With midterm season in full swing, one thing is extremely clear: College students are way overworked. Axinn Library is packed at all hours with students studying, writing essays, drinking one too many cups of coffee and generally in despair. The same can be found in any Resident Safety Representative (RSR) booth, behind the help desk in Hammer Lab, at student aide desks in offices across campus and anywhere else where students at work have spare time. Jokes about how little time you have for sleeping, eating and relaxing between classes, work, studying and homework might be standard exam-season humor, but this shouldn’t be the norm.
Labor activists fought bitterly for the eight-hour workday during the first quarter of the 19th century until it was finally codified under the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1937. The Eight-Hour Movement, as it came to be known, was one of the largest labor rights movements in American history. It gave us the modern standard 40-hour work week, overtime pay and the motto, “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest and eight hours for what we will.”
Everyone knows that eight hours of sleep is what you’re supposed to be aiming for every night, and the eight-hour workday has been established for over 80 years. But what about “eight hours for what we will?” Having that much leisure time to do with what you will sounds too good to be true, especially because we’re stuck in the middle of a culture that glorifies working until you drop.
This culture is even more present on a college campus like Hofstra’s, where the line for the Starbucks is almost always five minutes long, people walk around handing out free Red Bull and someone is always doing homework during an RSR shift. It’s so extreme that not working is a source of stress for a lot of people, myself included. If I have 10 minutes to sit down and watch Netflix, I spend pretty much nine and a half of them wondering if I’ve forgotten about some assignment I haven’t done yet.
The bottom line is that this isn’t healthy. Having to work all the time, even cutting back on sleep because of it, is a one-way ticket to burnout. That’s why the eight-hour model was originally proposed: Having a healthy balance of work, sleep and leisure time is essential to staying healthy, both physically and mentally. It’s not a shortcoming on students’ parts, though, that we can’t find the time to relax.
We shouldn’t feel like we’re doing something wrong for not working constantly, or as though not being able to take on a job as a student is some sort of personal failing. College is already a ton of work, and it’s unfair to expect (or require through astronomical tuition costs) that students work at or near full-time while studying.
Having to write an essay while working until 4 a.m., then having to go to class at 9:30 a.m. isn’t just a bad shift – it’s a labor rights issue. So is not being able to schedule a doctor’s appointment because your schedule is so full, or never having time to hang out with friends. Labor rights don’t begin and end when you clock in and out of work. They reach every aspect of life, especially when you’re expected to be working all the time. So, call off that shift you’re thinking about missing, have some friends over and relax. You deserve it.
Work It Out is a labor rights column written by Elliot Colloton, a sophomore sociology major. This column aims to examine the life and rights of student workers on Hofstra’s campus.
