WATERLOO - At a University of Waterloo public talk next week, an American expert will make a plea for more leisure time in order to improve the quality of life during a weakened economy.

Benjamin Hunnicutt, professor of leisure studies at University of Iowa, will give a lecture entitled Time to Live: The Forgotten Dream of Progress, the Healthy Alternative to Work Without End. The talk, to be held Monday, March 16 is part of UW's Hallman Visiting Professorship Lecture Series on Work and Health. It starts at 4:30 p.m. in room 1621 of the Lyle S. Hallman Institute for Health Promotion. Admission is free.

"As the leading expert on shorter working hours and a champion of social progress, Ben Hunnicutt's public lecture is a must-see for policy makers, elected officials and plain old-fashioned citizens who genuinely care about the civilized future of work and leisure," said Troy Glover, director of the Healthy Communities Research Network at UW.

"His message is timely as we struggle to find our way forward in the current economic crisis. Ben challenges us to revisit and reconsider our collective values as a society bent on unfettered consumerism."

For most of his academic career, Hunnicutt researched the end of shorter working hours. He addresses the question: Why did Americans stop reducing their work time, a process they had enthusiastically supported for a century, and begin desperately creating more work for more people around 70 years ago?

He has explored the rise of the world of total work -- the unique modern, progressive glorification of work and trivializing of leisure. Rather than a time to be with family and to spend on community, spiritual, and artistic pursuits, leisure has become a time to be fully passive. Today, people watch sporting events and consume, with leisure seen as down time.

Hunnicutt is the author of Kellogg's Six-Hour Day, which examines the company's 30-hour workweek during the Great Depression. The shorter workweek proved so popular that vestiges of it lasted until the mid-1980s. Morale improved and 85 per cent of workers liked the change despite the lower pay.

He also is the author of Work Without End: Abandoning Shorter Hours for the Right to Work as well as Western History of Leisure: Handbook of Leisure Studies.

Hunnicutt is a member of the Academy of Leisure Sciences; American Association for State and Local History; National Recreation and Park Association; National Therapeutic Recreation Society; Organization of American Historians; and the Iowa Parks and Recreation Association. He is also past co-director of the Society for the Reduction of Human Labor.

The other lectures in the work and health series, hosted by UW's faculty of applied health sciences, are as follows:

* April 2 -- Work-Life Balance: Rhetoric versus Reality. Speaker: Linda Duxbury, professor, Sprott School of Business, Carleton University.

* April 22 -- Pressure Zone or Pleasure Zone? How Family Life Impacts Work-Life Balance . Speaker: Tess Kay, deputy director, Institute of Youth Sport, Loughborough University, England.

* May 13 -- Occupational Health: Research to Practice to Policy and Back Again. Speaker: Barbara Silverstein, research director, SHARP Program, Washington State Department of Labor and Industries.