With Labor Day Comes More Labor, Less Play
Sixty years after Congress enacted the eight-hour workday, progress looks like this:
In New Jersey, a transit official sleeps with his pager under his pillow. In Palo Alto and San Jose, consultants and accountants at Ernst & Young are engaged in a radical experiment: not checking their voicemail while they are on vacation.
But, while the booming economy and new technologies mean that work is spilling into the homes of millions of Americans, personal pursuits are also creeping into the office.
The same devices that tether them to the job no matter where they are also let them play computer solitaire and buy airline tickets at their desks. And with two-career families common, parents think nothing of leaving work to attend assemblies at their children’s schools.
Viewed this Labor Day from either direction, the lines between work and home are blurring.
The workplace, analysts say, is becoming the primary focus of more and more lives. In a mobile society, the office is replacing the neighborhood as a community of friends and acquaintances. Workplace dramas dominate prime time.
The trend feeds on itself. Longer hours at work lead to office relationships, clubs and prayer groups, all of which extend the workday. People have second families at work--often more interesting than those at home.
“When you ask people where they really feel appreciated, it’s at work,” says Arlie Hochschild, director of the Center for Working Families at UC Berkeley. “A lot of people, parents of small children, would have to confess that Monday was a relief. In a way, home has become work and work has become home.”
According to a national study by the Families and Work Institute, people with full-time jobs put in an average of 47.1 hours a week last year, up from 43.8 hours in 1992. One in three brought work home at least once a week, a jump of 10 percentage points from 1977. One in five regularly traveled overnight for work.
“Forty hours a week is, to me, not particularly feasible,” shrugs Leslie Polgar, a high-tech consultant in Lafayette, Calif., who logs about 60 hours a week, rising early to contact European clients and staying in the office late to phone Taiwan. “Forty hours a week would be kind of boring.”
But not everyone thrives on this regimen like Polgar, 55, whose son and daughter are grown and gone. The Families and Work Institute study found a staggering 63% want to work less, up 17 percentage points from just five years ago. Most said that they have to work very hard (68%) and very fast (88%) and that they still do not have time to get everything done (60%).
A generation ago, sociologists predicted that computers would boost productivity enough to give America a three-day weekend. The Age of Leisure was on its way. But instead, laptops, cell phones, pagers and assorted other gizmos are seducing Americans into working wherever they are.
Robert Kelley, author of “How to Be a Star at Work,” attributes this in part to the rise of “gold-collar” jobs in an economy in which the brain is the factory. In 1950, perhaps 20% of workers met Kelley’s definition of gold-collar; now half do.
“Work has become an end in itself,” says University of Iowa historian Ben Hunnicutt. “It is who you are. It answers the questions of identity, of meaning.”
Some analysts dispute the research on the extended workday. Indeed, surveys of all employees, not just those who work more than 20 hours a week, show an average workweek of about 35 hours throughout the last decade, down from 61 hours in 1870 and 37 in 1973.
John P. Robinson, co-author of the 1997 book “Time for Life: The Surprising Ways Americans Use Their Time,” says that when people keep meticulous diaries they are surprised to find out how they spend their workdays, a misconception that may lead to over-reporting work hours in surveys such as the Families and Work Institute’s.
Michael Cox, an economist for the Federal Reserve Bank in Dallas, says that on average, people spend only 16% of their waking hours at work--about 1,557 hours a year in 1996, compared with 2,938 in 1890. Pointing to office extracurricular activities such as selling Girl Scout cookies and surfing the Internet, Cox adds that employees are not necessarily working.
“We make people go outside to smoke now; we don’t make them take their computers with them,” Cox says. “They’re getting paid for being there, so it shows up as work.”
More and More People Are Keeping in Touch
Pagers have become the icon of the extended workday. Gone is the time clock; that little black box on your belt means you are always on call.
To some, it is an electronic leash that binds them to their jobs. Others say that the pager means freedom: No longer must they sit at their desks awaiting a call from the boss or a client. Instead, they can be talking to a colleague down the hall, working out at the gym, watching the kids’ sports events, picking up dinner.
Cellular phones remain largely an upper-class luxury, but, at $10 a month, pagers are the province of the proletariat. One in five Americans--man, woman, child--carries the device, invented in 1949 by a hospital patient annoyed at doctors yelling back and forth over his bed.
For carpet installers and bankers, for plumbers and doctors, beepers are a staple of the new workplace uniform. For the entrepreneur, the pager can replace a receptionist. For the workaholic, it’s a security blanket.
“The sad truth is that I’m more or less consumed by the job, so the idea that somebody can reach me all the time does not particularly bother me,” says Howard Wolfson, chief of staff to Rep. Nita M. Lowey (D-N.Y.).
While others in the supermarket line flip through the National Enquirer, Wolfson checks the news headlines on his pager. When a satellite mishap darkened 42 million pagers in May, Wolfson was “totally bereft.” Heading to London recently for his first vacation in four years, he was dismayed to discover there was no international pager on the market.
“Every page suggests possibility,” he says. “The little beep goes off, the thing vibrates. . . . Who could it be? It’s like going to the mailbox. There’s always the possibility that . . . you won the sweepstakes.”
Chris Varelas, a New York investment banker who started wearing a beeper when he was chief financial advisor to Orange County during its bankruptcy, says that a silent pager is the supreme symbol of serenity.
“If you’re not being paged, you know that no one’s trying to contact you,” he points out. “You know you’re not being demanded at that moment.”
Varelas says that he will not take his pager with him on his September honeymoon to Turtle Island, a private beach near Fiji, because it will not work there. But a recent AT&T; survey showed 51% of travelers check in with work while on vacation; 38% carry cell phones, 20% bring beepers.
And there is no down time. Rob Hoggarth, of the Personal Communication Industry Assn., brags that on a recent trip to Boston he conducted nine transactions on his pager while waiting on the tarmac.
“We used to judge someone’s productivity based on the number of widgets that they sold,” notes Nancy Ozawa of the Menlo Park-based Institute for the Future, which found in a recent survey that workers at Fortune 1000 companies exchanged an average of 178 pager, e-mail, voicemail and fax messages a day. Now, “you’ll hear a lot of people talk about how brave they are for getting through 30 e-mails. It’s a badge of honor.”
Jim Wilk of Calabasas starts at 6 a.m., touching base with the business world on CNBC even as he opens his eyes. He signs on to check his e-mail and the headlines on his Internet service, puts in “pretty much 12-hour days with not that many lunches” and then, after dinner with his family, generally pulls out the briefcase and laptop for 90 minutes more. Wilk just left a job at a health care company--where he wore a beeper that buzzed every time he got a voicemail message at the office--and is starting his own marketing company.
“The world has almost become instantaneous expectations and responses,” he says. “I don’t know if it’s good or bad. I probably should throw it all away and start over.”
The verdict is still out at the San Jose and Palo Alto offices of Ernst & Young, where Susan Sweet is overseeing the no-voicemail-on-vacation experiment. “People were basically working all the time. There was not a lot of cultural protocol about when is it OK to stop.”
Calling for a Timeout
Vicki Robin stopped years ago, bagging a high-pressure stab at acting in New York. Starting again in a lower gear, she co-wrote a 1993 book, “Your Money or Your Life,” and now she runs the New Roadmap Foundation.
In seminars and newsletters, Robin preaches simplicity. Spend less, work less. In primitive hunter-gatherer cultures, she notes, people worked just three or four hours a day, leaving the rest of their time to more spiritual pursuits.
“We live in a culture that says more is better. It’s an absolutely psychological dead end. You can never have enough,” Robin says.
Eric Brown, 33, quit his job as a Capitol Hill press secretary for the Center for a New American Dream in Takoma Park, Md. He bikes to work--four days a week--and spends Fridays taking 2 1/2-year-old Maggie to Washington’s free museums. For a 50% reduction in hours he took a 40% pay cut. So Brown drove to Montreal for vacation instead of flying, stayed with relatives rather than in a hotel. He reuses aluminum foil.
Robin and Brown have plenty of company. In a 1996 survey, Harvard University professor Juliet Schor found that 19% of workers had purposely slowed down over the previous five years. More than half said they would stay in lower gear. In addition, 12% were involuntarily downshifted, losing hours or jobs--and a quarter of those called it a blessing in disguise.
Natalie Benda of Fullerton, Calif., is mid-shift. She just quit her $48,000-a-year job as a product manager and will start as a teacher in Norwalk--at about $31,000--this fall. She says she was putting in 10 or 11 hours a day, coming home too cranky and tired to cook dinner, when her bosses called her in to say it wasn’t enough.
“I just looked at them and was horrified,” says Benda, 28.
Unlike Benda, economists and other analysts say, many workers are still too afraid of layoffs to say no to late nights and weekends at their desks. But Michael Fogler, a Lexington, Ky., guitarist who wrote the 1997 book “Unjobbing,” turns the question on its head: It’s not how much you need your job, but how much your job costs you.
“A lot of times we spend money on things we need because we have the job,” he says. “If you didn’t have the job, you wouldn’t need the money.”
Susan Kurtz, a 27-year-old party planner, is in the office all day selling, then staffing three to five events a week, evenings and Saturdays. Her feet ache--and so she indulges in pedicures and massages.
“You want certain things and you have to work to have them. And then you have to work to maintain them,” Kurtz says on board a plane to Cape Cod for a vacation with her husband, a financial planner. “In the end, all the money in the world and all the fabulous cars are useless if you don’t have enough time to relax and read a book or go to a nice restaurant.
“The irony is, you can’t have it if you don’t work, and if you work, you can’t have it.”
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HIGHER WAGES
The median wage for U.S. workers is finally near the peak before the last recession. D2
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