The Work of Democracy

Self-governance cannot survive on whatever time is left.

Have you got a second? How about a minute? A few hours?

Between work and family, obligations and exhaustion, what little time we have rarely feels like our own. Rarer still does it arrive in continuous, usable pieces.

Writing The Steward’s Compass consumes most of my Sundays. Those are the days when I have the fewest external obligations. To be clear, that does not mean there are none. Sometimes plans are canceled. Sometimes I stay up late despite the workweek ahead because the article still needs to be finished.

Among Americans is recorded and edited after full workdays. I post across platforms during lunch breaks or in the narrow window between work and dinner. I am learning video production and building a network as I go, often opening editing software after spending all day looking at a computer, or searching for someone to interview after a day filled with meetings and office interactions.

Then there are relationships, domestic labor, health and the occasional hope of personal enjoyment.

This is not a complaint about an unusually onerous life. It is the opposite. I am fortunate to have any time and energy available for something as abstract as a civic project. Many Americans have even less. They have children and overtime. Car repairs, meal preparation and yard maintenance. They have lives already filled to the edges.

The work of citizenship has been assigned to the leftover hours.

The American labor movement once understood that time was part of freedom. The demand for the eight-hour day carried a simple promise: “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, and eight hours for what you will.”

That final eight mattered. It was time for family, education, association, worship, organizing and self-government. Workers were not only demanding relief from physical exhaustion. They were demanding possession of some meaningful portion of their own lives.

The weekend wasn't discovered. It was won.

The Fair Labor Standards Act established federal overtime protections in 1938 and phased the standard workweek down to forty hours by 1940. That settlement has barely moved since, even as American productivity has multiplied. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, business output grew more than nine-fold between 1947 and 2013 while the hours required to produce it didn't quite double.

We became capable of producing vastly more with each hour of labor. But we rarely used that capacity to return time to the people producing it.

Even the forty-hour week understates how thoroughly work organizes our lives. Full-time employees worked an average of 8.5 hours on the weekdays they worked in 2025, according to the latest American Time Use Survey. That does not include the commute, preparation for work or the time needed to recover from it.

Control over time is also distributed by class. New federal data show that 90 percent of workers in management, business and financial occupations had access to paid leave. Among service workers, only 45 percent did. Unstable schedules can also require workers to hold time open for an employer without knowing when, or whether, those hours will be paid.

An hour is equal on the clock. It isn't equal among the people.

It takes time to speak with neighbors, understand a proposed ordinance or attend a public meeting. I keep local government and community-organizing meetings on my calendar, but I rarely make them. I simply can't participate at the level I would like. Some weeks, doing anything more means sacrificing more sleep and spending less time with my partner.

When protests are dominated by gray and white hair, it is not necessarily because retired Americans care more. They are often the people who can participate with the least immediate sacrifice. Time has already filtered the public before anyone speaks.

Research has found that people working long hours and unsocial schedules are less likely to vote. That should not surprise us. Political participation requires more than legal permission. It requires attention, energy and some reliable command over one’s own day.

This doesn't make work the enemy. Workplaces can expose us to people unlike ourselves. Labor unions have historically helped workers develop the skills, relationships and collective power needed for democratic participation. My own public work can be an expression of civic purpose.

But work without sufficient compensation, security or practical freedom does not strengthen citizenship. It consumes the capacity citizenship requires.

We have built a culture suspicious of anyone who is not visibly working while remaining resentful of workers who demand to be properly paid. We treat employment as evidence of moral worth and time away from employment as something that must be justified. Meanwhile, caregiving, volunteering, learning, organizing and maintaining relationships are treated as secondary because the market does not price them.

Danielle recently described America as “a people process, not a politician process.”

But a people-process requires people to possess some part of their own day.

A stewardship government would recognize living wages, paid leave, predictable schedules and continued reductions in working time as more than labor policy. They are democratic infrastructure. They should be the worker's dividend and may prove to be a necessity with the advent of ever more productivity with ever fewer human hands. They create the conditions under which Americans can become more than workers, customers and exhausted spectators.

This Labor Day, we should remember the neglected promise of that third eight hours: time for what we will.

Democracy lives there.