COLUMN ONE : Employees Get a Real Workout : Californians are putting in more--and more intense--hours than ever and holding down more jobs. Recession anxiety, wage stagnation and corporate cuts are blamed.
Ray Dellerba remembers a time not so long ago when bankers like him worked bankers’ hours, took long lunches, golfed regularly and never came in on weekends.
These days he works 12 hours a day, often through lunch, puts in more hours at home with a laptop computer and spends two full Saturdays a month at the office. “I’ve never worked harder in my life,” says the 47-year-old president of Eldorado Bank in Irvine.
Balbir Mann starts his workday at 2:15 a.m., loading 500 newspapers in his gutted van for delivery in North Hollywood. Back at home by 5:30, he sleeps for three hours, then dons one of his two blue suits to go to his second, full-time job as a real estate agent.
Mann, 37, a father of three, says he can’t afford not to moonlight. “It’s hard to save money on just 40 hours.”
From the factory line to gleaming office towers, many people in California and elsewhere say they are working more hours, more jobs and more intensely than ever. Wage stagnation, corporate cuts, changing technology and the decline in labor unions have all contributed to increased work, according to analysts.
The trend has been building for some time but has accelerated in the last few years as the unemployment rate has dropped. And it has reached new proportions in the Golden State, a place long viewed as antithetical to hard work.
Two key figures lend support to the stories of Californians working more:
* Manufacturing employees in the state worked an average of 41.4 hours a week last year--the highest since 1947, when the U.S. Labor Department began tracking this data for California. Through the first half of this year, overtime in the state was running at an even faster pace.
* About 700,000 workers in California were holding down more than one job last year, an increase of about 50,000 from three years earlier when this group was last counted by the Labor Department. Many experts believe that the number of multiple jobholders is actually much higher, and current national data indicate that their numbers have increased sharply this year.
Although some view these developments as temporary, others say they reflect lasting changes in people’s jobs and work habits.
U.S. Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich says what’s happening in California and elsewhere shows that workers are struggling to maintain their standard of living. Just as women entered the labor force in droves in the 1970s, he said in an interview, more people are working longer and working more jobs to make ends meet.
“The decline in wages is the critical factor,” Reich said, noting that median weekly earnings of U.S. workers have fallen to $474 this year from $479 last year and $504 in 1979, after inflation.
“If median wages weren’t declining, they wouldn’t have to work so hard to make ends meet,” he said. “The longer hours and multiple jobs are coping mechanisms. They’re all driven by the same decline in median wage.”
Despite the rise in work time, experts disagree on whether Americans are “overworking” or whether this has had a significant effect on people’s health or leisure time, as Juliet Schor argued it has in her best-selling 1991 book, “The Overworked American.”
Dr. Alan Savitz, a psychiatrist and president of PacifiCare Behavioral Health, isn’t convinced that Californians are working harder. He thinks it’s more perception than reality, one that’s colored by the recession. Even so, he says, perceptions may be what counts here.
“We are finding many more people being stressed and feeling if they’re working beyond their capacity,” Savitz said, confirming the increase that PacifiCare and some other insurers are seeing in mental health claims.
Barbara Brandt, a spokeswoman for the Shorter Work-Time Group, an organization in the Boston area, says longer hours and multiple jobs for some invariably mean fewer jobs for others. “You have some people working too many hours and others who just can’t get enough,” she said. “You have a growing imbalance.”
*
To a large extent, it is corporate America that is pushing the longer work hours.
Many companies have found that time-and-a-half overtime costs them less than the health insurance, other benefits and training costs of new employees. Also for many employers, especially in California, memories of the recession are fresh, so they are more wary of adding staff they may have to lay off later if another downturn hits.
Circle Seal Controls Inc., a valve manufacturer in Corona, has seen a resurgence in orders since early last year. But instead of adding to its payroll, the company has been meeting increased demand by assigning an average of five hours of overtime a week to its 200 workers while also making more use of temporary employees.
By law, employers can require hourly wage earners to work overtime--within limits--even without advance notice, according to the Employers Group, a Los Angeles organization for manufacturers. But in California, where unemployment is high and job security scarce, workers need little prodding, says Elizabeth Andrew, Circle Seal’s human resource manager.
“They keep volunteering,” she says. “People are much more willing and they’re grateful.”
Last year, California’s 1.8 million manufacturing workers averaged 4.3 hours of overtime a week, up 30% from 1985. According to the Labor Department, overtime in California and nationwide is now at the highest point since the weapons-producing years of World War II.
The average overtime also doesn’t reflect the very long hours that some workers put in.
A typical workday for Cong A. Long, 26, a supervisor at Express Manufacturing Inc. in Santa Ana, runs from 2:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.--with two 10-minute breaks and a 40-minute lunch. He generally works weekends also.
All told, Long, who is married, figures he puts in 60 to 70 hours a week. After work, he says, he’s so tired that he collapses in bed. He wakes up, fixes a meal and then heads back to work. But he doesn’t complain.
“It’s a good chance to make money,” says Long, whose overtime hours enable him to take home double his average pay, which for a supervisor like him is about $10 an hour. “We need the money,” he adds. “One day we may not have a job.”
Philip Romero, chief economist in Gov. Pete Wilson’s office, says he believes that the work time of Californians is at or close to the crest. As the state’s modest recovery continues, Romero says employers will feel more confident about hiring and workers will become less anxious about their jobs. When that happens, he predicts, the pace of work will taper off.
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Others, however, aren’t so sure.
Dellerba, the president of Eldorado Bank, says his job and everybody else’s at the bank changed for good after a restructuring left Eldorado with nearly half the 200 workers it had three years ago.
The bank’s administrative assistant now does marketing, and its regional vice presidents oversee two to four offices instead of one.
“I thought it was temporary, but I found out it’s permanent,” Dellerba said of his expanded job, whose description fills three pages instead of two. “If you’re on salary and working 40 hours a week,” he says, “you’ve got a good job--keep it.”
Professional workers don’t get paid extra for working overtime. But increasingly, companies are giving raises based on performance, or bonuses for achieving profit goals, which also drives professionals to work harder and longer. Plus technology continues to push the pace, at once condensing and creating work.
“With everything computerized now, we have so much more information available to us to improve service to customers. But it takes us more time,” says Kim Megonigal, president of Kimco Staffing Solutions, which operates 10 temporary-help agencies in Southern California.
Megonigal says his temporary employees are collecting more overtime than he can remember, and he sees a sea change in California’s once-relaxed work culture.
“Ten years ago, all my customers ordered wine at lunch,” he says. “I haven’t had a business client ask for a glass of wine in the last three years. They don’t want anything to slow them down.”
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Yet even as workers are facing greater demands at their workplaces, many more of them are taking on a second or even a third job.
The number of moonlighters has surged in the last year. About 7.8 million Americans, or 6.1% of the labor force, held multiple jobs in July, up more than 600,000 from a year earlier. Figures for states are not compiled monthly, but 1994 data showed moonlighting in California has been rising since 1991, even though multiple jobholders declined slightly nationwide.
Labor Department studies show that the vast majority of multiple jobholders combined one full-time job with a part-time one. But the number of people working two full-time jobs has been climbing as well.
About 40% of the multiple jobholders reported the extra pay was to meet regular expenses or pay off debts. And today, women are almost as likely as men to hold more than one job, according to Labor studies.
Before the recession, Jan Cox of Ladera Heights had a comfortable $53,000-a-year job as an administration supervisor at Brookside Savings & Loan in West Los Angeles. But the S & L fell on hard times, and Cox says she had little choice but to leave in late 1990.
Today, Cox, 42, earns about as much as before, but she needs two jobs to do so. She works 10 to 12 hours a day as an office manager at Golin Harris Communications in Los Angeles, and then puts in additional hours at her home computer handling billing accounts for an attorney.
Cox, who is divorced, says moonlighting at times has hurt her health and social life. But at the moment, she sees little choice. Cox says she needs the extra money to pay her credit card bills and for living expenses, which include $1,000 a month for rent.
“I’ll probably moonlight forever,” Cox says. “In addition to paying off debt, I’d like to put some money in the bank.”
For some, moonlighting is also a means to look for new opportunities and enhance their job skills.
“It’s all related to insecurity,” says an Orange County librarian who works full time at a law firm and two part-time jobs at public libraries. He asked that his name not be used, concerned that his primary employer would disapprove of his secondary jobs.
“It helps me maintain my edge,” he says. “I’m concerned about maintaining a job--any job. I see these [part-time] jobs as a way to keep up my professional contacts and broaden my skills.
“I’m doing what needs to be done,” he adds. “It’s necessary.”
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Longer Days
California production workers last year averaged 30% more overtime than in 1985, and it continues to climb. Average manufacturing overtime hours per week:
1995*: 4.4
* Projection based on six-month figures
****
Multiple Jobholders
Nationwide, the number of people with more than one job has nearly doubled since 1975, with women accounting for much of the increase. U.S. workers with more than one job (in thousands):
*--*
Men Women Total 1975 2,962 956 3,918 1980 3,210 1,549 4,759 1985 3,537 2,192 5,729 1991 4,054 3,129 7,183 1994 3,853 3,319 7,172 1995 4,341 3,439 7,779
*--*
Note: 1994 and 1995 are for July; others are annual averages.
Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics
