Saranac Lake, NY       In the Adirondacks, leaves are already starting to change, while falling on roads and sidewalks.  Labor Day is behind us, schools are in session, and summer is slipping away.  Having been almost constantly on the road over the last weeks with more to come, I have often felt I was swimming against the tide, especially during my time in Europe.  I started getting messages in the middle of July that I would hear back from some of my colleagues over there in September.  It’s a reminder that we live in different worlds.

In organizing, summer was always primetime to do our work.  The long months of July and August were matched only by March for productivity. These were the times when you could get more done and make more happen.  The days were longer, so people could stay on the doors, making visits easily and often past eight.  People were a bit more relaxed, often available outside, and less battened down inside their houses.  Fewer actions had to be canceled or rescheduled due to weather or driving conditions.  Summer was for organizing.

When younger, I thought it always so.  But more than twenty years ago, as we were beginning ACORN’s expansion into Canada, I can remember riding in the passenger seat of one of our earlier staff member’s car, as we looked at organizing turf in the Vancouver area.  He mentioned his interest in ACORN adopting a “European schedule” to how we organized our work and wondered if that was possible and what I thought of that.  I literally had no idea what he was talking about.  He had to explain that he thought we should duplicate European summer and holiday schedules, like those in France.  I thought he was joking, and simply replied our members are working, so we are working, still clueless, but suddenly certain that this young man wouldn’t make it with ACORN.

Traveling with the Organizers’ Forum through Romania and Bulgaria, and then going on to visit our organizers in Sicily and Malta, the constant holiday refrain was the equivalent of a sign on a store in the US that would simply say, “gone fishing.”  Everyone was on holiday, or broke their holiday to meet with us, or so they claimed, though working people in those countries still had to pull their shifts and punch their clocks.  In a parliamentary and financial crisis in France now, the Prime Minister is proposing that workers lose two of their eleven state holidays and people are in an uproar.  Workers understandably shouldn’t be happy to have to work two extra days now without extra pay.  At the same time, a legally mandatory 25 days of vacation or 5 working weeks, is something unknown in the USA.  I read about the French practice of extending state holidays, by taking a vacation day so they could fashion four and five-day weekends.  Wow!  Good for them, but how can you get away with that?  Even at ACORN, where benefits were never miserly, it took almost twenty years to get four weeks or 20 days off, and that was the maximum that anyone could accrue, and many, if not most, felt lucky if they could even take that many days off along the way.

How do they do it over there?  How do they get away with it?  How is this not something that reeks of class divides and privileges?  As the service economy has swelled, whether in tourism or healthcare or even employment, like road and home construction, depends on summer weather, how do people not notice how many are having to work while others holiday?  I don’t get it, and it’s not because I’ve never heard of work-life balance.  Such a balance is hard to achieve, except when blind to equity.  Bargaining union contacts, we strive to get people 40 hours and push back at the 35-hour schedules in nursing homes and permanent part-time positions in schools and public service.  Members demand more hours, so they can make more pay, knowing they make less with less time.  I can remember the Walmart campaign where we campaigned against mandatory overtime from suppliers, but when meeting outside Nairobi with workers so employed, they bristled at the money they had lost because hours were now capped.

I don’t begrudge my comrades across the sea for their better benefits, but who is doing the work we love, while our members are doing the work they have to do?  When do the rest of the workers get their “summer,” while the middle and upper classes are flaunting their holidays?  Somehow, we need to square this circle, so it works for everyone as rights in common, not simply privileges for fortunate ones.  I hate to agree with some of the hectoring political and business leaders over there or pundits writing in The Economist, but I do kind of understand their point.