Time for People and Planet

Artwork in progress: the Labour Day rally will feature a giant clock that participants can write or draw on.

Dear Reader,

What are you doing now, as you read this letter? Are you finally getting some me-time after putting the kids to sleep, or are you quickly wolfing down your lunch so that you can rush back to work? Do you have the luxury to set aside time for reading, free from interruptions and distractions? Singaporeans are largely a time-starved lot. In Unease, Teo You Yenn writes about how even upper-middle-class parents have not used their relative wealth to buy more leisure time for themselves and their children—instead, it is spent on expensive meals and trips that fit within a tightly managed schedule.

Where did all the time go? On May 1, 1886, hundreds of thousands of workers in the United States wondered that too, and went on strike for shorter working hours, singing:

We mean to make things over,
We’re tired of toil for naught,
With bare enough to live upon,
And never an hour for thought;
We want to feel the sunshine,
And we want to smell the flowers,
We’re sure that God has willed it,
And we mean to have Eight Hours.
We’re summoning our forces
From shipyard, shop and mill;
Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest,
Eight hours for what we will!

Many strikers later succumbed to police violence, culminating in the Haymarket massacre, which is still remembered on Labour Day every May 1. Eventually, the workers did achieve their goal, immortalised in Dolly Parton’s song “9 to 5”, with a paid lunch break in the middle. But as unions weakened and wages stagnated, companies gradually clawed back this time by giving workers no choice but to work overtime.

140 years later, workers in Singapore still don’t have a true eight-hour day. Last year, full-time workers worked 43.8 hours a week on average. In fact, older generations will remember working a 5.5-day week until the government introduced the current 5-day week in 2004. We are one of the world’s most overworked countries and this also ranks us as the most fatigued, with serious impacts on physical and mental health.

At Ethos Books and Pagesetters Services, which I recently joined as a Project Manager, we are lucky to have a four-day work week, which gives us more time to spend in nature, pursue our hobbies or take care of our loved ones. Last Sunday, I joined a visit to Khatib Wellspring Farmden, where veteran farmer Mr Tang showed us the vast difference between the poor, clayey soil of the existing grass field, and the rich, black humus that he and his volunteers have developed in just a few years using permaculture principles. This has the added advantage of storing carbon in the ground, going a small way to mitigate the intense heat we felt that day. Imagine what Singapore would look like if every empty field was transformed into this! But despite the amazing work they do, a regular shared that they have been struggling to recruit volunteers from the nearby HDB flats, with many saying that they were too busy to help out.

This is why workers’ calls for shorter working hours and decent wages go hand in hand with making sure our planet is healthy and liveable for all. If we are all working overtime to keep up with the cost of living, how can we have the space to care for the environment, let alone ourselves?

On May 1, on Labour Day, Workers Make Possible and SG Climate Rally are jointly organising a rally at Hong Lim Park from 3–7pm, with the theme “Running out of time: Burnt out workers on a burning planet, time to take back your life!” It is a space that celebrates ordinary people showing signs of everyday courage and resistance, like the ones Diana Rahim writes about in We Saw Mountains. Visit the more than thirty booths, join in the collective art, listen to the performances and speeches and be a part of this budding movement to reclaim our time for ourselves. Hope to see you there!

For a better world,
Yong Feng

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