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IF YOU WENT to work on Monday, you're a sucker: that day, May 1, was National Phone In Sick Day. Not yet a bank holiday, the event was another of the activist collective Rtmark's anticorporate pranks, one with a serious point -- promoting awareness of the deterioration of that increasingly precious resource, free time. "We have all of these powerful technological tools," said Rtmark spokesman Frank Guerrero. "We should be able to make space for leisure." If hearing a member of the digital culture complain about the adverse effects of technology seems odd, it also sounds oddly familiar. In 1865, Brooklynite William Harding, president of the coachmakers union, spoke at a rally for the eight-hour work day. "Labor-saving" machines should start saving labor, he argues, rather than just increasing profits. The working class should get to spend time with their families, have some fun. The workers, exhausted from putting in twelve to fourteen hours a day, agreed. One of the striker’s chants went: "We may have enough to live on, but never an hour for thought."

Rtmark adopted Phone In Sick Day from the British group Decadent Action, which has successfully organized the holiday for the past three years. The day, originally set for April 6, was rescheduled for May Day, which is celebrated throughout Europe, South America, and Asia, but is oddly enough ignored in the United States, where it originated. Also known as International Worker's Day, the holiday commemorates the 1886 Chicago Haymarket Riots, in which workers were fighting for an eight-hour work day. (Rtmark is aiming even higher; insists Guerrero, "sitting down at a computer for six hours seems enough to me.") National Phone In Sick Day fits in well with Rtmark's other media ploys. When the group took on the corporation the digerati loves to hate, eToys, last year, they pummelled them with DOS attacks to get the company to drop its suit against etoy.com, a European art site.

After the WTO and IMF protests in Seattle and Washington, May Day took on a particular resonance this year. And as the collection of groups involved in fighting globalization continues to diversify, it seems natural that the digital workforce will begin to exercise some muscle, voicing a desire to spend more time with families and less in front of computers. Of course, in contrast to workers toiling for pennies in sweatshops, white-collar workers' suffering seems exaggerated, their complaints somewhat frivolous. But the same force that drives the exploitation of the third world is stretching the workday to its seams: the quest for more capital. Residents of Mexico City were disappointed last spring when their siestas and long lunch breaks were yanked away from them. This is the ominous result of competing in the free market: surrendering cherished cultural flavor -- and time for relaxation -- for a bigger piece of the monochrome pie.

It’s impossible to determine how effective Rtmark’s action was; although it merited coverage on NPR and Wired News last week, there was no mention of an insurgence yesterday, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had "no public comment." An extremely unscientific survey revealed that few people were aware of it. (At a May Day demonstration for amnesty for immigrant workers in New York City, not even the guy handing out socialist leaflets had heard of the Rtmark event.) Still, Rtmark received hundreds of e-mails in support of the project. Mark Allen, director of game development for an Internet company in Los Angeles, gave his department of ten the day off. Allen didn't take the protest too seriously, considering that long hours are the nature of the industry. But he was happy to "reflect on the fact that there's more to life than work." So, on Monday, he got his hair cut, sat by the pool, and took an hour for thought. On Tuesday, he returned to work. And to the twelve-hour day.


Claire Barliant is a reporter in New York City. On Monday, she didn't phone in sick, because she had too much work.

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