WORK LONGER, NOT SMARTER?
BY JULIANNE MALVEAUX
When the Fourth of July falls in the middle of the week, what’s a worker
to do? The stock market closed Wednesday at 1 p.m. so that workers could go
home early. Some employers have offered workers the option of taking the two
days before the Fourth, or the two days afterwards off. Some workers are
cobbling together a five-day weekend by using vacation and compensatory time
to get away. The tentative nature of many arrangements reminds us how little
vacation time most workers get in the United States, in contrast to those in
Western European countries. Here, workers start out with one or two week’s
paid vacation, and may work 15 or 20 years before they qualify for four
weeks. The law requires employers in Sweden, Spain, Denmark, Austria,
Finland and France to provide at least 30 days of paid vacation. Ireland,
Portugal, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, and Switzerland require at least
20 days of paid vacation. The average worker in the United States gets 16
vacation and sick days per year, which is less than the law requires for any
of the Western European countries that the OECD reported on in 1998.
The average full-time worker in the United States logged nineteen hundred
sixty-six hours in 1998, an increase of 22 hours since 1990. In contrast,
Japanese workers, who worked 2031 hours in 1990, worked 133 fewer hours in
1998. German, French, Canadian, Australian, Norwegian and Finnish workers
all worked fewer hours in 1998 than in 1990. Only workers in the United
States found their hours increasing.
The OECD reports workplace and other economic statistics for 20 economies
in the United States and western Europe. Excluding the United States, the
average number of hours worked was 1737. Americans work about 200 more
hours, or four more weeks, than their counterparts elsewhere, and 300 hours,
about seven and a half-weeks, more than the French, who worked an average of
1634 hours in 1998. The combination of longer vacations and fewer hours
worked daily, accounts for the difference.
Are workers in the Untied Sates working harder, but not smarter? How
much of our productivity gains are really a function of more work? To be
sure, workers in some of the western European countries do not have incomes
as high as those in the Untied States. But with millions of workers,
especially women, reporting that they are “time poor” and facing challenges
commuting, caring for their children, and being involved in their
communities, it makes sense to look at the way the US workplace is
constituted and the effort it demands from workers.
Enlightened workplaces often offer paid sabbaticals to executive workers,
and other perks designed to improve job satisfaction and retention. One
might ask if these perks would benefit all workers, from those at the loading
dock or on the typewriter, to those who are making executive decisions.
When employers don’t offer sabbaticals, it is not unusual to find employees
making career decisions that fulfill their personal goals, even if it means
leaving the structured workplace. One wonders what kind of productivity drain
takes place when seasoned workers pick up and leave because they are feeling
burned out. But we live in a culture of burnout, where many people compete
for bragging rights on their level of busyness. A whole generation of
electronic devices has been developed so that we can keep in constant touch
with the office. As the US economy has slackened too many workers fear that
out of touch means out of mind. Who wants to take off when 12-hour workdays
are part of the office culture?
Must our workplace culture demand nearly 2000 annual hours from the
average worker? Examples from Western Europe suggest that work doesn’t have
to be organized in a way that it is elevated above all other aspects of our
lives. Our hard-driving work culture among professional workers has the most
impact on working women with children, who are often forced to make hard
choices between career development and child raising. But our hard-working
culture also distorts the way we make public policy and the efforts we assume
that low-wage workers should make to survive. Too many cobble together a
living from several part-time jobs, earning little empathy from those who
think that 12 hours workdays are normal.
A few workers will get a break because our nation’s birthday fell midweek
this year. Workers deserve a legally mandated break, a change in our wage
and hour laws that increases the amount of paid vacation for those at the
bottom as well as at the top. A Congress that can’t get it together to
increase the minimum wage isn’t likely to do more for workers. Examples from
western Europe, though, remind us that working longer does not always mean
working smarter.