Quotes from Juliet B. Schor

Consumption is a social relationship, the dominant relationship in our society-one that makes it harder and harder for people to hold together, to create community.

Businessmen warned that idleness breeds mischief and-even worse-radicalism.

According to our calculations, just to reach their 1973 standard of living, they must work 245 more hours, or 6plus extra weeks a year.'8

time has become a currency, which we "spend" instead of "pass." Many of us need to relax, to unwind, and, yes, to work less.2

countervailing pressures, the most important of which was the trade union movement, which waged a successful hundred-year struggle for shorter hours. But once this quest ended after the Second World War, reductions in hours virtually ceased. Not long after unions gave up the fight, the American worker's hours began to rise.

the market system handed down to human beings a sentence of "life at hard labor."18

Work-and-spend has become a mutually reinforcing and powerful syndrome-a seamless web we somehow keep choosing, without even meaning to.

Where I work at the auto plant, the workers are just dropping like flies. When there's a lot of work because of a new model coming out, they make people work 10 and 12 hours every day, 6 days a week. Lots of people, even the younger ones, are developing high blood pressure, having accidents on the job, or car accidents on the way to and from work, or other serious health problems. But they have to do it. If you don't like it, you can just quit.44