Working Harder to Stay in Place
Many Americans are working longer hours with little to show for it, a new analysis by two economists reveals.
“Most Americans are not working harder so they can afford a fancier minivan,” said Barry Bluestone and Stephen Rose. “They’re just trying to make payments on their old car or cover the rent.”
“It turns out that the enormous increase in work effort over the past 20 years has allowed families to maintain their old standard of living--but almost nothing more,” they said.
Bluestone is a professor of political economy at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, and Rose is a senior research economist at Educational Testing Service, Princeton, N.J.
Tracking a cross-section of typical families from 1973 to 1988, they found:
* College graduates put in 16.6% more hours as of 1988 and were rewarded with 32.5% more earnings.
* Those with some college education put in 17.4% more hours but earned just 3.8% more.
* Those with only a high school degree put in 16.1% more hours but earned just 3.7% more.
* High school dropouts put in 11.6% more hours only to see their earnings fall 8.2% despite the extra effort.
“These families are trapped in an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ world, running faster and faster just to stay in the same place,” Bluestone and Rose said.
In an analysis published in the current American Prospect magazine, the economists note that families that are achieving prosperity as a result of added work hours--those headed by college graduates--”comprise less than a third of all American dual-income families.”
Overall, “there is a clear and unbroken trend toward much greater work effort,” they said, noting that in the two decades ending 1988 “prime age (25-54) working couples were putting in an average of 3,450 hours per year in combined employment, up from 2,850 two decades before.”
From 1973 to 1978, the combined real earnings of those couples grew by 18.5%, from $43,851 to $51,955, they said, with most of the increase stemming not from improved wages “but from increased work effort.”
The economists say Americans must work harder because of “the slowdown in wage growth during the past two decades.”
While real hourly wages for nonsupervisory employees jumped 79% from 1947 to 1973, since then hourly wages have actually declined by more than 13%.
“For many workers, working longer hours is the only way to compensate for lower wages,” they wrote.
Bluestone and Rose based their findings on the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, data on families tracked by the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan.
“We have found that many Americans are both overworked and underemployed,” the economists said.
“Because of growing job instability, workers face a feast-and-famine cycle: They work as much as they can when work is available to compensate for short workweeks, temporary layoffs or permanent job loss that may follow.”
One aspect of this trend is the upsurge in moonlighting. In 1979, Bluestone and Rose say, 4.9% of U.S. workers held more than one job--a figure that grew to 6.4% last year.
“Virtually all of this increase has occurred among women, who now represent nearly half of all multiple-job holders,” Bluestone and Rose said.
Women are working harder to prevent “a sharp reduction in family living standards” and men are putting in more overtime “to compensate for expected job loss in the future.”
