit for their employer (what Marx called “surplus value”), you’ll doubtless find six weeks in there to let the person go relax and enjoy life.

Time is money and all that.

—

1. While we’re on the topic of Quebec and McGill, they have a pretty progressive policy regarding time off. They stipulate a month’s vacation time for faculty (“when it does not interfere with teaching”), which, if you add that to all the weekdays that the university is closed during the year (many offices at McGill are closed on Fridays for a good chunk of the summer), actually adds up to more than six weeks of time off during a given calendar year. http://www.academic.mcgill.ca/guides/gheass/leaves/vacation_policy_ranked.htm Staff time off is governed by collective bargaining agreements and by seniority, but I would venture to say that the staff in my department have roughly the same vacation benefit that I do.

And Now, A Few Words About Bad Subjects

As some of you know, I am a member of the editorial team for Bad Subjects: Political Education for Everyday Life. I’m coediting an issue called “Intermedia” with Charlie Bertsch with a deadline of 1 September, and we are looking for short, accessible essays relevant to the issue theme. Though our maximum article length is 2000-3000 words, I’d be happy to run 500 or 1000 word essays as well. BS is not an academic publication, does not use footnotes, and is aimed at a general audience, so write accordingly.

The call for papers is posted on our website and is reproduced below:

Intermedia

A Call for Papers for the Bad Subjects Intermedia Issue (deadline 1 September 2005)

For all its usefulness and currency, the word “media” conceals as much as it reveals. The transition from one medium to another, even within the same device – mobile phones are a perfect example as they move easily from sound to text and back again – is fraught with complication. Even within what passes for a single medium, such as weblogs, the need to manage the coupling and uncoupling of conversation partners has created a demand for levels of internal mediation, whether through the proliferation of aliases or through technical means, like “friends” lists on livejournal. With digital video recording, fan groups and Bittorrent, podcasts and satellite radio, the boundaries between broadcast and boutique, between transmission and storage, become less and less meaningful as television sets, computer networks and portable hard drives “mediate” one another. Many of the most interesting developments in contemporary culture center on the spaces between media and the fissures within media. While contemporary critics decry the ever-increasing concentration of media ownership (and while we join them in their concern), media cultures, whether in or around media, continue to morph and change in often unpredictable directions.

This issue of Bad Subjects is devoted to those in-between spaces where different media meet, where they define their edges, where the passage from inside to outside is routed through portals that preserve or shatter what is transmitted, whether it be private thoughts or streams of numeric data. Send us your accounts of emerging media forms and cultures, your technological revelations or provocations, your autobiographical reflections on passing through media portals or struggling with formats, your anxieties about blogging in the workplace, and your plans to remediate the world. As always, we are particularly interested in the political dimensions of emergent media culture, and we are dedicated to publishing accessible prose for a large, nonspecialist audience. For examples of the kind of writing we publish, please visit our website at http://bad.eserver.org.

Send essays of no longer than 2000-3000 words (shorter is fine) to Jonathan Sterne and Charlie Bertsch via the email address intermedia@sterneworks.org. Queries are also welcome. The deadline for submissions is 1 September 2005.

Wow. That Was Fast.

I had no intention of disappearing from the blog world for three days but those were three fast days. Apart from a dissertation defense Wednesday (it was an awesome dissertation on the history of design and its relationship to media), they were mostly taken up with an application for a Mellon New Directions Grant, which is a sweet grant if you can get it because it buys you out of teaching for year (think of it as an extra sabbatical) and funds travel and expenses for educating yourself in a new field. As is common with these things, I first heard about it approximately two weeks before the deadline and had to drop everything to get the application together. I can, however, tell you all sorts of cool things about archaeology that I didn’t know before — that is the discipline I applied to retrain in. But I blog not about the content of mmy application but the form.

One of the things I know I’ve commented upon is that here, there is really a culture of bailing out for part of the summer (I’ll say more about that in a minute). Not everyone all at once, but late July is a popular time, which means that I got kicked upstairs to a very helpful woman named Isabelle Roy in the McGill Development Office because everyone else was off on vacation. She’s used to dealing with people getting grants for new buildings and stuff like that, but was very helpful to me. Once I turned in all my materials, she reformatted them on this amazing-looking McGill template. I’ve never seen a grant application look that good. The layout was actually gorgeous. Whether that will make a different to a panel of academics, who knows? But I asked her to send me a copy so I could at least have it for myself.

The application experience was also a good object lesson, because for the first week I worked on it, I wasn’t even sure it was going to happen because it required a letter from one of my senior colleagues assessing my work. Except they were all out of town. Every one of them. Mostly for vacation. Lucky for me, Will returned and saved my butt (thank you Will!) but it got me thinking that compared with my colleagues, I probably haven’t had enough vacation time this year. In discussing this fact with Jenny Burman (another colleague) and her partner Joseph, she pointed out that she believed in the French model — that there is no reason why a person shouldn’t have six weeks of vacation every year. I like that, and although it’s too late for us to go away for two whole weeks, we do have a couple short trips planned in August (though, true confessions, one is work-related). But next year, it begins. Six weeks a year of unwork will be mine.

On the other hand, if I get the fellowship (I imagine it’s a longshot just because it’s so good) then maybe the lesson is don’t take my vacation in late July because then I can apply for juicy fellowships that will give me a whole year to reeducate myself. That’s probably the wrong lesson to draw, though.

I’m fascinated by the politics of leisure here, and I know I’ve mentioned it before. It’s probably a timing thing for me as well, since moving here signaled the end of what Bob McChesney one referred to as the “throw yourself on a grenade” part of my academic career. On the other hand, Carrie’s still an assistant prof, and she’s hip to the time off thing.

There are many other things I’ve been saving up to blog about. But they will have to wait for other posts.

Pharmacologists 18, False Consciousness 16

It was, in every way, a moral victory. The other team was nice. We even led for an inning, 11-8. I scored the first run and went 4-4 with two doubles. Alas, a few good hits by the other team and a couple errors in the field sealed our fate, but there were plenty of heroics to go around. Wade had an outstanding night as a pitcher, setting us all up well. Coach Greg, who was instructed not to lift anything heavy after minor surgery (but the bat is so light in his hands!), had a grand slam to help catapult us to our first lead of the season. He also had a deft coaching strategy of not revealing the score while we were ahead (“let’s just put it away, guys”). In theory, that was a good idea. Anna had a couple singles and routinely circled the bases as Mike came up after her. Carrie had a double and a couple singles. Everybody at least moved up the runners in their at-bats. Where all sorts of things went wrong last week, they went right this week.

There was a lot of tasty outfielding, between Mike’s roving and Anna and Vera not letting anything past them. The infield wasn’t perfect (like last game) but we were still pretty awesome. Carrie took a nasty hit off her shin at shortstop that nobody noticed until after the game (it is still good and nasty looking this morning). Definitely one of those things where you can see how it hurts.

And so, our too-short official season comes to a close. No wins, five losses. But at least one moral victory. And next year we’re going to be more awesome. Maybe we’ll even win one. In the meantime, who’s up for a pickup game?

A Year In (ctd)

You’d think that after three major life moves (Chambana, Pittsburgh, here — okay, that’s probably not all that much), I’d have figured out how to “get in” to a city as fast as possible. Then again, as Emily (one of my grad students) told me, it takes three years to really live in a place. To that end, this summer is quickly becoming my “remedial consumerism” summer. Let’s face it. For many middle class people such as myself, a good many of the pleasures of living in a large city are consumerist in nature. It’s about being able to get Really Nice Stuff or just Stuff That Is Particularly To My Liking. So I’ve been learning:

–where to go for good ice cream (not soft serve!)
–where to buy clothes (I shop at the Big and Tall store)
–where to buy shoes (same problem)
–where to buy CDs
–which kitchen store has the really disturbingly nice gadgets
–which stores have the best (or best deals on) special ingredients and foods, like porcini mushrooms, tsaziki sauce, and mock duck.

I mean, shoes, CDs, ice cream and clothing are available all over the city, but that’s the point: it’s a matter of knowing WHERE to go, at least to suit my own tastes.

Carrie and I are also taking some time to explore neighborhoods that we wouldn’t normally go to. Last weekend was Ahunsic, this weekend was Verdun. Ahuntsic was, I’m told, “the next big thing” before NDG became the “next big thing” in real estate. It is very subruban-feeling in that the streets are wider, the housing newer, and there are little strip malls here and there, but it still feels very Montreal. Most structures are multifamily dwellings (no cottages, just duplexes or more), and when we drove by a park, we saw people playing cricket, not baseball. Verdun, meanwhile, seems like a bit of an extension of St. Henry. It’s working class like our neighborhood is working class, though the business district seems a little more happening. It’s also surprisingly close to downtown. Here I thought it was way far out.

Hit It 16, False Consciousness 3

There was much analysis after the game but I think it comes down to this:

Monday’s practice helped.

We still lost.

Our fielding was good. Hell, our ERA dropped below 21! It was our performance at the plate which was upsetting. We kept hitting balls to them. Their fielding was good, but not heroic or anything. Apart from Mike’s 2 run homer and Coach Greg’s triple, it was a lot of singles (self included, even though I worked out the whole “elbow up” thing in Monday’s practice). And that just won’t do.

My thought: Sometimes your team just has a bad game. It was still fun.

In lieu of further reporting on the game, I direct your attention to this.

One Year and Counting

We arrived in Canada to live on the 19th of July 2004. I didn’t mark the date yesterday, so I’m doing it today. A year into my Canadian experience, I can note the following (this is a preliminary list; more may be added):

–I now sometimes get annoyed at the Globe and Mail‘s conservative streak, especially with respect to Canadian politics. It’s still far left of the New York Times on civil liberties and international coverage — usually.

–I have a basic (though still somewhat rudimentary) understanding of Canadian politics. Which is probably what enables me to see the Globe and Mail’s conservative streak.

–I’ve had tons of outstanding food all over the city and now have opinions about

–which Montreal bagel is best
–which cheap Indian restaurants are best
–which Vietnamese place actually serves decent vegetarian food
–why my relatively smaller Mache Maissonneuve is better than the larger Atwater and John Talon Markets

–I am gaining a footing in language politics. I know considerably more French than I did at this time last year, though I feel slightly guilty I’m not already fluent. But I’m taking lessons (I should practice more!). This also means:

–I can get through a cab ride or shopping trip in sentence fragments
–I get mad an Anglo anti-Quebec and anti-French sentiment
–I can call bullshit when someone who’s never been east of Papineau says of the Quebecois “you don’t really need to know French in this city. Everyone knows English, though some people pretend they don’t.” WRONG-O! It’s a class thing: there are plenty of people who don’t know English well enough to communicate in it, and they live on my side of Papineau
–living outside the US, I also now make more of an effort with my Spanish, which often comes back to me when I’m trying to say something in French.
–I can hear different Quebec French accents, even if I can’t imitate them or understand much of what they are saying.

–I am getting used to living in a big city. Intellectually, I know I have it really good, but of course emotionally, I can already feel myself starting to take certain things for granted:

–I am not impressed with the sheer number of festivals this summer, and most of them I will miss in favor of getting on with my life
–I am also jaded about the number of conferences and guest speakers during the academic year, since to see them all would leave me no time for my own work
–I am used to people taking chances with fashion that they would shy away from in other cities (though I still really like it)

–I am more aware of the parochialism of my own knowledge as a U.S. raised- and- trained- scholar. There’s a whole world out there.

–I am starting to get some idea of what it might mean to be an immigrant

–I am starting to understand that the amount of vacation I take each year is less than the normal amount that my Canadian colleagues take, and I need to take steps to rectify this.

–Personally and professionally, I am enjoying my civil liberties more than ever before