Many Are Leaving the Workplace to Return to the Family : Lifestyles: A growing number of women and men in all sorts of careers are asking whether long hours devoted to the job are worth it.
Joanne Brundage had been working 10 years as a letter carrier for the U.S. Postal Service when she decided to make sure her life would not become frenetic. It was seven years ago; she was pregnant with her second child.
Brundage and her husband, a letter carrier on an intersecting route in suburban Chicago, felt the pace of their lives would turn too hectic if both worked full time while raising two young children. But Brundage could not get the go-ahead from her employer for what seemed like the ideal solution: a husband-wife job-share that would enable both to spend a lot of time with their family while maintaining secure employment.
So Brundage opted, bitterly, to stay home.
Today, Brundage is the founder of Female, or Formerly Employed Mothers at the Leading Edge, a support and advocacy group for mothers who have left jobs to attend to family matters--often because the workplace would not allow them to spend more time away from the office.
“A lot of people have begun to question how much time and how much of your life you have to sacrifice for your career,” she says. “People are exhausted, and they don’t see any return on the investment they’ve made. The ‘80s and the recession have made people think: ‘I’ve worked myself to death and where am I for it?’ ”
Brundage is part of a growing number of workers nationwide, men and women from different walks of life, who have started asking if long hours devoted to the job are worth it.
“Americans now value time at least as highly as they value money,” says Brad Edmondson, editor-in-chief of American Demographics magazine.
While many workers are still unable to find any jobs, Americans at the same time have become increasingly frustrated in recent years with too much work and not enough free time, according to several surveys.
In 1989, almost two-thirds of the 1,000 respondents to a poll commissioned by personnel firm Robert Half International said they would be willing to reduce hours and salary to have more personal time. And in 1991, a survey conducted for the Hilton Corp. found virtually the same results: Two-thirds of 1,000 respondents said they, too, would take salary reductions to get more time off. And these respondents cut across all segments of the American work force.
Over the last five years, there has been a small flurry of activity aimed at reducing working hours. A sampling:
The Family and Medical Leave Act, landmark federal legislation requiring employers to give employees unpaid time off for family emergencies, took effect Aug. 5 after almost a decade of fierce business opposition. Minnesota three years ago enacted a law requiring employers to give employees 16 hours a year off, unpaid, to attend parent-teacher conferences or other school activities.
AFL-CIO officials this year have proposed discouraging overtime by requiring that the overtime-eligible be paid double wages rather than the current time-and-a-half standard. Union officials are disturbed that one segment of the work force is working overly long hours while another segment remains unemployed, says John Zalusky, head of wages and industrial relations for the union.
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Some employers report that employees are less timid these days about seeking time off.
“People are feeling much more comfortable about asking for alternative work schedules that include reduced hours,” says Sonia Werner, work/life balance consultant to Corning Inc., an Upstate New York manufacturer noted for offering flexible working arrangements. “We’ve had more creative arrangements over the last two years than we’ve ever had.” Two small private groups are studying and boosting the idea of less work and more leisure. The Society for the Reduction of Human Labor, which provides a forum mainly for academics to discuss the issue, was formed about five years ago, and is co-directed by Benjamin Hunnicutt, a professor of leisure studies at the University of Iowa.
In Boston, the 4-year-old Shorter Work-time Group, whose main activity is an occasional newsletter, has produced a 10-item agenda for bringing more spare time into Americans’ lives.
The reduced hours mini-movement also has a manifesto of sorts: “The Overworked American,” a best-selling book by a Harvard University economist. In her study, author Juliet Schor asserts that for a variety of economic reasons, the average working American today puts in 163 more working hours annually than his or her counterpart 25 years ago. That adds up to one month extra on the job every year.
Schor’s conclusions have raised skeptical eyebrows among some economists who believe her claims of Americans overworking are exaggerated or just plain wrong. Nonetheless, her views clearly have tapped into something many working Americans feel. A time squeeze accounted, in part, for New Yorker Daniel Byrnes’ decision in 1988 to leave an hours-devouring job and turn to private consulting work instead. Byrnes had been working 65 to 70 hours a week in the human resources office of a New York-based financial services company. When his father in Ohio was stricken by a life-threatening kidney ailment, Byrnes felt the pressure mount.
It was almost impossible, he says, to work up to speed while devoting the time necessary to help his parents. “I just said, ‘Hmmm, let me re-evaluate my priorities here.’ The crisis made me stop and think, ‘Is this how I want to live? Is this what I want to do?’ I decided the answer was no.”
Private consulting offered Byrnes an alternative: work that he found not only more satisfying but that allowed him a less stressful, 35-to-40-hour-a-week pace. It’s not just white-collar workers who have felt a time crunch. Industrial workers too are logging increased overtime, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. For December, 1992, production workers tallied an average of 4.2 hours of overtime a week, the highest number since the bureau began keeping overtime statistics in 1956, when the yearly average was 2.7 hours.
Economists say that many employers prefer overtime to hiring more people, especially given continuing uncertainties in the economy--because it often remains cheaper for the employer to pay time-and-a-half to a smaller work force than offer regular-time salaries and fringe benefits to a larger one.
Schor says overtime is only one reason why Americans feel overworked. Moonlighting is increasing, she says; so is commuting time. And even programs often lauded for helping employees, such as sick-child-care assistance and at-the-office fitness programs, come with the drawback of being “designed to make it easier for employees to be on the job ever more hours.
“The sick-child-care program means you don’t stay at home with your child. Somebody else does,” Schor says.
One of the most significant contributors nationwide to the sense of overwork many Americans feel, is the mass arrival of women in the workplace, an influx that has failed to be accompanied by a large reduction in the amount of housework and child-rearing duties that still need to get done, Schor says.
For instance, Wyvon Mathews, a Sacramento state government office assistant who is a single mother of an 11-year-old son, has become active in her union to press for more flexible working arrangements. If she arrives late to work, which happens because of her son’s school bus schedule, she makes up the time by skipping lunch and taking work home.
“I make sure the homework gets done. I make sure the dog gets walked. I make sure the house is clean . . . . If I get enough sleep, I don’t have time put on my makeup and get breakfast,” she says.
