It Works Out That Americans Spend More, Not Less, Time on the Job

The media have feasted recently on Japanese jibes at American work habits. Are U.S. employees not working hard enough?

Responses to these charges have largely missed the point. Judged by relevant standards, U.S. workers are already overworked. Rather than considering ways to make our employees work harder, we should concentrate instead on how to help them work more effectively and, in the end, to work less.

One important dimension of this debate is the number of hours people put in on the job. The average full-time employee in the United States worked more than 1,900 hours on the job in 1990, just a little less than an average of 40 hours a week for 50 weeks a year. In recent surveys, when asked, “How many hours each week do you estimate you have available to relax, watch TV and so forth?” the average American reported an average of less than 17 hours of available leisure time a week, or less than 2 1/2 hours a day.

There are two main standards by which we can judge the intensity of this working time. First, how does it compare historically with trends in the United States? Second, how does it compare with work-time in other leading industrial democracies? In assessing working time by these standards, we’re able to draw on a new and important book just published by economist Juliet B. Schor of Harvard University, “The Overworked American.”

Since the early 19th Century, there had been until recently a long and steady decline in annual working hours in the United States as workers and households were able to take advantage of the continuing rise in wages and living standards. But this trend has been reversed since the 1950s. American employees have been working more, not less. Schor estimates, for example, that the total annual working hours of fully employed labor force participants in the United States increased by 163 hours between 1969 and 1987, an increase of nearly 10% or the equivalent of an extra month of working time a year. And according to Harris surveys, the amount of reported leisure time declined from 26 hours a week in 1973 to less than 17 in 1988, a decline of more than a third.

In addition to working more than we used to, we’re also now working substantially more than workers in most European countries. It used to be that U.S. and European workers put in roughly comparable hours over the course of a year. Since the 1940s, however, a huge gap has opened up, with average working hours continuing their historical decline throughout much of Europe while that trend was reversing in the United States. By the late 1980s, U.S. manufacturing employees worked roughly 320 hours a year more than their counterparts in West Germany or France, the equivalent of roughly two additional months of working time.

This increased working time has many components. Average hours worked per week have climbed for full-time workers. More people in households are working full-time. More people are moonlighting, holding down more than one job at a time. Vacation time has stopped increasing, and for many workers in lower-level jobs vacation entitlements are spare, if they exist at all. (In France, by contrast, all employees have been entitled since the early 1980s to a full five weeks annual vacation time.)

What explains this heavy dose of extra work over the past couple of decades?

There are many explanations, of course, and some of them are welcome. Married women are much more likely to work full-time than formerly, for example, which has represented in part an increase in their relative economic independence within their families.

The most important explanation for Americans’ overwork is declining real wages and the struggle to sustain living standards. This is hardly welcome since it reflects the mounting pressure on workers and households from persisting stagnation in the U.S. economy.

After rising rapidly during the boom years immediately following World War II, the average real hourly earnings of wage-and-salary employees in the United States peaked in the early 1970s and has been flat or declining ever since. By 1991, the average hourly take-home pay of production and non-supervisory workers--accounting for roughly four-fifths of all employees in the United States--had fallen back to its levels of the early 1960s.

Still hoping to improve their living standards, U.S. workers and households had only one choice left: In order to keep annual incomes at least flat, we had to work more hours per year simply to offset eroding real hourly take-home pay.

Another explanation for overwork focuses on the stagnation of productivity growth in the U.S. economy. One of the most important sources of stagnant incomes since the early 1970s has been the limp growth in productivity in the United States, especially compared to the pace of productivity growth among our leading international competitors. If workers’ hourly output doesn’t grow much, then that doesn’t leave much room for rises in hourly earnings. And if hourly earnings don’t increase, it’s hard for workers and households to deal with the problem of overwork.

In addition to these direct material sources of overwork, Schor also emphasizes rampant consumerism. “For many Americans,” she writes, “escaping the trap of overwork will also entail stepping off the consumer treadmill.” This is likely to require psychological as well as economic changes. We shall need to learn both to resist the siren’s call of product advertising and to enjoy a better and different quality of leisure time.

What, then, about the Japanese--with whom we seem destined to compare our economic lives in nearly every respect?

Japanese employees do indeed work more hours per year than their American counterparts. But this is hardly a necessary condition for international competitiveness; the Germans have continued to sustain rapid productivity growth and buoyant trade surpluses with average annual hours far below both Japan and the United States. Nor should we necessarily regard the Japanese penchant for longer hours as a model. Overwork is regarded as a critical problem in Japan. The Japanese government has made 1,800 hours a year a policy objective, hoping to reduce annual working time below current U.S. levels.

Will the issue of overwork return to the arena of public debate--from which it has largely remained absent since the 1920s? “By understanding how we came to be caught up in the cycle of work-and-spend,” Schor concludes, “perhaps we can regain a reasonable balance between work and leisure.”