Burning the Midnight Oil : THE OVERWORKED AMERICAN: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, <i> By Juliet B. Schor (Basic Books: $21; 247 pp.)</i>

For years, I’ve been telling my children that Americans have gotten lazy and complacent, and can no longer compete with industrious foreigners. I hoped this would get them to do their homework. It didn’t, and now it appears I was wrong to begin with. According to Juliet Schor, an associate professor at Harvard, Americans haven’t gotten lazy and complacent at all. If anything, we’ve been working ourselves to exhaustion.

The conclusion of this first comprehensive study of our work habits to be done in recent history is that the average U.S. working stiff puts in nearly three more weeks at the office per year than he/she did in 1970. Factory workers spend a full two months longer on the job than their European counterparts do.

These numbers run entirely counter to the popular view, which says: We’ve been goofing off too much, and that’s why our civilization has gone into decline and the French can buy up New York real estate, while we can no longer afford a cup of coffee in Paris.

Perhaps this delusion of national lassitude comes from the fact that we surround ourselves with leisure-time paraphernalia (boats, treadmills, Nautilus machines, golf carts, ski gear, health-club memberships) which--judging from my own experience--is rarely used. Owning this equipment may convince us that we’re more fun-loving then we really are, when in fact we have little time and less energy left for recreation, since we’re down at the office working overtime to pay the stuff off.

Economist Thorstein Veblen theorized that the leisure class was devoted to conspicuous consumption. What he didn’t anticipate in the case of the United States was that so many conspicuous consumers who aspired to the leisure class would be holding down two jobs to cover their credit-card bills from all their conspicuous purchases.

By Schor’s reckoning, we’ve steadily been adding nine hours of work per person per year since the late 1940s. One important factor in this heap of toil is that millions of women who previously were engaged in unpaid domestic servitude and not counted as workers are now receiving paychecks. “In exactly the same way that we use up too much clean air and water because it has no price, the housewife’s time was squandered,” the author says.

Housework, she claims, still is as time-consuming as before, in spite of the popularity of labor-saving devices such as industrial vacuum cleaners and pre-stuffed butterball turkeys. Today, women do most of the domestic chores before 8 a.m. or after 5 p.m., and on weekends. Men, apparently, now share in 40% of the housework, and also are spending more time than ever at the office.

Back in the 1940s, when there were fewer labor-saving devices, people’s work hours actually were diminishing, and experts were predicting that the 30-hour work week would soon replace the old-fashioned 40-hour work week. There was widespread concern among psychologists that Americans were not prepared to handle the abundance of leisure that soon would be ours, and plans were afoot to train the population to appreciate art and music and adopt other methods of killing time.

Some prediction that turned out to be. If Schor is correct, we’ve already replaced the old-fashioned 40-hour week with the 50-hour week, and our free time is a vanishing resource. It’s the Germans who got the 35-hour week and the French who got the nationally mandated five-week vacation every summer, when Paris empties out completely. Yet somehow we’ve ignored the European example entirely in our national mania to keep up with the Japanese.

The question of why we persist in keeping up with the Japanese, who lead the world in fish poisoning and executive burnout, when we ought to be imitating the more sensible Europeans, is beyond the scope of this book. But clearly it’s something we should consider. After all, the Europeans have been improving their standard of living while avoiding the office--which is exactly what was supposed to happen to us. Unlike us, the Europeans are not obsessed with keeping up with the Japanese.

Americans have a history of trying to keep up with the wrong people that goes back at least as far as the 1960s, when we tried to keep up with the Russians, which we now know was a fool’s errand, since they have no jobs and only one Pizza Hut.

Schor suggests that the Europeans may be better than we are at managing their money as well as their time, and have struck a sensible balance in which leisurely lunches are more important than automatic garage-door openers and VCRs.

The most unfortunate aspect of our overworked society is that while some people put in more hours on the job, others have no jobs at all. Increasingly, we are becoming a nation of workaholics and idlers. This development can be blamed in part on employers who prefer paying overtime to an exhausted few to hiring additional employees for whom medical insurance and other benefits must be provided. It is a vicious double paradox in which the workaholic has plenty of money but no time to enjoy it, whereas the non-worker has plenty of time and no money.

In the 1920s and earlier, Schor reminds us, the issue of time versus money was debated in union halls and in corporate boardrooms across the country, and U.S. workers were known to lobby or even to go on strike for shorter hours. In contemporary society, this is unheard of. We’ve abandoned the campaign for shorter hours, presumably because the Japanese aren’t working shorter hours, and our unions would never go on strike to demand less work.

As for how to reverse this 30-year trend that has some people wandering the streets and others trapped in the office, Schor has a modest proposal which merits consideration: a time-share system in which the overworked would give up some of their excess hours to the unemployed. This, she suggests, would create a fairer, happier and more productive society with no exhausting overtime. Employees at all levels would be given a choice between pay raises or more paid vacations.

If corporations and mom-and-pop enterprises won’t adopt such plans voluntarily, Schor hopes that the government will pass laws to make them mandatory: Take time off, or else!

But like so many other ambitious social-engineering schemes, this one is unlikely to succeed without the support of the people. In a spirit of self-sacrifice, I for one am willing to give up my next book review in return for a paid holiday of playing contract bridge. As a wise man once observed: “Nobody on his deathbed ever says he wishes he’d spent more time at the office.”

BOOKMARK: For an excerpt from “The Overworked American,” see the Opinion section, Page 2.