Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 16, 1992 TAG: 9202180017
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JULIET B. SCHOR
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
WORKING MORE FOR LESS
In the last twenty years the amount of time Americans have spent at their jobs has risen steadily. Each year the change is small, amounting to about nine hours, or slightly more than one additional day of work. In any given year, such small increments have probably been imperceptible. But the accumulated increase over two decades is substantial. When surveyed, Americans report that they have only sixteen and a half hours of leisure a week, after the obligations of job and household are taken care of. Worker hours are already longer than they were forty years ago. If the present trends continue, by the end of the century Americans will be spending as much time at their jobs as they did back in the nineteen twenties. . . .The time squeeze surfaced with the young urban professional. These high achievers had jobs that required sixty, eighty,even a hundred hours a week. On Wall Street, they would regularly stay at the office until midnight or go months without a single day off. Work consumed their lives.
And if they weren't working, they were networking. They power-lunched, power-exercised, and power-married. As the pace of life accelerated, time became an ever-scarcer commodity, so they used their money to buy more of it. Cooking was replaced by gourmet frozen foods from upscale delis. Eventually the "meal" started disappearing, in favor of "grazing." Those who could afford it bought other people's time, hiring surrogates to shop, write their checks, or even just change a light bulb. They cut back on sleep and postponed having children. ("Can you carry a baby in a briefcase?" queried one Wall Street executive when she was asked about having kids.)
High-powered people who spend long hours at their jobs are nothing new. Medical residents, top corporate management, and the self-employed have always had grueling schedules. But financiers used to keep bankers' hours, and lawyers had a leisured life. Now bankers work like doctors, and lawyers do the same. A former Bankers Trust executive remembers that "somebody would call an occasional meeting at 8 a.m. Then it became the regular 8 o'clock meeting. So there was the occasional 7 a.m. meeting. . . . It just kept spreading." On Wall Street, economic warfare replaced the clubhouse atmosphere - and the pressure forced the hours up. As women and new ethnic groups were admitted into the industry, competition for the plum positions heightened - and the hours went along. Twenty-two-year-olds wear beepers as they squeeze in an hour for lunch or jogging at the health club.
What happened on Wall Street was replicated throughout the country in one high-income occupation after another. Associates in law firms competed over who could log more billable hours. Workaholics set new standards of survival. Even America's sleepiest corporations started waking up; and when they did, the corporate hierarchies found themselves coming in to work a little earlier and leaving for home a little later. As many companies laid off white-collar people during the 1980s, those who remained did more for their monthly paycheck. . . .
At cutting-edge corporations, which emphasize commitment, initiative, and flexibility, the time demands are often the greatest. "People who work for me should have phones in their bathrooms," says the CEO from one aggressive American company. Recent research on managerial habits reveals that work has become positively absorbing. When a deadline approached in one corporation, "people who had been working twelve-hour days and Saturdays started to come in on Sunday, and instead of leaving at midnight, they would stay a few more hours. Some did not go home at all. . . ."
The recent growth in small businesses has also contributed to overwork. When Dolores Kordek started a dental insurance company, her strategy for survival was to work harder than the competition. So the office was open from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. three hundred and sixty-five days a year. And she was virtually always in it.
This combination of retrenchment, economic competition, and innovative business management has raised hours substantially. One poll of senior executives found that weekly hours rose during the 1980s, and vacation time fell. Other surveys have yielded similar results. By the end of the decade, overwork at the upper echelons of the labor market had become endemic - and its scale was virtually unprecedented in living memory.
If the shortage of time had been confined to Wall Street or America's corporate boardrooms, it might have remained just a media curiosity. The number of people who work eighty hours a week and bring home - if they ever get there - a six-figure income is very small. But while the incomes of these rarefied individuals were out of reach, their schedules turned out to be downright common. As Wall Street waxed industrious, the longer schedules penetrated far down the corporate ladder, through middle management, into the secretarial pool, and even onto the factory floor itself. Millions of ordinary Americans fell victim to the shortage of time.
The most visible group has been women, who are coping with a double load - the traditional duties associated with home and children and their growing responsibility for earning a paycheck. With nearly two-thirds of adult women now employed, and a comparable fraction of mothers on the job, it's no surprise that many American women find themselves operating in overdrive. Many working mothers live a life of perpetual motion, effectively holding down two full-time jobs. . . .
For many, the workday rivals those for which the "satanic mills" of the Industrial Revolution grew justly infamous: twelve- or fourteen-hour stretches of labor. . . .
By my calculations, the total working time of employed mothers now averages about 65 hours a week. Of course, many do far more than the average - such as mothers with young children, women in professional positions, or those whose wages are so low that they must hold down two jobs just to scrape by. These women will be working 70 to 80 hours a week. . . .
One might think that as women's working hours rose, husbands would compensate by spending less time on the job. But just the opposite has occurred. Men who work are also putting in longer hours. The 5:00 Dads of the 1950s and 1960s (those who were home for dinner and an evening with the family) are becoming an "endangered species." Thirty percent of men with children under fourteen report working fifty or more hours a week. And many of these 8:00 or 9:00 Dads aren't around on the weekends either. Thirty percent of them work Saturdays and/or Sundays at their regular employment. And many others use the weekends for taking on a second job.
A twenty-eight-year-old Massachusetts factory worker explains the bind many fathers are in: "Either I can spend time with my family, or support them - not both." . . .
According to an official of the Service Employees International Union in New England, nearly one-third of their nursing-home employees now hold two full-time jobs. Changes in the low end of the labor market have also played a role. There is less full-time, stable employment. "Twenty hours here, thirty hours there, and twenty hours here. That's what it takes to get a real paycheck," says Domenic Bozzotto, president of Boston's hotel and restaurant workers union, whose members are drowning in a sea of work. Two-job families. Those were the good old days, he says. "We've got four-job families." The recent influx of immigrants has also raised hours. I.N. Yazbek, an arrival from Lebanon, works ninety hours a week at three jobs. It's necessary, he says, for economic success.
This decline of leisure has been reported by the Harris Poll, which has received widespread attention. Harris finds that since 1973 free time has fallen nearly 40 percent - from a median figure of 26 hours a week to slightly under 17. Other surveys, such as the 1989 Decision Research Corporation Poll, also reveal a loss of leisure. Although these polls have serious methodological drawbacks, their findings are not far off the mark. A majority of working Americans - professionals, corporate management, "working" mothers, fathers, and lower paid workers - are finding themselves with less and less leisure time.
Although the symptoms of time squeeze are relatively uncontroversial - an acceleration in the pace of life, a rise in time-saving innovations, increasing stress, and role overload - analysts differ sharply in how they understand these phenomena. Social critic Jeremy Rifkin believes that what has changed is our perception of time itself. Everything is speeding up, and the culprit is technology. . . . Once people become acclimated to the speed of the computer, normal human intercourse becomes laborious. Programmers get irritable and impatient. Children complain that their teachers talk too slowly, in comparison with Nintendo or Atari. . . .
Not everyone blames technology. A second theory is that we are merely victims of our own aspirations. We have become more demanding in terms of activities, goals, and achievements. And today's life styles "offer people more options than ever before," according to John P. Robinson, one of the nation's leading chroniclers of how people spend their time. This theme is echoed by another time-use expert: "We have become walking resumes. If you're not doing something, you're not creating and defining who you are." Since the time available to us to do and to define ourselves cannot increase, we are naturally frustrated. While some have suggested that this is merely a "baby-boom" problem, the evidence suggests it is more widespread.
The idea of rising aspirations echoes views put forward more than twenty years ago by economists Gary Becker and Staffan Linder. Becker's work was based on the simple observation that consuming takes time. As people get richer, and own more and more consumer goods, there is less and less time to spend with each item. Unavoidably, use of the Walkman, the VCR, the camcorder, and concert tickets gets crammed into the space once occupied by the lone record player. Linder also believed that leisure time would eventually become hectic as people tried to keep up with the use of an accumulating mountain of possessions. In "The Harried Leisure Class," he predicted that growing affluence would lead people to switch to those activities that can be done quickly. Long courtships, leisurely walks on the beach, or lingering over the dinner table were destined for extinction. People would do more things at once and do them faster. Even if the amount of leisure time itself did not change, it would become much more harried.
At first blush, events appear to have borne out Linder's ingenious argument. The New York Times has already chronicled the quiet death of the dinner party, as he prophesied. ("Most people I know have turned their ovens into planters," notes one professional woman.) Life has become more harried - but probably not so much for the reasons Linder and Becker predicted. They anticipated that rising incomes would cause the frenzy. But for many workers, earning power reached a high point just after Linder's book was published, and has been declining since. By this analysis, their lives should have become less harried. What Linder did not foresee was that the growing demands of work would lead to a decline in leisure time itself.
There is undoubtedly truth in the ideas that technology and aspirations have led to an accelerated sense of time. But both these explanations have missed a much more obvious force operating in our lives. Time has become more precious because people have less of it to call their own. We have become a harried working, rather than leisure, class, as jobs take up an ever larger part of ever more Americans' lives.