All work and no play.

Despite, or perhaps because of, jet travel, personal computers, cell phones, microwaves, drive-through restaurants, home shopping networks, and the World Wide Web, the pace of life has been cranked up to a level that's making us ill and taking a lot of the fun out of life

Thousands of Canadian families are stretched close to the breaking point by the economic pressures of the 1990s. For most families, two jobs are now a basic necessity of life. The earnings of most Canadian workers have stagnated or declined in the past 15 years. Only a dramatic increase in the number of women in the labour force has allowed many families to maintain a survival income.

Declining wages are one of the main reasons for a tremendous increase in the number of dual-income families. In almost two-thirds of Canadian families today, both the husband and the wife are working outside the home.

The percentage of families with two jobs has nearly doubled since 1967. The idea that a single breadwinner can earn enough to support a spouse and several children is history. That worked okay until the late 1970s and the recession of the early 1980s.

Some experts estimate that a family must work 65 to 80 hours a week to make the same income as a single breadwinner working 45 hours in the 1970s. In the last 10 years, families have had to work almost twice as hard just to stay in the same place economically.

Even if a family has two-full-time jobs, much of the income goes to the increased cost of transportation, clothing, and meals for the second worker in the family. Child-care costs gobble up a big chunk of an extra income too.

A layoff, an illness, a disabling accident, an unplanned expense, or the loss of their babysitter or day-care centre can cause panic in a family and tremendous hardship.

Working odd hours, doing shift work, or combinations of part-time jobs, overtime hours, moonlighting, self-employment all mean that family members have less time for each other. Parents are so busy making a living that there's too little time left to make the living worthwhile. Statistics Canada released a report in 1995 confirming what working families already know: they are spending less time together and more time at work.

Sometimes, even two incomes are not enough. The number of moonlighting couples, where one spouse or both hold two jobs, jumped by more than 50% in the past decade, and a fifth of dual-earner couples worked 90 or more hours between them in 1994. It's no wonder that many adults are `time crunched,' juggling the competing demands of work, personal, and family responsibilities.

In 1995, a study in Quebec found that three-quarters of employees in large companies say they have trouble reconciling their jobs and child-care responsibilities. The study included 575 union members who worked at least 28 hours a week and had at least one child 12 years old of younger. It found that 56% of the women and 42% of the men suffer "a high level of psychological distress," a sense of being over-worked, of irritability, and of extreme fatigue. That is twice the rate in the general population. In single-parent families, the percentage climbs to almost 70%.

Another study by the Canadian Council on Social Development in 1996 also found that parents have a hard time balancing the demands of work and family. Half the parents in the study of 27,000 employees reported high levels of difficulty in managing their family time. Half of working mothers and 36% of working fathers reported high levels of stress. About 40% of working mothers and 25% of working fathers reported high levels of depressed moods as well. Fewer than half the parents surveyed were highly satisfied with their lifestyles.

All this work doesn't just make Jack and Jill a dull boy and girl. It makes them sick

A survey of employers by the Stress Institute and the Ontario Labour Ministry found that 26% of all absenteeism is believed to be caused by stress. Stress is seen as a major cause of such physical complaints as headaches, backaches, colds, flus, and a variety of psychosomatic illnesses that are increasingly common among parents who are juggling two jobs and young children.

Some think what we need is a more European approach. In many European countries there are income-security programs and housing allowances, and job-sharing is encouraged. People are actually urged to work fewer hours to help reduce family stress.

Child-care programs and parental-leave policies are seen as essential to cope with the growing family pressures. Some countries allow fathers to take two weeks off work when their baby is born, and parents are entitled to paid days off when they leave the office to take care of their children.

But, even when paternity leave is offered to Canadian fathers who want to spend time with a new baby there are few takers. Many still believe child-rearing is a woman's job, and men still are concerned that paternity leave would hinder or eliminate their chances of promotion.

Some say there is even some resentment when women take off because their workload has to be split among all remaining people.

Money is cited as another reason: because men often earn more than women, families can't afford even a temporary loss of that paycheque.

With an estimated 80% of working Canadians suffering stress, guilt, and anxiety over the work-family juggle, labour and business from across the country got together in 1992 to look for ways to lighten the load for employees. A conference co-sponsored by National Grocers Co. Ltd. and the United Food and Commercial Workers in Toronto pointed out the need for new working arrangements. Flexible work arrangements, supportive supervisors, and providing basic information on child-and elder-care services go a long way toward helping employees balance their schedules, according to a psychologist speaking at the conference.

Without such workplace support, employees start to lose control of their lives, and that means they start slipping up both at work and at home.

Statistics Canada says the issue of how to help employees has grown rapidly over the past decade as more young mothers continue to enter the workforce. The most recent numbers suggest that nearly three quarters of mothers with children under 16 are in the labour force. And, StatsCan points out that the struggle to reconcile competing areas of responsibility remains largely female, even in 1997. Some researchers have found that allowing women just 15 minutes of flexible time a day can have a profoundly positive effect on their working lives: it relieves them of the feeling that they have to be in two necessary places at the same time.

SUGGESTED ACTIVITIES:

1. A survey conducted by the Conference Board of Canada in 1988-89 found that most companies offered limited family benefits. The survey included 385 companies employing more than one million Canadians. About half the companies surveyed permitted flextime, while 18% allowed job sharing. Clerical workers were the most eligible for creative job scheduling. About half the organizations surveyed allowed employees special leave for family reasons and extended maternity leave. But, most had never considered offering programs such as elder care, or after-school and summer programs for children. Between 60 and 90 of the companies surveyed believed that employers should not provide these benefits. And, most employees agreed. About 65% of 7,003 employees surveyed felt that family concerns were the primary responsibility of the individual. Do a survey of large local companies to see if attitudes have really changed much in the last decade. What are companies doing to help their frazzled employees?

2. Many see housework as something trivial, something unimportant that women do. Others see it as a major political issue tied into key social values and personal, economic, and political relations, and at the base of creating a more just, peaceful, and balanced society for everyone. Discuss.

3. Here's an idea that's been put foward to help make up the time deficit. Young people could be drafted into a national community service program. Such a mandatory program could be put into schools so that young people can learn to appreciate the obligations as well as the rights of citizenship and learn how to participate in the institutions of their society. This could be handled in much the same way as many countries have organized compulsory military service. Arrange a debate around this idea.

FACT FILE

In the 1830s, European visitors were astonished by the frantic pace of life in the United States.

Statistics Canada calculates that unpaid work was equal to anywhere from 32% to 54.2% of Canada's Gross Domestic Product in 1992.

SOMETIMES

YOU JUST CAN'T WIN

Anthropologists have found that around the world whatever is considered "men's work" is almost universally given higher status than "women's work." If in one culture it is men who build houses and women who make baskets, then that culture will see house-building as more important. In a culture where the reverse is true basket-weaving will have higher social status than house-building.

CARING 90s-STYLE

According to a newspaper report in 1993, a U.S. computer, Vicki, allowed people to check in with their loved ones every day without actually having to talk to them. Its program, designed by Voice Integrators of Gaithersburg, Virginia, would dial an assigned number and play a recorded message; if the recipient didn't acknowledge the call by pressing 1 on the telephone keypad, Vicki alerted the customer. The company warned: "Please remember that Project CareCall does not and cannot replace human love, care, and attention, nor was it intended to."