As usual, you get home to your heavily mortgaged house very late, having put in a couple of extra hours at the office and driven for more than an hour on a still-crowded expressway in your expensive but unpaid-for car. Your spouse, having put in overtime at a job miles in the other direction, has to stop and pick up your children from a costly but not entirely trustworthy day- care facility and so will be home even later.
Dinner will be something that goes into the microwave. Afterward, if everyone isn`t feeling too disagreeable, you`ll try to spend some time with your children. You won`t have time to read much of your newspaper, or pick up the best seller that has been sitting unopened on the coffee table for days, next to your stack of unread magazines. It`s too late to run that really terrific film you brought home from the video store four days ago. The homeowners association meeting and the community center concert are absolutely out of the question.
Maybe you`ll watch a little TV, but nothing very taxing, because you`re exhausted and have to get up early in the morning.
Anything else, including conjugal relations, will have to wait for the weekend. You think you might even take in a movie then down at the local shopping mall, except you have to catch up on all those wretched household chores. Nothing to be done about it, of course. If you didn`t work so much, you couldn`t make ends meet.
According to Harvard economist and author Juliet Schor, that`s all too painfully accurate a picture of typical American life in the 1990s. And it symbolizes what has become a major flaw of our economic system.
In sum, those Japanese politicians have it all wrong. Americans aren`t lazy. They`re working too hard and too long, to the point where they no longer get to enjoy life much anymore, let alone fully participate in the things that make it truly meaningful.
”A lot of people are suffering,” she said in a recent interview. ”I like to quote the historian E.P. Thompson on this: `Time has become a currency. It`s no longer passed but spent.”`
In light of the recession, many people would rather work themselves to the bone than be unemployed. But Schor sees a significant link between the high jobless rate and the overwork syndrome. To save money on fringe benefits, employers have been cutting payrolls to a minimum and compelling
their remaining workers to maintain output through overtime and overwork.
But this has produced a contrary result, she said. Because of poor morale, low energy and strain, ”not to speak of stress-related diseases,”
American productivity lags behind that of the more leisure-oriented industrial societies of Western Europe.
Of the leading developed nations, only Japan has longer work hours-and less productivity. Japanese office workers log 225 hours, nearly 6 work weeks, more a year than Americans. Schor says the Japanese government has, in fact, set as a national goal the reduction of the Japanese work year to 1,800 hours a year.
The Japanese have even coined a term for the price that has too often paid for their economic success: karoshi, or ”death by overwork.”
”Otherwise perfectly healthy,” Schor said, ”they keel over at their desks, usually after a prolonged stretch of overtime or a particularly high-pressure deal.”
She notes that France and Germany enjoy higher productivity and healthier economies than the U.S.-and longer vacation times for their workers. French law mandates a five-week paid vacation, which many companies extend to six weeks; in Germany, the vacation minimum is three weeks and may run to 5 1/2 or 6 weeks for some firms.
Americans work more than 320 hours a year longer than their French and German counterparts, Schor said. Vacations in Sweden are as long as eight weeks.
”In America, people have to fight to get two,” she said.
According to Schor, who has written a new book, ”The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure” (Basic Books, HarperCollins), American firms have forgotten a lesson learned as long ago as the Depression: Happy, unstressed, energized employees produce more than unhappy, tired ones. ”When the Kellogg Co. made their historic switch to a six-hour day on Dec. 1, 1930, they were searching for a strategy to cope with the unemployment of the Depression,” she writes. Many companies in the Depression reduced working hours and pay to keep as many people employed as possible.
”To their surprise, they found that workers were more productive, on the order of 3 percent to 4 percent. In some departments, the pace picked up even more.”
Schor said, ”What we`re enduring now represents a very big change from the last 40 years. Americans haven`t worked like this since World War II.”
In fact, the current American work climate has reversed a 70-year trend in declining work hours that began as a curative response to the bad old sweatshop, child-labor days of the late 19th Century, when starvation-wage immigrant workers were so plentiful.
During the Depression, labor unions and mainstream economists considered shorter working hours the principal means to a better life and economic salvation.
In the 1920s, Henry Ford, who more or less invented mass production, dramatically increased the pay and reduced the work hours of his employees so they would be able to buy and have time to use his company`s products. By 1969, the average American laborer worked 1,786 hours a year, down from a high of 3,650 hours a year in 1850.
By 1987, the annual average had risen to 1,949 hours per worker and was climbing.
”The average employed person is now on the job the equivalent of an extra month a year,” she said.
The combined rate of unemployment and underemployment rose from 7.2 percent in 1969 to 16.8 percent in 1987, when America was supposedly reveling in the boom of Reagan-era prosperity.
Schor is not an ideologue who blames everything on Ebenezer Scrooge management mentality. Although the decline of the power of labor unions has been a major factor in the shift to (often unpaid) longer hours, she said, the unions themselves helped bring the situation about by changing their goals from more leisure to more pay and costly fringe benefits, which many companies could not afford.
Prisoners of possessions
And the American work force is to blame for its predicament, she said, because of its desperate desire to hold on to the remarkably high standard of living it achieved during the postwar years, a historic anomaly made possible mostly by the rest of the world`s supine economies.
Reinvigorated global competition and the reduction of purchasing power caused by inflation have made most American families fall behind. As a result, in many families both parents work or one is forced to take a second job.
Time once devoted to leisure, family relations, recreation and cultural pursuits now goes into odious and not always fairly shared household chores, a stressful factor that takes its toll and is revealed in the high divorce rate. ”In return for a 1970s standard of living, employers are now demanding far more hours,” Schor said. ”For the production and non-supervisory employees who make up 80 percent of the labor force, these demands have been substantial. According to our calculations, just to reach their 1973 standard of living, they must work 245 more hours, or six-plus extra weeks a year.”
The impoverished people of the former Soviet Union, of course, are doing that just to keep in bread, but Americans are obsessed with considerably less- essential purchases. They are trapped in what Schor calls ”the insidious cycle of work-and-spend”-the ”shop till you drop” syndrome.
”Americans spend three to four times as many hours a year shopping as their counterparts in Western European countries,” she said. ”Once a purely utilitarian chore, shopping has been elevated to the status of a national passion.”
Instead of the quality of their time, Americans emphasize the ownership of objects, buying many things they really don`t want, need or have time to enjoy, she said.
”Instead, they watch television, which tells them to go out and buy more things,” she said.
Schor urges a shift in emphasis in lifestyles and thinks a reduction in the normal work week from 40 to 35 hours would cost employers little and improve productivity and the quality of life considerably.
Oddly, she looks to medieval times, when life was very short and much more devoted to enjoying it.
Even most peasants worked only 180 days a year. The ample holiday time was spent ”both in sober churchgoing and in festing, drinking and
merrymaking,” she said.
But there were drawbacks. Housework and hygiene were hardly preoccupations.
”In those days, washing would be done once a month at most and, in many families, much less-perhaps four times per year,” she said. ”Nearly everyone wore dirty clothes nearly all the time.”
A lesson from India
Schor, 36, is something of a workaholic herself. The author of a previous book, ”Tunnel Vision,” about the AFL-CIO, and the editor of several economic-essay anthologies, she also is head tutor on Harvard`s committee on degrees in women`s studies. Her husband, Prasannan Parthasarathi, is an Indian-born doctoral candidate at the university.
She has less time now for her favorite sport of squash because she gave birth to the couple`s first child, a son, three months ago.
Schor has traveled widely in India and thinks that for all its backwardness and poverty, we can learn a lesson from that land.
”They`re not used by time there,” she said. ”They know how to use it.”
Schor`s ideas haven`t gone unnoticed in the political community. One Democratic presidential candidate has contacted Schor (she won`t say who) and wants to incorporate some of her ideas and data into his economic proposals.
