Taking the Debate on the 40-Hour Workweek to a Hire Realm

Happy Independence Day, America!

Now get back to work.

Call it a job or call it a career. Whichever--according to the July-August Utne Reader, a lot of folks have suddenly decided they work too much and for all the wrong reasons.

As usual, Utne’s compilation of articles and sidebars don’t dovetail into a concise portrait of a problem, but rather intersect, overlap and in some places contradict.

The overview makes sense, though. As a consumer culture, we want more, more, more of everything--more espresso machines, more electronic doodads on our cars, more frequent-flyer miles and, increasingly, more time.

Since that latter commodity tends to be a finite one for living things, wanting more of it gives rise to some frustration.

The key question this Utne package raises is:

“Is the 40-hour workweek, 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year, really the natural rhythm of the universe?”

No way, these writers argue. Some hunting-and-gathering cultures, reports Barbara Brandt, spend only three to four hours a day doing the work necessary to keep themselves alive.

Even those societies that Americans might consider competitors in the world marketplace allow themselves more leisure.

Austrian, Greek, Portuguese and Swiss workers get four weeks of vacation a year by law; the Finns, French, Swedes and Spanish get five. As Brandt sees things, though, the 40-hour week benefits employers in unseen ways.

“A system that offers only two options--long work hours or unemployment--serves as both carrot and a stick,” she says.

“Those lucky enough to get full-time jobs are bribed into docile compliance with the boss, while the specter of unemployment always looms as the ultimate punishment for the unruly.”

Brandt and her organization, Shorter Work-Time Group of Boston, propose that Americans demand six-hour days and 30-hour weeks, four to six weeks of paid vacation and better family leave policies, among other changes.

Elsewhere, the Utne crew grapples with the more personal issues confronting Americans.

Many yuppies, for instance, claim to have forsaken the risky or low-paying career of their dreams in the interest of providing a better life for their children.

But an article from the Washington Monthly wonders if that isn’t usually just an excuse.

“What kids need most of all is love and attention, especially when they’re young,” author Jason DeParle says. “These commodities are available at all income brackets.”

Besides, another Utne piece quotes studies showing that “above the poverty level, the relationship between income and happiness is remarkably small.”

The angriest analysis of American working life comes from Michael Ventura. In a column reprinted from the L.A. Weekly, Ventura recounts his decade of low-challenge jobs.

Adding up his labors in the vineyards of uncaring employers, Ventura calculates that he would have to work about 26 years to get one year of time for himself.

His conclusion:

“My employers are stealing my life.”

And to rub salt in his psychic wounds, his employers were utterly disinterested in what Ventura had to say about the work they were stealing.

His analysis may be astute from a socioeconomic perspective, but you’d think Ventura, of all people, would be more Zenian in his view of the working life.

But for some reason, intellectuals find it incomprehensible that some people enjoy the relative security, the camaraderie and the challenges even the humblest job provides.

And while Josephine Sixpack may have noticed that Lee Iacocca is criminally overpaid, that doesn’t mean she wants her co-worker Jake (the guy who spends what little free time he has at Monster Truck rallies) running Chrysler.

She probably doesn’t want to run it either. She has better things to do.

Which leads to the final question readers may ask: “Does anguish about the workweek even exist?”

Here again, Utne has an answer.

To paraphrase Utne contributors Barbara DaFoe Whitehead and her husband, Ralph: A trend is a trend because magazines (and magazine columns) have said it’s a trend. Since the media feeds on itself, any twice-mentioned trend is likely to be self-fulfilling.

The media defines trends by their relevance to upper-income baby boomers. Now the managers and professionals tracked by the media are hitting middle age and having children simultaneously.

So when some of them came to the astounding realization that they can’t have a new Jaguar, a vacation in Fiji, a power-lunchin’ career and a mutually nurturing relationship with little Muffie and Sigmund, the media’s trend antennae perked up.

Meanwhile, the authors report, “those in the less-affluent two-thirds of the baby-boom generation didn’t make such a deep commitment to work in the first place. . . . They’ve been placing a premium on their family life for a long time.”

REQUIRED READING

* Like everything else, conservatism is in the throes of ecological crisis. “Since the early 1980s, the environment has grown harsher for conservatives: their numbers are booming, their feeding range is shrinking, and their predators are growing steadily more skillful.

Ecological crisis causes aggression in white mice, and, as any cancer researcher can tell you, Man is just a big, hairless white mouse.”

Where can one read that assessment? The Nation? Washington Monthly? Jesse Jackson’s diary? No, the July issue of the conservative American Spectator.

But while the world’s environmental problems continue to befuddle scientists and politicians alike, Spectator writer David Frum, an editor at the Wall Street Journal, has found the root cause of the right’s disequilibrium: conservative columnist Patrick Buchanan.