Once the self-described guardian of “union power, soul power”—an ally of the Black Panthers and student New Leftists and an opponent of the Vietnam War—1199 is still a force for civil rights. This time, it joins a front of union confederates in the march for marriage equality. In fighting for “working families, not just certain families,” as Jackson put it in one campaign spot, labor is pushing the boundaries of queer politics while recharging its own power.

A black and blue rainbow in Maryland

Passing marriage equality in Maryland took a full deck of cards. First there was the inside game. MFME amplified the support of movers and shakers, including the mayor of Baltimore, a Baltimore Ravens player, the lieutenant governor and Governor Martin O’Malley, who, after the bill narrowly failed the legislature last year, made it a legislative priority. Then there was what Kevin Nix of the Human Rights Campaign calls a “grassroots groundswell.” Unions, clergy, civil rights groups and traditional advocacy groups like the HRC and Equality Maryland worked together to mobilize their constituencies. Given the likelihood that marriage equality will be challenged by ballot referendum in November, the ground game rolls on.

Labor has been a key source of mobilization. Unions have offered “voices other than gay voices” and “expertise in terms of politics and professional expertise in organizing,” Nix says. “The goal is to get as many folks on board with this issue, so aligning with labor helps spread the word and educate constituents and voters.”

MFME has worked most closely with SEIU Local 500, the state AFL-CIO and 1199. Before Jackson was elected president of the coalition, 1199 sat down with the governor and other key players to determine the shape of the coalition. Since then, the union has worked communications, played a “heavy” financial role and communicated with its members, who live predominantly in black districts in Baltimore City and Prince George’s County represented by key black legislative caucus members.

Given the public perception that blacks don’t support marriage equality—propped up by anti-gay organizations—1199’s organizing extends from its own membership to the larger black community. “Folks who hadn’t had an opportunity to talk about it spoke to members,” Jackson says. “Because our community is so heavily faith-based,” he adds, “there has been a divide,” which has been “lopsided because the side that supported [marriage equality] didn’t really have the opportunity to be vocal.”

The alternative

The fight for gay rights makes for strange bedfellows. Not-too-union-friendly corporations like Apple and Google threw hundreds of thousands of dollars against Prop 8 in California in 2008. The militantly anti-union Hyatt Corporation, “committed to being a global company that embraces and achieves diversity,” as its website reads, has sponsored and hosted the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation Media Awards and, in 2010, became a platinum sponsor of the International Gay Lesbian Travel Association. The Hyatt flaunts special “Pride Welcome Packages” in cities with large gay populations like San Francisco and Minneapolis. More recently, Starbucks, Microsoft, Nike and over 100 other businesses in Washington State endorsed the marriage equality bill passed there in February.

The partnership works both ways. The HRC appointed Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein as a spokesperson for its national marriage equality campaign. GLAAD even went so far as to send a letter to the Federal Communications Commission supporting AT&T, an ally, in its attempt to merge with T-Mobile last year. (As it happens, the CWA and other unions also supported the merger.)

“Gay people need to wise up when corporations advertise in our publications or give money to get on the HRC Equality Index,” says Cleve Jones, a protégé of Harvey Milk and now the head of UNITE HERE’s Sleep With the Right People campaign, a collaboration with the LGBT community pushing hotels to respect their workers. “They’re not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. Corporations don’t have hearts.” (Disclosure: I have organized for UNITE HERE.)

The gay community’s long-standing feeling of invisibility makes it particularly vulnerable to corporate buyout, Jones says. If a liquor company came into a gay neighborhood and put up a giant billboard with a gay couple drinking its product, for example, potential moral outrage might be clouded by the joy of recognition—“Look how far we’ve come!”

This is what queer theorist Michael Warner calls the “trouble with normal”—that is, a politics in which groups seek to be integrated into the system without challenging its logic. Instead, minority status should be the source of aggressive and visionary resistance to existing regimes of power. As Cathy Cohen has it, punks, bulldaggers and welfare queens should unite with members of other marginalized groups—gay or not—in the service of “progressive transformative coalition work.”

This is the radical potential of gay-labor alliance—a challenge to one-dimensional, and co-optable, identity politics. Conveniently, the politics of gay rights revolve largely around bread-and-butter union demands—good benefits, non-discrimination, the right to self-expression, and collective empowerment. In turn, the buckets of corporate cash that flow into LGBT causes, and the existence of otherwise conservative groups like GOProud, survive as naked, heartless ironies.

In Washington, re-articulating queer

To the extent that Washington State marriage equality advocates don’t pursue a more expansive coalitional politics, queerness becomes easy for opponents to dismiss as the province of cosmopolitan Seattle. “There’s a common misconception that this is an urban Democratic issue,” says Zach Silk of Freedom to Marry in Washington. “There was a realization that we needed to form a broader progressive coalition and to make it something that anyone can join.”

To that end, Washington United for Marriage—MFME’s counterpart, which also faces the prospect of a November ballot referendum—has spent significant energy organizing conservative Democrats and moderate Republicans in swing districts in suburban Seattle as well as rural populations represented by powerful state legislators. Labor has been critical in these efforts, not only for its image—giving people “the understanding that this was a broad progressive campaign,” Silk says—but for its material role in organizing workers, voters in their communities, and legislative allies.

The campaign has benefited most from the diffuse constituency and broad support of United Food and Commercial Workers Local 21—without whom, Silk claims, “we wouldn’t have been able to win.” The local is Washington’s largest private sector union, comprising 38,000 workers from the grocery, retail and healthcare industries. Members live in every legislative district in the state and represent a range of ethnic backgrounds and education levels.

At the outset, Local 21 reached out to labor champions in the state legislature who otherwise might not have viewed marriage equality as a legislative priority—a critical task given how fast the bill moved through the 2012 legislative session. The campaign at large is effectively housed in Local 21’s union hall, where union leaders have opened up the local’s “state-of-the-art” phone bank, as communications director Tom Geiger calls it, for other organizations in the coalition to reach out to their memberships. This is “a way of walking the walk,” Geiger says, “not just making a financial contribution or doing the lobbying, but being a full-fledged participant in the campaign.”

Local 21 has a multitiered system for communicating with its own members, who work at over 700 shops across the state. On top of traditional physical mailings, the local has spent the last several years developing an email list now covering nearly half its membership. It has also worked to train 1,000 shop stewards, a necessity given its small corps of 25 staff representatives. Member outreach and member-to-member organizing are the local’s core devices for building power. “When we have a group of our members and staff and their families march in the gay pride parade every year, if we had never played a role in the issue before, it might seem a bit odd,” Geiger says. “But by making the point time and again, it provides a certain higher level of union pride.”

Local 21 is joined on the WUFM steering committee by SEIU’s Washington State Council. SEIU is Washington’s largest union, representing over 100,000 workers in healthcare, public education and social services. After the international union voted in 2004 to embrace the fight for marriage equality formally, SEIU has contributed significant financial support and volunteer time to the ongoing campaign in Washington State. The campaign also benefits from the union’s close relationship with Governor Christine Gregoire and key legislative leaders.

“I think there’s a natural affinity between a lot of our members and our LGBT brothers and sisters,” says David Rolf, an international VP and the president of SEIU Healthcare 775NW. The member-leaders of 775 are mainly working-class women in their 50s, including Mormons and Catholics, Rolf says. Many working in healthcare, SEIU’s largest industry, saw firsthand the human impact of the AIDS crisis.

Long-term partnership, on the coasts and beyond

The passage of marriage equality in Washington is only the latest in a string of pro-equality gains. After Washington enacted its own Defense of Marriage Act in 1998, which limited marriage to opposite-sex couples, activists slowly chipped away at the impact and spirit of the law: first passing anti-discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in housing, employment, insurance and lending in 2005; then limited domestic partnerships in 2007; and then, in 2009, a domestic partnership law covering “everything but marriage” and upheld at the ballot box later that year. “We were starting from a place of incremental victory and really great dialogue,” Silk says. By now, marriage equality is “extremely mainstream.”

Marriage equality’s entry into the broader American “mainstream” is the offspring of decades of coalitional struggle. In some cases, unions and LGBT activists have fought together against anti-gay, anti-union companies. Most famously, while the Teamsters were stuck in contract negotiations with the Coors Brewing Company in 1973, Harvey Milk led a Coors boycott that began at gay bars in San Francisco and spread nationwide. In 2008, UNITE HERE and leaders in the LGBT community launched a boycott of the San Diego Grand Hyatt, owned by Doug Manchester, a critical seed-funder of the drive to get Prop 8 on the ballot. The boycott won national attention and cost Hyatt $7 million in business.

Other blue-rainbow alliances have taken the form of local electoral blocs. In the ’70s, gay liberation groups, labor groups and black power groups joined forces against white conservative mayor Frank Rizzo in Philadelphia, ultimately preventing him from getting a chance at a third term. In the ’90s, Massachusetts’ Gay and Lesbian Labor Activists Network helped mobilize the gay population and union members in opposition to the fiscal conservatism of Republican governor William Weld.

By the 1980s, blue-rainbow politics became formalized as caucuses within unions. Caucuses primarily took hold in unions with concentrated urban memberships in the Northeast and West; where caucuses for women and racial minorities already existed, like teachers unions and other public sector unions; and in industries with sizable gay memberships, like food service and healthcare. The AFL-CIO followed suit, albeit slowly. First it passed a resolution stating its opposition to sexuality-based discrimination in 1983, followed by a similar resolution against anti-gay-rights ballot initiatives 10 years later.

Then, in 1997, under the supervision of President John Sweeney, the AFL-CIO’s executive board voted unanimously in favor of Pride at Work, its own LGBT caucus. The year before that, Mary Kay Henry filled Sweeney’s place on SEIU’s executive board when he left to lead the AFL-CIO. Henry, who is a lesbian, was a founding member of SEIU’s Lavender Caucus and is now president of the international union.

Of course, the restriction of queer politics to union caucuses runs the same risk of segmentation that threatens the LGBT movement at large. “We don’t have a caucus, and won’t ever have one,” Cleve Jones says of UNITE HERE. “It’s kind of ironic for me. I was all about identity politics. But identity politics is a real trap.” Instead, Jones works with union locals to train all members, gay and straight, on member-to-member organizing around issues of justice at the intersection of labor and queer.

Nonetheless, the formalization of gay labor activism has played its own role in broad-based organizing. In New York, for example, Pride at Work helped mobilize members of the AFL-CIO’s affiliate unions in the winning fight for marriage equality last year, and as 1199’s LGBTQ caucus chair Patrick Duncan told me, the Empire State Pride Agenda reached out to labor before any other allies.

Laboring for equality—and for labor

“What is at stake for queer workers and our allies is nothing less than the forward motion of the labor movement as a whole,” wrote Miriam Frank and Desma Holcomb in New Labor Forum in 2001.

In its commitment to queer politics, labor benefits not only from the direct action and media savvy of gay rights activists, but from the rolling tide of LGBT equality. For 1199, whose 9,000 members in the Maryland and DC area are only a fraction of its total membership, leadership in the fight for marriage equality is a key plank of its broader political program. “This is a time when 1199 is stepping out more and more,” Jackson says. “Our program is going to build significantly.” In 2010, 1199 undertook extensive canvass operations and member political organizing to elect Rushern Baker, an aggressive supporter of labor, as Prince George’s County Executive, and Joanne Benson and Victor Ramirez as first-term state senators.

For UFCW Local 21, coalitional politics are a means of organizing and improving the conditions of a largely low-paid service workforce. “Sometimes you have to win protections in your contract,” Geiger says, “but unless you want to fight those battles contract by contract by contract, if something rises to the level of a civil right, it should be put into law!”

As with the hundreds of guaranteed benefits that come with marriage equality, so go other contract measures. Local 21 was unable to win paid sick days in its last round of negotiations for grocery workers in 2010. But last year, the local worked with over 75 progressive allies to make them guaranteed by law in Seattle, covering 150,000 workers. A statewide bill is currently in the works.

The same logic applies to the federal Employee Non-Discrimination Act—which, despite the consistent support of at least three-quarters of voters, introduction in almost every U.S. Congress since 1994, and the endorsement of President Obama, still hasn’t been passed. ENDA would protect queer workers from harassment or firing—a protection still withheld by 15 percent of Fortune 500 companies for sexual orientation and 51 percent for gender identity. Unions across the spectrum, as well as the AFL-CIO, are strident ENDA backers.

For queer workers themselves, the passage of marriage equality is a potential source of union pride. Take Alyssha Jacobs, a 24-year-old patient transporter at Johns Hopkins Hospital, a recently elected shop delegate for 1199, a lifelong Baltimore resident and lesbian. After meeting Jackson, Jacobs was encouraged to give testimony in front of state legislators. Already iffy about giving a prepared speech, she was first told that she wasn’t on the roster. Then she faced backlash from anti-gay legislators. “They just tried to justify it in so many ways, and it was hurtful,” she says.

But now, after a victorious campaign with the heavy involvement of her union, Jacobs wants to come out even more. “I was just on the outside looking in, and now I know they’re defending me and taking me in the right direction,” she says, of 1199. Jacobs is particularly eager to spread the union message to younger people like herself. “I work, I go to school full-time, and if I can get involved in the union, why can’t you?”

Jacobs occupies a strategic position as a labor activist. Her charge, as Judith Butler put it in an InterOccupy conference call in February, is to “see the conditions of being trans or queer as ways to articulate what inequality is, to communicate what the 99 percent is.”

At the turn of the 99% Spring, gay rights are on the uptick. Fifty-three percent of the population supported marriage equality in a 2011 Gallup poll, compared to 27 percent in 1996. Roy McDonald, a Republican state senator from Troy, New York, captured the shifting mood in a press spot last June: “Well, fuck it, I don’t care what you think. I’m trying to do the right thing. I’m tired of Republican-Democrat politics.”

Whether queer politics will become co-optable platitudes or the source of broader resistance to the normal is, however, open to question. That’s why the work of young activists like Alyssha Jacobs, and the decades-long marriage of labor and queer, is worth defending.

Skip forward to 2012 — a superheated moment primed by seething protest campaigns and a divisive presidential election. Not surprisingly, the sports world has again shifted, becoming just as politically fraught as the society it entertains — and whether or not you agree with a particular sports icon’s opinion, the larger change is a welcome development for participatory democracy.

In the last few years, we’ve seen sports activism at every locus on the ideological continuum. On the right, football phenom Tim Tebow starred in an antiabortion Super Bowl ad. In the transpartisan middle, Boston Bruins goaltender Tim Thomas refused to attend the White House’s Stanley Cup ceremony because he said he “believe(s) the Federal government has grown out of control.” And on the left, Major League Baseball teams have led public campaigns against anti-gay bullying.

No matter the issue, sports is now involved. The NFL players association has proudly supported public workers’ high-profile fights. Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen (clumsily) highlighted the hypocrisy of an American government that at once embraces various dictators but shuns Cuba’s autocratic regime. And, of course, LeBron James organized Miami Heat players into a hoodie-themed photo in solidarity with those demanding an investigation into the shooting of Trayvon Martin.

James’ move best highlights the veering undercurrents. As the Bleacher Report’s Ryne Hodkowski noted, the NBA star for years mimicked Jordan and other 1990s-molded “corporate athletes who don’t say anything political in fear of losing a big-time contract.”

Now, though, even carefully managed figures like James are weighing in on national controversies. Such moves exemplify both personal courage and, as important, an America that has suddenly become politically engaged. Indeed, fans now expect their sports deities to embrace that new normal — and, as James shows, those deities are increasingly responding to the call.

Many criticize this transformation, insisting that athletes should play ball and keep quiet about anything else. Summing up that belief in the wake of Guillen’s impolitic comments, Politico’s Jonathan Allen declared that athletes should “just shut up” and play.

On the surface, the jeremiad may seem perfectly reasonable — but its deeper suppositions are abhorrently elitist and anti-democratic. They assume that only certain kinds of establishment-vetted individuals — specifically, professional political operatives, politicians, pundits and reporters — have standing to promote political causes.

That sentiment should be offensive not just to athletes, but to anyone not of the professional political class. Because, really, if a baseball manager or a basketball player somehow has no right to speak out, why should a plumber or a factory worker have that right?

In a political culture constantly paying homage to the working-class creed, few would — or should — say that such blue-collar laborers must simply “shut up and work.” It should be the same standard for athletes. The more these public figures exercise their right to speak out on major issues, the more they help teach younger generations that politics is not a game only for Washington, D.C., elites, nor a punch line only to laugh at during “The Daily Show” — but a critical battle of ideas that requires everyone’s participation.

Aren’t such tyrannical, arbitrary and callous acts illegal? Can management just throw you out on your ear, upending your life and endangering your ability to support yourself, for wearing the wrong shirt? Freedom of speech, freedom of expression, right?

Wrong.

The First Amendment and many of the Constitution’s other protections only extend to the government, not to private employers. Freedom of speech and expression are not protected in the private-sector, nonunion workplace. You could be fired for, say, wearing a pin advocating a particular political party. You could also be fired for sporting a smiley face pin.

“People assume they have a lot more protection at work than they actually do,” says Judith M. Conti, federal advocacy coordinator for the National Employment Law Center (NELP). “People also assume they have some right to be treated decently, and fairly, and respectfully at the workplace. They have the right to freedom from discrimination based on certain immutable characteristics like sex, race and age, but as long as treatment at work isn’t related to one of those characteristics you can be treated badly with no legal recourse. It’s kind of a free-for-all.”

According to Donna Ballman, the labor lawyer six of the Wellborn employees have retained, the workers had no idea their jobs could be imperiled by their choice of clothing color. “Who would?” Ballman responded in an email message. “Most Americans think your employer must have a good reason to fire you.”

But for the most part, American workers labor under the auspices of employment-at-will, a doctrine that allows employers near total control to hire, fire and promote, for good reasons, bad reasons or no reason at all. Employment-at-will is a principle that dates back to British common law, which early settlers brought with them from the Old World during the Colonial era. It is a relic of that time and has long since been overturned in Britain, along with the rest of the world’s wealthy nations.

In America well over three-quarters of workers are covered by employment-at-will, with Montana (with a population of less than 1 million) being the only state with a law requiring employers to have “reasonable grounds” for laying people off. Outside of Montana, a union is the surest protection against employment-at-will’s regimen of near total employer power. (Only a tiny sliver of American workers belong to a union: at last count 7.2 million in the private sector, or 6.9 percent of the workforce.)

Any union contract worth its salt includes a “just cause” firing clause. This generally means that employers are free to fire or lay off workers for any number of reasons, including misconduct, poor job performance, job obsolescence, or lack of revenue. But they cannot arbitrarily punish workers because the manager is having a bad day, or because they don’t like your smile (or lack thereof), as employment-at-will allows. (As the employees of the Elizabeth R. Wellborn law firm learned, this manifestly unjust state of affairs is just as applicable to white-collar jobs as it is to the low-wage service sector workforce.)

As academic Corey Robin notes in his book “Fear: The History of a Political Idea,” employers have wantonly exercised this power, and the judiciary has repeatedly upheld this despotic state of affairs. The courts have backed employers’ right to fire their workers for such non-work related reasons as “carrying on extramarital affairs; participating in group sex at home; having children out of wedlock; smoking on the job; wearing, in the case of off-duty male police officers, an earring; and carrying on relationships and friendships with coworkers or employees of a competitor.”

The available non-union protections are spotty, at best. There are highly specific whistle-blowing exceptions (under the Clean Air and Water Acts, for instance), precisely negotiated contracts requiring just cause (which many employees are too scared to ask for), or an ethical employer, like Costco, can choose to complicate the firing process (the box store makes managers clear their decision with a regional vice president before they fire an employee of over two years). Government employees are generally safer from their managers’ whims, but as the public sector continues to shrink fewer Americans are enjoying that protection.

The employer’s legal ability to fire and discipline people for their non-work personal lives even stretches to sexual orientation: only 20 states, and the District of Columbia, have laws against such discrimination, while the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) has languished in Congress for almost 20 years (since 1994, to be exact). Workers are protected against other forms of discrimination by the Civil Rights Act Title VII (race, religion, sex, age, and so on), although the burden of proof is punishingly high.

“There are plenty of cases where employees are fired for reasons of age or race, can show that they were unjustly terminated, but can’t prove by a preponderance of evidence that the subjective motivation of the employer was race, age or sex,” says Thomas Geoghegan, labor lawyer and author of the union movement memoir “Which Side Are You On?” “That’s a huge hill to climb. The reality is that there is much more protection from race, sex, age discrimination in countries where you just can’t be fired unless you have just cause for doing so.”

Most rich, democratic nations, including almost all of the European Union, Japan, South Korea, and Canada provide “just cause” protections for their workers. (Many less wealthy, but still democratic nations eschew employment-at-will, including many Latin American nations and South Africa.) The laws vary, but they generally provide what only a union contract in the United States does: You can’t be fired for any old reason. Many nations even have an independent labor court system to adjudicate such cases. America’s much vaunted Constitution is not so generous.

Unfortunately, change does not seem to be in the offing. Neither Geoghegan or Conti are aware of any current legislative or popular challenges to employment-at-will’s hegemony. A 2008 ballot initiative in Colorado would have put a just-cause amendment on the ballot. But labor leaders pulled it at the last minute in a deal with business interests to defeat a right-to-work initiative, which would have forced unions to provide services to non-dues paying workers.

Ballman notes that most states have an inspection apparatus to examine unemployment insurance claims, and if an employee is fired for misconduct, she is found ineligible for unemployment benefits. “But what about the employer who fires without just cause?” she asks. “Why not give the unemployment hearing officers one more power: the power to reinstate with back pay? Why should taxpayers have to pay because someone was in a bad mood and fired an employee?” (While this idea is appealing, Ballman admits it has no legislative traction.)

Although the Constitution does not protect them, the Wellborn workers could have a case under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Ironically, management’s belief that the color coordination was an act of protest could make their wardrobe a protected activity under the NLRA. “Right now we are trying to reach an amicable resolution,” Ballman says. “We’ll see.”

Unfortunately, the NLRA’s protections are often scant. The employer fines it allows are embarrassingly small and its enforcement arm is notoriously overworked. The best workers can usually hope for is reinstatement with mitigated back pay, after a long and drawn out hearing process. Even reinstatement can prove a hollow victory: One 1980s law review found that 80 percent of those rehired are fired again within a year, while a 1998 study reported that 65.3 percent of the reinstated quit after less than a year back “because of what they perceived to be unfair treatment.”

That’s the best the federal government can offer American workers. Either way you lose your job for wearing the wrong shirt.

And they reminded Americans of the value of organized labor. People who’d never been part of a union stood and marched, rallied and voted, knocked on their neighbors’ doors to gather signatures on petitions for recall elections and a ballot referendum.

“For all its faults, the National Labor Relations Act established that it is the policy of the U.S. government to encourage collective bargaining,” Jacob Remes, assistant professor of public affairs and history at SUNY Empire State College, told AlterNet. “The New Deal established collective bargaining as a fundamental part of democracy–what they called industrial democracy. We talk about how the New Deal era has ended, but I think one of the great things about these fights is that they reminded people–politicians, pundits, the populace–that despite the decline of the rest of the New Deal, we still believe in at least this element of industrial democracy.”

In Wisconsin, despite over 100,000 protesting in the streets of Madison and a weeks-long occupation of the Capitol, Governor Scott Walker signed Act 10 into law, stripping around 175,000 public workers of their right to bargain collectively with their bosses over anything but wages. Wisconsinites turned to recall elections to express their anger; they recalled two Republican state senators and are now working on getting rid of Gov. Walker.

“One of the things people we represent now see is the value of their collective bargaining agreements,” Marty Beil of AFSCME Council 24 told AlterNet. “Workers come in and they take for granted all the protections and benefits and processes. Now that there’s no collective bargaining agreement and management can do what they want with you, folks are getting a better understanding of the value of their union.”

In Ohio, state law allowed workers to get SB5, the anti-union bill, on the ballot as a referendum in 2011 and overturn it by a substantial margin. While that hasn’t stifled Governor John Kasich’s attacks on workers, it has certainly limited his ability to directly crack down on union power. The anti-labor right hasn’t rested, though, and it is still pushing other bills—and even a constitutional amendment—that would undermine unions in other ways.

It’s obvious that the conditions on the ground for working people in Wisconsin and Ohio are very different. AlterNet took a look at the struggles of public workers in both states—what it’s like to have lost collective bargaining rights, the endless string of new attacks on workers, and what people in both states are doing to fight back.

Missing Collective Bargaining in Wisconsin

For those watching Wisconsin after last year’s protests, most of the news has been of recall elections—last year, the recalls of two Republican state senators and this year’s recall of Scott Walker, his lieutenant governor and four more state senators, launched with a petition signed by over one million people.

But in the meantime, Walker’s Act 10 went into effect June 29, 2011, instantly stripping collective bargaining rights from some 175,000 Wisconsin public employees, and the recalls have yet to produce changes in the law.

According to information gathered by the Institute for Wisconsin’s Future, a state worker who earns $40,000 a year, under Act 10, has lost an average of $3,668 from her paycheck. “That’s $70 a week cut from a family budget, $70 weekly which cannot be spent at local stores,” they point out. They also estimate the loss to local economies caused by the pay cuts and hikes in the workers’ side contributions to health insurance premiums will be over $700 million—and that taking that money out of Wisconsin’s economy will lead to the loss of nearly 7,000 private-sector jobs in the first year of the governor’s austerity budget.

And it’s not just wages that have been lost. “Regardless of what happens with the recall, we’re probably not going to be able to completely roll back the increases in contributions on health insurance and pensions,” Jenni Dye, an attorney and candidate for Dane County Board, told AlterNet.

Meanwhile, under Act 10, unions are now required to recertify each year, holding an election that requires 51 percent support of all employees in the bargaining unit—even if some of them choose not to vote. This means that, unlike political elections in this country, any non-vote is counted as a “no.” In large bargaining units, made up of thousands of workers, Beil said, that makes recertification nearly impossible, and many of the unions didn’t try.

For those that did go through the recertification process, Act 10 placed extreme limits on what they can bargain over—wages only, up to a capped increase at the consumer price index. (The AFL-CIO noted that there is no such cap on non-union workers’ wage increases.) Vacations, benefits, working conditions, sick days, overtime—bargaining for any of that is expressly forbidden.

Now Walker has even refused to negotiate with the unions willing to jump through all these hoops to comply with his law. The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel reports that two of the unions, the State Professional Education and Information Council #1 and the Wisconsin State Attorneys Association, have filed unfair labor practice complaints against Walker’s administration because it has refused to set a date for negotiations–and as many as four other unions might also file suit. These unions have gone through elections, finishing, according to Beil, in December of last year, and have been trying to get Walker to come to the bargaining table ever since. Dye said that Walker’s refusal to negotiate proves that his goal was always “to see an end to collective bargaining, period, in Wisconsin.”

Beil represents, among others, workers at the state’s correctional institutions, who are openly being told by their bosses that they simply have no union anymore. Yet the unions keep fighting for the workers, even without official recognition. AFSCME and others have to use the courts or administrative hearings to fight for the workers. Beil called it “a campaign of suppression and intimidation.”

Beil told a story of guards at a women’s correctional facility, who get sent along with inmates when they have to go to the hospital to hold a “vigil.” If one of the guards has to use the bathroom while waiting, they are now required to call the prison, get a replacement sent out, and not use the bathroom until they have returned to their post at the prison. “Workers are every day subject to this kind of abuse and degradation. There’s absolutely no dignity in the workplace anymore,” he said.

Wisconsin’s teachers, are also feeling the loss of their protections at work, with new handbooks replacing their old union contracts, containing strict and arbitrary rules on dress code and restrictions on their outside-of-work activities. In New Berlin, teachers reported [PDF] that not only were workdays for teachers getting longer with no pay increases, but that teachers must adhere to a dress code that includes skirts below the knee, no jeans, no open shirts, and that they can be dismissed for the crime of having students as “friends” on Facebook. They are also required to report any traffic incidents or tickets to their school district.

“’Moral turpitude’ is a standard [officials] are trying to now use in very vague ways,” Dye said.

And because Act 10 expressly forbids collective bargaining, Dye noted, some districts are worried that if they collaborate with teachers to design an employee handbook that is fair to all, they could actually be in violation of the law.

But workers haven’t given up, and are finding new ways to fight despite the loss of their union protections. “The decertified unions in Wisconsin are in some ways a return to a world before collective bargaining was the sine qua non of a union. This is scary, certainly, but some unions might find it liberating. It allows them the opportunity to experiment with new ways of building power,” Remes pointed out.

In Madison, the teachers’ union, Madison Teachers Incorporated, is playing a large role in school board elections, because those school board officials once in office have the ability to write rules for the teachers. Dye, who decided to run for office after being deeply involved in last year’s Capitol protests and occupation, noted, “It’s even more important that we have strong candidates and strong elected officials on school boards, county boards, because now those officials have so much more power and control over our public employees.”

Dye and others like her, running for office around the state or joining up with insurgent campaigns as organizers, are part of a movement that is determined to bring some rights and respect back to Wisconsin’s working people. “It’s actually kind of difficult to have a sense of the real movement spirit that is part of the day-to-day life here on the ground,” Peter Rickman, a union organizer and former leader of Wisconsin’s Teaching Assistants Association, told AlterNet. “We’ve gone from feeling like the right-wing is ascendant, to now–not only have we staged a dramatic fight-back at the Capitol, but collective action is a part of everyone’s day-to-day lives.”

Rickman pointed out that the organizing happening now is bringing together community groups, political organizations and unions, building new organizations (many under the umbrella of We Are Wisconsin) that can last beyond one protest or one election cycle. “We do rallies and we do protests and we do direct action in addiction to voter contact. We have strength in numbers, the 1 percent has the money,” he said.

The logo that became ubiquitous during last spring’s protests, the state of Wisconsin redesigned as a blue clenched fist, is still everywhere, Rickman said, a sort of talisman for those involved in the movement. “When you have the blue fist button folks will come up to you and say ‘Here’s what I’ve been doing, what are you up to?’ We have a real social movement on the ground, and it involves everyday people.”

Beating Back Mini-SB5s in Ohio

In Ohio, state law allows for a “Citizens’ Veto“ of a law passed by the legislature and signed by the governor—and the citizens took advantage, first gathering 1.3 million signatures on a petition to overturn Senate Bill 5, the anti-union law, 6,000 volunteers dancing them in a parade down to the Secretary of State’s office, and then resoundingly defeating the law in an off-year ballot referendum that saw record voter turnout.

“It got people to start thinking about the role of labor in Ohio,” Brian Rothenberg, executive director of ProgressOhio, told AlterNet. “You can almost thank John Kasich and the Republicans because it woke up a lot of Ohioans who had been bombarded by talk radio and had forgotten what labor meant to them.”

But Kasich and Ohio Republicans—and even some Democrats—aren’t done trying to eliminate union power just yet. Jason Perlman of the Ohio AFL-CIO told AlterNet that they’re seeing attempts around the state to revive bits and pieces of SB5 in local legislation, attacking workers’ rights by dribs and drabs.

One development is a new plan to overhaul Cleveland’s schools—and like the emergency manager provisions in Michigan, give officials the power to break existing contracts with workers. “Really, if this happens, they can do what they want, no contract has meaning, the school board has no more power of authority. It’s a little authoritarian in its concept,” Perlman said.

Workers are still facing pressure to take pay cuts (the same rhetoric around “shared sacrifice” hasn’t gone away) and many have faced cuts to their benefits as well. Perlman noted, “I think people are still unfortunately confused as to what they perceive a public employee actually making. The other side did a very good job of portraying public workers as overpaid and underworked.”

The Dayton Daily News reported that five local governments stopped paying 100 percent of their employees’ insurance premiums in 2011, requiring employees to contribute part of the costs. In the city of Moraine, unions have agreed to pay freezes, job cuts, and the city has doubled the deductible on its employees’ healthcare plans. Public employees have been making concessions on their contracts for years, Perlman noted, but they understand that right now they still may have to give up a bit more to show good faith. “I’m hoping and believing that this is a one step back, two steps forward process,” he said.

But Rothenberg pointed out that in Ohio, at least, the employees still have a seat at the bargaining table, and that has an impact on the entire economy; when union workers get better wages, it helps set the standard for non-union workers’ pay as well.

Meanwhile, while union workers are giving up hard-won wages and benefits, others in the state are pushing for a misleadingly named “Right-To-Work” law—they’re working to get the provision, which defunds unions by allowing employees represented by a union not to pay the costs of representation, passed as a constitutional amendment. To get an amendment on the ballot this year, they need around 381,000 signatures by July 4—which Perlman said seems unlikely. And, he noted, even many Republicans have distanced themselves from the proposal, which is being pushed by Tea Party groups and the Associated Builders and Contractors of Ohio.

While the anti-union crowd might be having trouble getting signatures together for their no-rights-at-work agenda, Rothenberg said that the progressive and pro-labor coalition that overturned SB5 is in great shape, having just collected signatures to redo how redistricting is done in Ohio. And Perlman appreciates the help from community groups. It’s nice to see people who aren’t union leaders discussing the benefits of unions, he noted. “When people see the head of a labor union talking about the good things they do, of course he’s going to say that.”

Beyond the benefits of unions in the workplace, though, Rothenberg argued that part of the reason Ohio is in a better place right now is that it is not reliant on politicians—the citizens had to find other means by which to fight their governor’s regressive agenda. “The lesson of Wisconsin and Ohio is that those citizens can be organized and they can make a difference regardless of who’s in power.”

In both Wisconsin and Ohio, what started as an attack on public employee unions that a couple of Tea Party governors thought they could sneak past the public has turned into a vibrant people’s movement. Perlman pointed out that for a long time, workers had grown used to a middle-class lifestyle and were distanced from the fights of the labor movement that had won them decent wages and benefits in the first place. The attacks they’ve faced in the past year, and particularly in Wisconsin, the struggles workers face every day now that they have lost collective bargaining, have woken them up to the reality that the other side wants to eliminate all their rights.

“For a long time the American worker has had it good enough, they’ve had something to lose,” Perlman said. “I think people are finally starting to realize that we no longer have it good enough.”

This is what work looks like now. It’s been this way for so long that most American workers don’t realize that for most of the 20th century, the broad consensus among American business leaders was that working people more than 40 hours a week was stupid, wasteful, dangerous and expensive — and the most telling sign of dangerously incompetent management to boot.

It’s a heresy now (good luck convincing your boss of what I’m about to say), but every hour you work over 40 hours a week is making you less effective and productive over both the short and the long haul. And it may sound weird, but it’s true: the single easiest, fastest thing your company can do to boost its output and profits — starting right now, today — is to get everybody off the 55-hour-a-week treadmill, and back onto a 40-hour footing.

Yes, this flies in the face of everything modern management thinks it knows about work. So we need to understand more. How did we get to the 40-hour week in the first place? How did we lose it? And are there compelling bottom-line business reasons that we should bring it back?

The Making of the 40-Hour Week

The most essential thing to know about the 40-hour work-week is that, while it was the unions that pushed it, business leaders ultimately went along with it because their own data convinced them this was a solid, hard-nosed business decision.

Unions started fighting for the short week in both the UK and US in the early 19th century. By the latter part of the century, it was becoming the norm in an increasing number of industries. And a weird thing happened: over and over — across many business sectors in many countries — business owners discovered that when they gave into the union and cut the hours, their businesses became significantly more productive and profitable. As Tom Walker of the Work Less Institute puts it in his Prosperity Covenant:

That output does not rise or fall in direct proportion to the number of hours worked is a lesson that seemingly has to be relearned each generation. In 1848, the English parliament passed the ten-hours law and total output per-worker, per-day increased. In the 1890s employers experimented widely with the eight hour day and repeatedly found that total output per-worker increased. In the first decades of the 20th century, Frederick W. Taylor, the originator of “scientific management” prescribed reduced work times and attained remarkable increases in per-worker output.

By 1914, emboldened by a dozen years of in-house research, Henry Ford famously took the radical step of doubling his workers’ pay, and cut shifts in Ford plants from nine hours to eight. The National Association of Manufacturers criticized him bitterly for this — though many of his competitors climbed on board in the next few years when they saw how Ford’s business boomed as a result. In 1937, the 40-hour week was enshrined nationwide as part of the New Deal. By that point, there were a solid five decades of industrial research that proved, beyond a doubt, that if you wanted to keep your workers bright, healthy, productive, safe and efficient over a sustained stretch of time, you kept them to no more than 40 hours a week and eight hours a day.

Evan Robinson, a software engineer with a long interest in programmer productivity (full disclosure: our shared last name is not a coincidence) summarized this history in a white paper he wrote for the International Game Developers’ Association in 2005. The original paper contains a wealth of links to studies conducted by businesses, universities, industry associations and the military that supported early-20th-century leaders as they embraced the short week. “Throughout the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, these studies were apparently conducted by the hundreds,” writes Robinson; “and by the 1960s, the benefits of the 40-hour week were accepted almost beyond question in corporate America. In 1962, the Chamber of Commerce even published a pamphlet extolling the productivity gains of reduced hours.”

What these studies showed, over and over, was that industrial workers have eight good, reliable hours a day in them. On average, you get no more widgets out of a 10-hour day than you do out of an eight-hour day. Likewise, the overall output for the work week will be exactly the same at the end of six days as it would be after five days. So paying hourly workers to stick around once they’ve put in their weekly 40 is basically nothing more than a stupid and abusive way to burn up profits. Let ‘em go home, rest up and come back on Monday. It’s better for everybody.

As time went on and the unions made disability compensation and workplace safety into bigger and bigger issues, another set of concerns further buttressed the wisdom of the short week. A growing mountain of data was showing that catastrophic accidents — the kind that disable workers, damage capital equipment, shut down the lines, open the company to lawsuits, and upset shareholders — were far more likely to occur when workers were working overtime and overtired.

That sealed the deal: for most businesses, the potential human, capital, legal and financial risks of going over 40 hours a week simply weren’t worth taking. By World War II, the consensus was clear and widespread: even (or especially!) under the extreme demands of wartime, overworking employees is counterproductive and dangerous, and no competent workplace should ever attempt to push its people beyond that limit.

The Overtime Exception

There was one exception to this rule. Research by the Business Roundtable in the 1980s found that you could get short-term gains by going to 60- or 70-hour weeks very briefly — for example, pushing extra hard for a few weeks to meet a critical production deadline. However, there were a few serious caveats attached to this which used to be well-known, but have mostly been forgotten.

One is that increasing a team’s hours in the office by 50 percent (from 40 to 60 hours) does not result in 50 percent more output (as Henry Ford could have told them). Most modern-day managers assume there will be a direct one-to-one correlation between extra hours and extra output, but they’re almost always wrong about this. In fact, the numbers may typically be something closer to 25-30 percent more work in 50 percent more time.

Here’s why. By the eighth hour of the day, people’s best work is usually already behind them (typically turned in between hours 2 and 6). In Hour 9, as fatigue sets in, they’re only going to deliver a fraction of their usual capacity. And with every extra hour beyond that, the workers’ productivity level continues to drop, until at around 10 or 12 hours they hit full exhaustion.

Another is that overtime is only effective over very short sprints. This is because (as Sidney Chapman showed in 1909) daily productivity starts falling off in the second week, and declines rapidly with every successive week as burnout sets in. Without adequate rest, recreation, nutrition and time off to just be, people get dull and stupid. They can’t focus. They spend more time answering e-mail and goofing off than they do working. They make mistakes that they’d never make if they were rested; and fixing those mistakes takes longer because they’re fried. Robinson writes that he’s seen overworked software teams descend into a negative-progress mode, where they are actually losing ground week over week because they’re so mentally exhausted that they’re making more errors than they can fix.

The Business Roundtable study found that after just eight 60-hour weeks, the fall-off in productivity is so marked that the average team would have actually gotten just as much done and been better off if they’d just stuck to a 40-hour week all along. And at 70- or 80-hour weeks, the fall-off happens even faster: at 80 hours, the break-even point is reached in just three weeks.

And finally: these death marches take a longer-term productivity toll as well. Once the crisis has passed and that 60-hour-a-week team gets to go back to its regular 40, it can take several more weeks before the burnout begins to lift enough for them to resume their typical productivity level. So, for a while, you’ll get significantly less than a full 40 out of them.

Wise managers who understand this will a) avoid requiring overtime crunches, because they’re acutely aware of the serious longer-term productivity hit that inevitably follows; b) keep the crunches as short as possible when they are necessary; and c) give their teams a few days off — one to two comp days per overtime week worked is about right — at the end of a hard sprint. This downtime enables them recuperate more quickly and completely. It’s much more productive to have them gone for the next week — and then back on the job, rested and ready to work — than have them at their workstations but too fried to get anything useful done for the next month.

So, to summarize: Adding more hours to the workday does not correlate one-to-one with higher productivity. Working overtime is unsustainable in anything but the very short term. And working a lot of overtime creates a level of burnout that sets in far sooner, is far more acute, and requires much more to fix than most bosses or workers think it does. The research proves that anything more than a very few weeks of this does more harm than good.

Enter the Knowledge Worker

After WWII, as the GI Bill sent more workers into white-collar jobs, employers at first assumed that the limits that applied to industrial workers probably didn’t apply to knowledge workers. Everybody knew that eight hours a day was pretty much the limit for a guy swinging a hammer or a shovel; but those grey-flannel guys are just sitting at desks. We’re paying them more; shouldn’t we be able to ask more of them?

The short answer is: no. In fact, research shows that knowledge workers actually have fewer good hours in a day than manual laborers do — on average, about six hours, as opposed to eight. It sounds strange, but if you’re a knowledge worker, the truth of this may become clear if you think about your own typical work day. Odds are good that you probably turn out five or six good, productive hours of hard mental work; and then spend the other two or three hours on the job in meetings, answering e-mail, making phone calls and so on. You can stay longer if your boss asks; but after six hours, all he’s really got left is a butt in a chair. Your brain has already clocked out and gone home.

The other thing about knowledge workers is that they’re exquisitely sensitive to even minor sleep loss. Research by the US military has shown that losing just one hour of sleep per night for a week will cause a level of cognitive degradation equivalent to a .10 blood alcohol level. Worse: most people who’ve fallen into this state typically have no idea of just how impaired they are. It’s only when you look at the dramatically lower quality of their output that it shows up. Robinson writes: “If they came to work that drunk, we’d fire them — we’d rightly see them as a manifest risk to our enterprise, our data, our capital equipment, us and themselves. But we don’t think twice about making an equivalent level of sleep deprivation a condition of continued employment.”

And the potential for catastrophic failure can be every bit as high for knowledge workers as it is for laborers. Robinson cites the follow-up investigations on the Exxon Valdez disaster and the Challenger explosion. Both sets of investigators found that severely overworked, overtired decision-makers played significant roles in bringing about these disasters. There’s also a huge body of research on life-threatening errors made by exhausted medical residents, as well as research by the US military on the catastrophic effects of fatigue on the target discrimination abilities of artillery operators. (As Robinson dryly notes: “It’s a good thing knowledge workers rarely have to worry about friendly fire.”)

“Passion,” De-Unionization, and the End of the 40-Hour Week

How did this knowledge, which was so deeply embedded in three generations of American business management that it was utterly taken for granted, come to be so lost to us now? There are probably several answers to that, but there are three factors in particular that stand out.

The first is the emergence of Silicon Valley as an economic powerhouse in the late 1970s. Since WWII, the valley had attracted a unique breed of worker — scientists and technologists who carried with them a singular passion for research and innovation. Asperger’s Syndrome wasn’t named and identified until 1994, but by the 1950s, the defense industries in California’s Santa Clara Valley were already drawing in brilliant young men and women who fit the profile: single-minded, socially awkward, emotionally detached and blessed (or cursed) with a singular, unique, laser-like focus on some particular area of obsessive interest. For these people, work wasn’t just work; it was their life’s passion, and they devoted every waking hour to it, usually to the exclusion of non-work relationships, exercise, sleep, food and sometimes even personal care. The popular stereotype of the geek was born in some real truths about the specific kinds of people who were drawn to tech in those early years.

The culture that grew up in the valley over the next few decades reflected and valorized the peculiarities of what Lockheed’s company psychologists were calling by the late ’50s “the sci-tech personality.” Companies broadened their working hours, so programmers who came in at noon and worked through till midnight could make their own schedules. Dress codes were loosened; personal eccentricities were celebrated. HP famously brought in breakfast every morning so its engineers would remember to eat. The local 24-hour supermarket carried microchips alongside the potato chips, so techies working in their garages could stop in at 2am for snacks and parts.

And then, in the early ‘80s, Tom Peters came along, and promoted the Silicon Valley work ethic to the rest of the country in the name of “excellence.” He extolled tech giants like HP and Apple for the “passion” of their workers, and told old-industry employers that they could move into the new age by seeking out and rewarding that kind of passion in their employees, too. Though Peters didn’t advocate this explicitly, it was implicitly understood that to “passionate” people, 40-hour weeks were old-fashioned and boring. In the new workplace, people would find their ultimate meaning and happiness in the sheer unrivaled joy of work. They wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.

There were two problems with this. The first is that this “passion” ideal didn’t recognize that the vast majority of people have legitimate physical, emotional and psychological needs — things like sleep, exercise, relaxation and the maintenance of strong family and social support bonds — that these engineers didn’t have to nearly the same degree. The second was that most managers, lacking windows into their workers’ souls, decided to cut corners and measure passion with one easy-to-chart metric: “willingness to spend your entire life at the office.” (It was about this time, with gourmet company cafeterias and in-house fitness centers and on-site child care sprouting up in high-tech campuses all over town, that I realized if a company is working that hard to make the workplace feel like home, it’s a strong suggestion that their employees risk sanction if they ever attempt to visit their actual homes again.)

These were the early morning-in-America Reagan years. The unions — for 150 years, the guardians of the 40-hour week — were falling under a conservative onslaught; and in their place, the new cult of the entrepreneur was ascendant. All the old paternalistic contracts between employers and employees were torn up. Where companies once hoped to hire people young and nurture their careers through to a pensioned retirement — a lifelong relationship that required managers to take the long view about how to keep their workforces sustainably healthy and happy — young Gen Xers were being given a 401k and told to expect to change jobs every three to five years. Even while employers were demanding new levels of “passion” and commitment, they were also abdicating their old obligation to look after the long-term well-being of their employees.

The rapacious new corporate ethic was summarized by two phrases: “churn ‘em and burn ‘em” (a term that described Microsoft’s habit of hiring young programmers fresh out of school and working them 70 hours a week until they dropped, and then firing them and hiring more), and “working 90 hours a week and loving it!” (an actual T-shirt worn with pride by the original Macintosh team. (Productivity experts estimate that we’d have probably had the Mac a year sooner if they’d worked half as many hours per week instead.) And this mentality soon spread from the technology sector to every industry in every corner of the country.

The new ideal was to unleash “internal entrepreneurs” — Randian übermenschen who would devote all their energies to the corporation’s success, in expectation of great reward — and who were willing to assume all the risks themselves. In this brave new world, the real go-getters were the ones who were willing to put in weekends and Saturdays, who put their families on hold, who ate at their desks and slept in their cubicles. Forty-hour weeks were for losers and slackers, who began to vanish from America’s business landscape. And with their passing, we all but forgot all the very good reasons that we used to have those limits.

Within 15 years, everything America’s managers used to know about sustaining worker productivity was forgotten. Now, 30 years and a few economic meltdowns on, the cafeterias and child-care centers and gyms are mostly gone, along with the stock options and bonuses that were once held out as the potential reward for the long hours. All that remains of those heady, optimistic days is the mandatory 60-hour work-week. And, unless you’re an hourly worker — still entitled to time and a half by law — the only inducement employers currently offer in exchange for submitting yourself to this abuse is that you get to keep your job.

Can We Bring It Back?

Bringing back the 40-hour work-week is going to require a wholesale change of attitude on the part of both employees and employers.

For employees, the fundamental realization is that an employer who asks for more than eight hours a day or 40 hours a week is stealing something vital and precious from you. Every extra hour at work is going to cost you, big time, in some other critical area of your life. How will you make up the lost time? Will you ditch dinner and grab some fast food? Skip the workout? Miss the kids’ game this week? Sleep less? (Sex? What’s that?) And how many consecutive days can you keep making that trade-off before you are weakened in some permanent and substantial way? (Probably not as many as you think.) Changing this situation starts with the knowledge that an hour of overtime is a very real, material taking from our long-term well-being — and salaried workers aren’t even compensated for it.

There are now whole industries and entire branches of medicine devoted to handling workplace stress, but the bottom line is that people who have enough time to eat, sleep, play a little, exercise and maintain their relationships don’t have much need of their help. The original short-work movement in 19th-century Britain demanded “eight for work, eight for sleep and eight for what we will.” It’s still a formula that works.

For employers, the shift will be much harder, because it will require a wholesale change in some of the most basic assumptions of our business culture. Two generations of managers have now come of age believing that a “good manager” is one who can keep those butts in those chairs for as many hours as possible. This assumption is implicit in how important words like “productivity” and “motivation” are defined in today’s workplaces. A manager who can get the same amount of work out of people in fewer hours isn’t rewarded for her manifest skill at bringing out the best in people. Rather, she’s assumed to be underworking her team, who could clearly do even more if she’d simply demand more hours from them. If the crew is working 40 hours a week, she’ll be told to up it to 50. If they’re already at 50, management will want to get them in on nights and weekends, and turn it into 60. And if she balks — knowing that actual productivity will suffer if she complies — she won’t get promoted.

Of course, hiring new people is out of the question — again, especially when the workers are salaried. Squeezing extra time out of an employee when you’re not going to have to pay extra for it is seen as a total freebie by managers who cling to the delusion that they’re getting 50 percent more work in 50 percent more time. This belief also drives the fallacy that you can fire one person and divide their job between two other people, who will work an extra 20 hours per week for free — and that there is no possible downside to the company for doing this.

And of, course, that’s wrong.

And it hurts the country, too. For every four Americans working a 50-hour week, every week, there’s one American who should have a full-time job, but doesn’t. Our rampant unemployment problem would vanish overnight if we simply worked the way we’re supposed to by law.

We will not turn this situation around until we do what our 19th-century ancestors did: confront our bosses, present them with the data, and make them understand that what they are doing amounts to employee abuse — and that abuse is based on assumptions that are directly costing them untold potential profits. We may have to appeal to the shareholders, whose investments are at serious risk when employees are overworked. (At least one shareholder suit has already been filed against a computer game company that was notorious for working its people 80 hours a week for years on end. It was settled out of court on terms favorable to the plaintiffs.) We may have to get harder-nosed in negotiating with our bosses when we first take the jobs, and get our hours in writing up front — and then demanding that they stick with the contract down the line. And we also need to lean on our legislators to start enforcing the labor laws on the books.

But the bottom line is: For the good of our bodies, our families, our communities, the profitability of American companies, and the future of the country, this insanity has to stop. Working long days and weeks has been incontrovertibly proven to be the stupidest, most expensive way there is to get work done. Our bosses are depleting resources from of the human capital pool without replenishing them. They are taking time, energy and resources that rightfully belong to us, and are part of our national common wealth.

If we’re going to talk about creating a more sustainable world, let’s start by talking about how to live low-stress, balanced work lives that leave us refreshed, strong and able to carry on as economic contributors for a full four or five decades, instead of burned out and broken by a too-early middle age. A full, productive 40-year career starts with full, productive 40-hour weeks. And nobody should be able to take that away from us, not even for the sake of a paycheck.