E-Mail This Article to a Friend Time out If you don’t have time to read this, you probably should BY SALLY CRAGIN

If you’ve got the time, or especially if you haven’t, you’d be well advised to hustle down to Jimmy Tingle’s Off Broadway this Sunday for what’s being billed as the "Take Back Your Time Comedy and Musical Benefit." And if you’re working this weekend and not getting time and a half, that goes double.

"Americans in general are overworked, rushed, hurried, and stressed-out and this is a problem," says writer/editor Barbara Brandt, a self-described "social-change activist." Her long-running forum is a local non-profit organization called the Shorter Work-Time Group, which aims to bring "the issue of overwork and lack of time into public discussion."

"The American labor movement pushed and struggled for 150 years to get an eight-hour [work] day and a five-day work week," she says, but this victory, she points out, has been steadily eroded over the course of decades. "In the 1950s, you could raise a family very well on one income. What’s been happening since the 1970s is that work hours have been going back up again." This issue affects all workers, she says, but particularly "the professionals, the white-collar people who are exempt from the fair-labor-standards act and don’t get extra pay whatsoever."

Back in the 1960s, Brandt was studying sociology in graduate school, where students "were told the problem would be too much leisure because automation and technology would do the work for us." Welcome to the 21st century. "Now, 70 percent of the workforce is what you’d call full time — 50, 60, 70 hours a week. The other part of the workforce is the temporary or contingent workforce who don’t get paid benefits as [do] their full-time colleagues."

Yeesh. Brandt even goes so far as cast the dangers of this scenario in terms of a new social epidemic: "work addiction," which the culture deems an "acceptable addiction. All of us "rushed and hurried" Americans, she says, take a huge toll on the environment and ourselves. Why? We eat badly because we consume more convenience items. And we’re less interested in time-consuming activities like recycling. We crash our cars because we doze off while driving. But the coup de grace is political apathy. "One fifth of the people who didn’t vote in the last election said they didn’t because they didn’t have time."

At this point in the conversation, I’m starting to feel that I don’t have enough time, so I ring off to contact some of the benefit performers by e-mail (so much quicker than using the phone). Songwriter Marcia Deihl, the evening’s "Funny Songs Specialist," writes back, "Obviously it’s a complex issue. But compared to other countries, the US looks pretty bad." And singer Ben Tousley responds that "the issue is important because it is not merely economic but profoundly spiritual. This movement represents a form of resistance to the depersonalizing wheels of big corporations and governments which seek to legitimize the erosion of our quality of life. It’s saying we are in part responsible for cooperating with such injustice and we must take back our power to say no."

The "Take Back Your Time Comedy and Music Benefit" features performances by Jimmy Tingle, Ben Tousley and Sue Kranz, Marcia Deihl, Sparky & Bartholomew, and the Raging Grannies this Sunday, September 28, at 7 p.m. at Jimmy Tingle’s Off Broadway, 255 Elm Street in Somerville’s Davis Square. Tickets are $10 to $20; call (617) 591-1616. The "Take Back Your Time" campaign kickoff and handbook-release celebration takes place tonight, September 25, from 7 to 9 at the First Unitarian Church, 3 Church Street in Harvard Square; stop by and pick up your copy of the "Take Back Your Time" handbook. For further information about Timeday activities — including national "Take Back Your Time Day," on October 24 — visit www.timeday.org, or call (617) 628-5558; for news about local Time Day events, e-mail walterness@msn.com