BOOK MARK : If You Think You’re Working More and More Hours, You’re Right

Sociologists in the ‘50s predicted that by 1990 we would be able to retire at 38 years old, or work only six months a year. Today, Americans’ work time is longer than it was 40 years ago, the author contends.

In the last 20 years, the amount of time Americans have spent at their jobs has risen steadily. Each year, the change is small, amounting to about nine hours,or slightly more than one additional day of work. In any given year, such a small increment has probably been imperceptible. But the accumulated increase over two decades is substantial. Working hours are already longer than they were 40 years ago. If current trends continue, by the end of the century Americans will be spending as much time at their jobs as they did back in the 1920s.

The decline in Americans’ leisure time is in sharp contrast to the potential provided by the growth of productivity. Productivity measures the goods and services that result from each hour worked. When productivity rises, a worker can either produce the current output in less time, or remain at work the same number of hours and produce more. Every time productivity increases, we are presented with the possibility of either more free time or more money. That’s the productivity dividend.

Since 1948, productivity has failed to rise in only five years. The level of productivity of the U.S. worker has more than doubled. In other words, we could now produce our 1948 standard of living (measured in terms of marketed goods and services) in less than half the time it took in that year. We actually could have chosen the four-hour day. Or a working year of six months. Or, every worker in the United States could now be taking every other year off from work--with pay. Incredible as it may sound, this is just the simple arithmetic of productivity growth in operation.

But between 1948 and the present we did not use any of the productivity dividend to reduce hours. How did this happen? Why has leisure been such a conspicuous casualty of prosperity? In part, the answer lies in the difference between the markets for consumer products and free time.

Consider the former, the legendary American market. It is a veritable consumer’s paradise, offering a dazzling array of products varying in style, design, quality, price and country of origin. Marketing experts and advertisers spend vast sums of money to make these choices appealing--even irresistible. And they have been successful. In cross-country comparisons, Americans have been found to spend more time shopping than anyone else. They also spend a higher fraction of the money they earn. And with the explosion of consumer debt, many are now spending what they haven’t earned.

On the other hand, the “market” for free time hardly even exists in America. With few exceptions, employers (the sellers) don’t offer the chance to trade off income gains for a shorter work day or the occasional sabbatical. They just pass on income, in the form of annual pay raises or bonuses, or, if granting increased vacation or personal days, usually do so unilaterally. Employees rarely have the chance to exercise an actual choice about how they will spend their productivity dividend.

Almost as paradoxical as the rise of work time itself is the fact that it occurred on the heels of widespread predictions that work was disappearing. By the late 1950s, the problem of excessive working hours had been solved--at least in the minds of the experts. The four-day week was thought to “loom on the immediate horizon.”

What the experts didn’t realize was that key incentive structures of capitalist economies contain biases toward long working hours. As a result of these incentives, the development of capitalism led to the growth of “long hour jobs.” The eventual recovery of leisure came about because trade unions and social reformers waged a protracted struggle for shorter hours. Some time between the Depression and the end of World War II, that struggle collapsed. As the inevitable pressures toward long hours reasserted themselves, U.S. workers experienced a new decline that now, at the century’s end, has created a crisis of leisure time.

A wide body of opinion holds that before capitalism, work and leisure were less distinct concepts than they are today. In historian Keith Thomas’ words, “the recreational activities of the Middle Ages recall the old primitive confusion as to where work ended and leisure began.” Indeed, the terms leisure and free time were not even in common usage in mid-19th-Century England. According to a widely held interpretation, it was the rise of capitalism that created today’s sharp and identifiable distinction between work and leisure. (It is important not to overstate this, for even in medieval times, of course, the notion of labor as a chore was present.)

In a sense, the historians’ characterization of precapitalist societies may teach us most about our own dreams and imaginations. It is hard to avoid at least a touch of nostalgia for a world in which work was more integrated into family and social life, recreation less commercialized and time more an easy background than a scarce commodity frenetically spent. And from this vision of the past, we are drawn to think about our future. Will the ranks of those who consider themselves “time poor” continue to grow? Or will we find it possible to reclaim the sense of work, time and leisure we have lost?

The past 40 years should provide a warning. They have brought us nothing in the way of leisure time and a saner pace of life. The bias of the system is strongly toward the status quo. But time poverty is straining the social fabric. Continued growth threatens environmental balance, and gender equality requires new work patterns. By understanding how we came to be caught up in the cycle of work-and-spend, perhaps we can regain a reasonable balance between work and leisure.

1991 by Basic Books, a division of HarperCollins Publishers.

BOOK REVIEW: “The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure,” by Juliet B. Schor, is reviewed on Page 1 of the Book Review section.