News Release Archive - 2001

HOLLY SKLAR
Co-author of the just-released book Raise The Floor: Wages and Policies That Work For All Of Us, Sklar said today: “A job should keep you out of poverty, not keep you in it. Most Americans believe that. But as we celebrate Labor Day, hardworking Americans [who are] paid minimum wage have to choose between eating or heating, health care or child care. At $5.15 an hour, they earn just $10,712 a year. That’s a third less than in 1968, when the minimum wage was about $8, adjusting for inflation. A couple with two kids would have to work a combined 3.3 full-time minimum wage jobs to make ends meet. It just doesn’t add up. Let’s stop shortchanging workers with the minimum wage, and make it a living.”
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KIM BOBO
Bobo is the founder and executive director of the National Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice. She said today: “I serve on the soup kitchen committee at my church and see many families forced to make ends meet by eating at the soup kitchen. Many of those who frequent our soup kitchen work full-time jobs that do not pay livable wages. I hate to admit it, but we are underwriting the costs of employers paying sub-livable wages…. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported that over 50 percent of new jobs created in the society don’t pay enough to lift a family of three out of poverty…. It’s time for these outlaw businesses to stop doing a job on their workers.”
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JOSE LANDAVERDE
A day laborer who also works with the Latino Workers’ Union of Chicago to fight for the rights of day laborers, Landaverde said today: “In some neighborhoods in Chicago, 65 percent of Latino workers are day laborers. Most of these workers are women. Companies are firing permanent workers to get temporary workers, so they can make more money — the same reason they move to Mexico. Mostly, the workers get $5.15 per hour, but sometimes companies take out for transportation and processing checks, so the worker gets even less. A typical day laborer makes $5,000 per year; so you have four or five families living together in an apartment. This is not healthy, it’s not how a normal family should live. Companies are greedy. They are looking for money, not family values. We want day labor agencies regulated, we have over 1,000 cases pending before the Department of Labor in Chicago of day labor agencies which have not paid workers. Mayor Richard Daley is close to the owners of Windy City, a day labor agency that has contracts with the city. It’s industry getting what it wants and making deals with the politicians.”

ELIZABETH DRAKE
International financial analyst with the AFL-CIO, Drake said today: “In an increasingly globalized economy ruled by institutions lacking basic transparency and accountability, inequality is rising both between and within countries. The IMF and World Bank routinely require countries to privatize their public services and cut public sector jobs and wages and erase worker protections. These policies not only hurt workers in the developing world, they speed up the global race to the bottom.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; Norman Solomon, (415) 552-5378

LORETTA ROSS
Founder and executive director of the National Center for Human Rights Education, Ross is at the UN conference on racism, which begins on Friday in South Africa. She said today: “The Bush administration should not come to the conference. It would likely play an obstructionist role, refusing to acknowledge that the enslavement of Africans in the Americas and the theft of Native-American lands were crimes against humanity. Instead, members of the Congressional Black Caucus should attend. This would be in the tradition of civil-rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer and her colleagues from Mississippi, who sent an alternate delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention…”

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RON DANIELS
Executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, Daniels said today: “The behavior of Colin Powell is yet another testimony to the fallacy of skin politics. Simply exchanging White faces for Black faces in positions of power does not necessarily translate into justice for Black people. In a right-wing, illegitimate, racist administration, Colin Powell or any other Black person must do as the master commands or suffer the consequences…. Nations from Africa and the Third World have reported that the U.S. has used threats, intimidation and bribery in its attempt to block a comprehensive discussion about slavery.”

LAMIS ANDONI
Andoni is an independent analyst and journalist who has covered the Mideast for nearly two decades. She said today: “The Israeli bombing and takeover of Beit Jalla, parts of neighboring Bethlehem — and now Rafah in Gaza — are only the latest signs that the agenda of the Sharon government is to break Palestinian resistance and continue the occupation…. While most have been focusing on Hamas, the secular PLO has been re-asserting itself, which is why Israel assassinated PFLP leader Mustafa Zibri.” Andoni has interviewed Zibri.
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FRANCIS BOYLE
Professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law, Boyle said today: “UN Security Council Resolution 1322 [2000] ‘calls upon Israel, the occupying Power, to abide scrupulously by its legal obligations and its responsibilities under the Fourth Geneva Convention…’ There are 149 substantive articles of the Fourth Geneva Convention that protect the rights of every one of these Palestinians living in occupied Palestine. The Israeli government is currently violating, and has since 1967 been violating, almost each and every one of these…”

HOWEIDA ARRAF, ADAM SHAPIRO
Arraf and Shapiro are U.S. activists with the International Solidarity Movement, a group of people putting themselves between Israeli forces and Palestinians in the occupied territories.
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JEFF HALPER
Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, professor of anthropology at Ben Gurion University and editor of News From Within, Halper said today: “Israel is succeeding in making its occupation invisible. What is called Israeli ‘retaliation’ is violence to continue the occupation and what is called Palestinian ‘terrorism’ is violence to end the Israeli occupation.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

As the IMF and Argentina’s government agree to another loan package of $8 billion and further austerity programs, the following analysts are available for interviews:

BEVERLY KEENE
Coordinator of Dialogue 2000, a coalition representing human-rights and other groups in Argentina, Keene said today: “This new agreement with the IMF brings no resolution to growing unemployment and poverty. In fact, it will only make things worse since these loans are conditional on implementing more of the policies that have impaired the economy and taken an enormous human toll due to the cuts in health and social services…. Argentina will pay some $30 billion in interest and foreign debt service this year, more than half the national budget and many times over what it will spend on education and healthcare. This debt itself is fundamentally illegitimate, in part because it largely originated in loans taken out by a military junta responsible for the torture and disappearance of more than 30,000 Argentinians during the so-called ‘dirty war’ during the 1970s and ’80s. The governments, bankers and corporations of the rich north are continuing to oppress us by forcing us to pay them back for their loaning money to the murderous junta.”
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MARK WEISBROT
Co-author of the recent report “The Scorecard on Globalization 1980-2000: Twenty Years of Diminished Progress,” Weisbrot said today: “Argentina has borrowed more than $40 billion at high interest rates to defend its overvalued currency. That would be the equivalent of our government borrowing $1.4 trillion — 70 percent of our federal budget — to defend our own overvalued dollar. For 20 years now, Latin America has followed Washington’s advice and slashed tariffs, swallowed IMF austerity plans and sold off tens of billions of dollars of state assets to foreigners. This has brought a lot of pain, but no gain. Over the last 20 years, income per person in Latin America grew by a mere 7 percent, compared to 75 percent for the two decades before that (1960-1980), when governments exercised more control over their economic policies.”
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GREG PALAST
An economist and author of Democratic Regulation, Palast writes the column “Inside Corporate America” for Britain’s Guardian newspapers. He said today: “Last September, while Argentina was already on the cliff-edge of a deep recession, the IMF required Argentina to cut the budget deficit from $5.3 billion to $4.1 billion and asked for ‘a 12-15 percent cut in salaries’ of civil servants. The economists at the IMF surely know that holding back government spending and snuffing out purchasing power in a contracting economy would be like turning off the engines on an airplane in stall. The payoff for these delusional and cruel policies was a $26 billion emergency loan package. However, the IMF also forced Argentina to ‘peg’ its currency to the dollar, which meant that Argentina was at the mercy of banks and speculators and ended up paying a whopping 16 percent risk premium above normal in return for the dollars needed for this scheme. Argentina’s people don’t net one penny. Little of the bailout money escapes New York, where it lingers to pay interest to U.S. creditors, like Citibank. What’s more, the peg causes the peso to remain overvalued, making it very hard for Argentina to export its way out of recession. This disaster was created by IMF policies which transformed a mild recession into a depression and international crisis.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

With the White House reporting today that the current-year surplus has plummeted to $158 billion from the $281 billion projected in April, the following policy analysts are available for interviews:

STEVEN KULL
Author of the report “Americans on Federal Budget Priorities,” Kull is director of the Center on Policy Attitudes, which conducted a scientific online survey to determine how Americans thought the budget should be divided. He said today: “Based on what we’ve seen, in terms of how people prioritize the surplus, there may be significant public discomfort with the next round of tax cuts. The public has put a higher priority on education and healthcare than tax cuts. There was a feeling that if there was a substantial surplus, people could have all of the above, but as the surplus diminishes in size, the tax cut is losing its appeal.” When Americans were queried about what part of the budget they wanted increased or decreased, Kull found they wanted a “dramatic reduction in defense spending — on average by 24 percent. The areas of the budget to receive the highest dollar increase were related to ‘human capital.’ These included educational programs — federal support to education and job training — and medical research.”
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DOUG HENWOOD
Author of the book Wall Street and editor of Left Business Observer, Henwood said today: “It’s sad that the budget debate seems to have come down to Bush and the Republicans handing out tax cuts skewed to the very rich and the Democrats complaining that he’s squandering the surplus. It’s like a debate between two kinds of Republicans — Reaganite supply-siders and Hooveresque austerity hounds. Why isn’t anyone saying that a flush government could afford to spend on badly-needed health care, child care, and environmental initiatives?”
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FRIDA BERRIGAN
Senior research associate at the World Policy Institute and author of the forthcoming article “The Pentagon All-Stars,” Berrigan said today: “President Bush’s proposed $32.6 billion increase in military spending is greater than the entire defense budgets of every country in the world except for England, Russia, China and Japan. Bush proposed a 10.5 percent increase in military spending to a whopping $343.3 billion. The proposed federal education budget is only $19.9 billion. The proposed budget for ‘missile defense’ alone is $8.2 billion, an increase of almost 60 percent. This is the largest military budget increase since early in the Reagan administration.”
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MAX SAWICKY
Senior economist with the Economic Policy Institute and author of the forthcoming article “Up From Debt Reduction,” Sawicky said today: “The Democratic Party since Mondale has been trying to get the Republicans on fiscal responsibility — with disastrous results. There’s been an abandonment of fiscal activism from the Democratic Party.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

Wednesday (Aug. 22) marks the fifth anniversary of President Clinton’s signing of the “welfare reform” law. Re-authorization for Temporary Assistance to Needy Families, the program that came out of the 1996 legislation, will be a subject of controversy during the next year. The following policy analysts are available for comment:

NOEL A. CAZENAVE
Co-author of the just-released book Welfare Racism: Playing the Race Card Against America’s Poor and associate professor of sociology at the University of Connecticut, Cazenave said today: “The deployment by politicians and the media of racist images of lazy and sexually promiscuous black ‘welfare mothers’ facilitates the enactment of ostensibly color-blind, but in fact racism-driven, policies and programs. While in such punitive welfare initiatives African Americans are more likely than European Americans to be sanctioned off of welfare, ultimately — when welfare racism goes unchallenged — all poor people, regardless of their race or ethnicity, are harmed.”
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ANN WITHORN
Author of For Crying Out Loud: Women’s Poverty in the United States and professor of social policy at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, Withorn said today: “Welfare rolls dropped by more than half nationally since 1996 — but poverty for single mothers is only down 0.7 percent. Just because families are off welfare doesn’t mean they’re out of poverty; indeed, they may be in greater jeopardy. Living without a backup, going from one low-wage job to another, calling on relatives and friends who are themselves stretched to the limit, destabilizes everyone, especially children. So family homelessness is actually up. There’s talk of ‘personal responsibility,’ but what about the public’s responsibility? We were so fearful of making poor people dependent that we failed to create a dependable safety net for all as the economy worsens.”
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KATE KAHAN
Executive director of Working for Equality and Economic Liberation, a group formed in response to the welfare law of 1996, Kahan is a former welfare recipient. WEEL is based in Montana, the home state of Sen. Max Baucus, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee, which will be dealing with TANF re-authorization. Kahan said today: “The goal of welfare ‘reform’ was to reduce caseloads, not to reduce poverty. People can be sanctioned off welfare for being five minutes late for an appointment. In Montana, our child poverty rate has gone up to 21 percent…. I got on welfare in 1993 after leaving an abusive relationship. The welfare system today is so intrusive and degrading that many women are staying in such relationships.”
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GWENDOLYN MINK
Author of Welfare’s End, Mink said today: “The only positive aspect of the 1996 welfare law is that its block grants expire in 2002. This means that TANF will have to be re-authorized, which presents an opportunity to fix the ways it abuses poor women and their families. However, re-authorization also offers the forces of patriarchy an opportunity to tighten the screws on poor women. Already, we can hear the drum roll for fatherhood and marriage provisions as the ‘next steps in welfare reform.’ Aside from the fact that government should not be messing with intimate decisions about family formation and parental relationships, this focus on getting mothers to ‘marry out’ of poverty totally begs the question of why so many mothers are poor. Even for former TANF recipients who have played by all the rules, employment in the labor market earns them on average only $7 per hour — hardly a living wage for one person, let alone for a mother with a child to support.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

As the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives releases a report this afternoon at the Brookings Institution, the following individuals are available for interviews:

REV. JAMES LAWSON
Pastor emeritus of the Holman United Methodist Church in Los Angeles and one of the architects of the civil rights movement, Lawson said today about the White House plan: “This is another attempt to undermine the notion that government should be responsible for justice and equality in the emancipation of its vulnerable. The religious and political right so limit the options that they become one-dimensional — and serious religious, academic and political questions are never raised. The original U.S. government was established largely to protect the slave states and to protect the wealthy. This current program is an attempt to reverse the gains that people have made in the last century. Among other things, this program is an attempt at allowing the government to define who the black leaders are. Some of the right-wing foundations have been doing this. Martin King referred to it as a strategy of racism for the establishment to find a Negro that they can put in a shirt and tie who they can make a spokesperson for the status quo. Bush has said he views this as a way of convincing the African-American churches on the issue of abortion. It is an attempt to have discrimination be allowed in the name of religious conscience. It is also a stealth campaign on school vouchers, which would include funding all-white academies in the South. If the administration can blur the public dollar line, they can curtail the gains made on the equality of women and further legalize racism and poverty in education.”

SAMANTHA SMOOT
Executive director of the Texas Freedom Network, Smoot said today: “President Bush is broadening his drive to deregulate faith-based social service providers. In his Executive Order establishing the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, he explicitly directed that office to ‘eliminate unnecessary legislative, regulatory and other bureaucratic barriers that impede effective faith-based and other community efforts to solve social problems.’… In the name of ‘leveling the playing field’ for faith-based programs in Texas, then-Governor Bush passed laws relaxing regulations over these programs, including fully exempting faith-based drug treatment centers and children’s homes from state licensing and oversight. In Texas, faith-based drug treatment centers must now simply register their religious status with the state to gain exemption from virtually all of the health and safety, accountability and quality-of-care guidelines required of their secular counterparts, including: all employee training and licensing requirements, medical treatment guidelines, abuse and neglect prevention training, client rights protections, and requirements for reporting abuse, neglect, emergencies and medication errors. Under then-Governor Bush’s legislation, religious childcare centers and children’s homes in Texas could be accredited by a private, religious entity in lieu of state licensing, thus escaping state inspections and oversight. In the end, these alternatively-accredited child care facilities had a rate of abuse and neglect claims that was 50 times higher than that of state-licensed facilities.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

THOMAS POWER
Chair of the economics department at the University of Montana and author of the paper “Destroying Forests to Save Them: Rational Responses to the Summer of 2000 Wildfires,” Power said today: “The argument of many of the Western governors is that significant expansion of Western logging will reduce fires. But from an economic point of view, to reduce the threat of fire, you have to remove the most flammable material, but that has no commercial value. If you log an area, you remove the material that is least flammable — commercial logs — and leave the material that’s most flammable — brush and small trees. We can’t possibly afford to do what the timber industry and their advocates want to do, which is to ‘treat’ the forest — their euphemism for logging. We can’t afford to intensively manage tens of millions of acres of wild forest, and it would be environmentally damaging to try to do so. In addition, it’s not necessary to protect people and communities from wildfire.”

TIM HERMACH
Founder and executive director of the Native Forest Council, Hermach said today: “More than one hundred years ago, the great Republican conservationist President Teddy Roosevelt protected what came to be known as the National Forests from all further logging. Why? Because of the irresponsible and brutal behavior of the nation’s rapacious timber barons. Since then, however, Big Timber has bought its way into Congress and has clear-cut and logged over 40 million acres of these pristine national forests…. And they’ve been aided and abetted by the U.S. Forest Service and your tax dollars. The timber industry is pretending to be concerned about forest fires; they believe the fire issue can still be used to justify even more logging and to cover up the fact that they are the ones causing many of the fires and that their logging usually makes fires worse, not better.”
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“DOC” PARTRIDGE
Partridge, a former professor of Forest Disease and Insect Problems at the University of Idaho, has spent 37 years working on forest issues. He said today: “The administration is claiming that thinning will protect the forests, but what the administration and the timber industry want is a pretext to go in and log. They would not remove small-diameter material, but large trees. So while pretending that they are protecting forests from fires, they would actually be increasing the likelihood of fires…. Small debris and small-diameter timber is what’s left on the ground after they log the large-diameter trees that the timber companies want. The proposed ‘thinning’ — a euphemism for logging — will also become another way that the taxpayer subsidizes the timber industry. Not only does that industry get this material at greatly reduced cost, but the taxpayer subsidizes the roads that are built for the timber companies to use. Claims that forests are unhealthy have been and are being advanced as part of the reason for ‘management,’ but that is simply another pretext for logging. The published record shows that loss of trees from disease, fire, insects and any other disaster is less than 1 percent per year.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

Anticipating major protests, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank announced late Friday that they will be scaling back their fall meetings in Washington to only two days, Sept. 29 and 30. The following policy critics are available for interviews:

NJOKI NJOROGE NJEHU
Director of the 50 Years Is Enough Network, a coalition of over 200 U.S. grassroots groups dedicated to transforming the World Bank and the IMF, Njehu said today: “The duration of the IMF/World Bank meetings does not matter to the hundreds of millions of people impoverished by the institutions’ austerity policies, like user fees for primary health and education or abrupt increases in the price of water in the name of market ‘reforms.’ Whether they meet for six days or two, the institutions’ agenda remains the same: more layoffs, less government spending on social programs, less credit for small farmers and businesses, more privatization, and higher corporate profits. And however long they meet, they have shown no willingness to open the meetings up to the news media or public view. We will continue challenging the self-serving economic assumptions and secretive habits of these institutions until popular pressure forces fundamental change.”
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KEVIN DANAHER
Editor of Democratizing the Global Economy: The Battle Against the World Bank and the IMF, Danaher said today: “The Bank says that we [demonstrators] are cutting off dialogue with these protests, but the reason we started protesting in the first place was to confront their closed decision-making process. Instead of making the process transparent, being more open and democratizing the global economy, the IMF and World Bank had the opposite reaction: to call in thousands of police, which are paid for by our tax dollars…. Last week, several anti-corporate-globalization groups challenged the World Bank to a debate. If our arguments are so weak, then they should jump at the chance to debate us…. There have been protests against the structural adjustment policies of the World Bank and IMF in dozens of developing countries before they began happening in the industrial countries. There are protests in Argentina as we speak.”
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RADHIKA BALAKRISHNAN
Associate professor of economics at Marymount Manhattan College, Balakrishnan is author of the forthcoming The Hidden Assembly Line: Gender Dynamics of Subcontracted Work in a Global Economy. She said today: “The IMF and World Bank’s structural adjustment policies, where they coerce governments of developing countries into cutting back on essential services, increase the burden on women. When education and healthcare get cut, it is women who — for no compensation — have to fill the void and provide those services. The function of the World Bank and IMF has been to liberalize trade policies, and the ultimate benefactors of that are U.S. multinational corporations that gain access to markets.” Balakrishnan recently visited Ghana, which has been touted by the IMF as a success. But she said: “The IMF compelled the Ghanaian government to gut the public transportation system, increasing the dependence on private cars and the cost to people of getting to work, thus decreasing their real wages. The IMF got the government to focus the economy on cocoa as an export, so when the world prices for cocoa fell, it devastated the economy.”

For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

RUTH HUBBARD
Professor emerita of biology at Harvard University and author of Exploding the Gene Myth, Hubbard is on the board of the Council for Responsible Genetics. She said today: “The most immediate problem with Bush’s stance is that by saying there will be no federal funding for initial stem cell research, that means there will be no federal regulation. Germany, Britain and other countries have laws that regulate this kind of research. The existence of excess embryos for research is a result of the lack of regulation of the U.S. fertility industry. As a result, we have already seen the biotech companies beginning to produce embryos for research that are not intended to relieve infertility. This was not addressed by Mr. Bush.”

QUENTIN YOUNG, M.D.
National coordinator of Physicians for a National Health Program, Young said today: “Bush’s statement on stem cell research is the latest in a series of doublespeak pronouncements where the fig leaf of high morality — the sanctity of life — poorly conceals his fundamental ethic: a commitment to corporate exploitation and commodification of everything. There are serious issues of experimentation, but none of the ethical questions are resolved if for-profit models are not only permitted but favored, often to the exclusion of serious not-for-profit scientific experimentation. If this disastrous trend — which commenced with the patenting of elements in the human gnome and is now exploding — is not reversed, it holds dire consequences for the human experience.”
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THOMAS NAGY
Nagy is author of “The Secret Behind the Sanctions: How the U.S. Intentionally Destroyed Iraq’s Water Supply,” the just-published cover story in the September issue of The Progressive. He is associate professor of expert systems at George Washington University. Nagy said today: “Last night, Bush said that he ‘worries about a culture that devalues life.’ If he wants to show his commitment to the idea of the sanctity of life and save the lives of thousands of children each month, all he has to do is tell the U.S. delegation to the UN to stop withholding from Iraq materials needed to rehabilitate the water treatment systems that were disabled as a result of the U.S. bombing and sanctions.”
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KATHY KELLY
Kelly is co-founder of Voices in the Wilderness, which is currently conducting unauthorized delivery of medicines to Iraq. She and several of her colleagues have recently begun a 40-day fast in front of the U.S. Mission to the UN. She said today: “We still await an answer to an April 2001 letter to Bush signed by scores of religious groups and leaders calling for the lifting of the sanctions, which have been in effect for 11 years.”
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GINA COPLON-NEWFIELD
Coordinator of the U.S. Campaign to Ban Landmines, a coalition of over 500 groups, Coplon-Newfield said today: “One hundred and forty countries have joined the Mine Ban Treaty, but the U.S. has not. Eighteen thousand people are maimed or killed from landmines each year, and most of the victims are civilians. If President Bush is concerned with the value of life, then we urge him to join an agreement that has already begun saving lives.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167

President Bush is on a month-long vacation, but many people in this country get scant time off. The following analysts are available for interviews about how Americans would benefit from more vacation time:

DEBORAH FIGART
Co-editor of the recent book Working Time, Figart is professor of economics at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey. She said today: “It’s great that the president of the United States can recoup his energy with long vacations. Now he should encourage policies so that other hard-working Americans can also have time for rest, family and other activities. An International Labor Organization study earlier this year found that the U.S. has overtaken Japan with the highest average annual hours worked — just under 2,000 hours per year. The typical vacation in Europe is four to six weeks. In the United States, you’re lucky if you get two weeks. France has a 35-hour work week by law, and limited overtime beyond that. Part of the problem is that U.S. managers are encouraged to overwork people because of the fixed costs associated with each employee: healthcare insurance, unemployment insurance, etc. Low-income people work overtime so they can pay their bills. Many people who work the most are among the one-third of Americans who are not covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act, so-called ‘white collar’ workers. Technology could be part of the solution, but it has often meant that people spend time at home writing work-related emails. While men generally are more overworked than women, that changes if you count unpaid work.”
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JOE ROBINSON
Director of the Work to Live campaign and author of a forthcoming book by the same name, Robinson said today: “We’re the most vacation-starved country in the industrialized world. By far. Small business employees, the majority of us, get an average of eight days off while Europeans and Australians receive four to six weeks paid leave. In total hours, we now work two months longer every year than Germans. Two weeks longer than the Japanese.”

GABE SINCLAIR
Author of the new utopian novel The Four Hour Day, Sinclair works as an expert machinist. He said today: “Two percent of Americans now grow all of our food and then some. Another 30 million or so do all the mining, manufacturing and construction. If this minority can produce our modern cornucopia, then the four-hour workday is within easy reach. Instead, we remain thoroughly addicted to consumerism, to violence, and to class hierarchy.”
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DAVID STRAUSS
Executive director of the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs, Strauss said today: “Farm workers — like a lot of other workers — do not get the opportunity for paid vacation time. If the weather is bad, or they are between crops they have to work on, they do not get a dime. The typical farm worker has no vacation benefits, no health benefits, and works for at or near minimum wage.”
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For more information, contact at the Institute for Public Accuracy:
Sam Husseini, (202) 347-0020; David Zupan, (541) 484-9167