Americans Work Too Much for Their Own Good

[marmar]

By John de Graaf and David K. Batker
Nov 3, 2011 7:00 PM ET


(Bloomberg) In 1965, a U.S. Senate subcommittee predicted that as a result of increasing labor productivity from automation and “cybernation” -- in other words, the computer revolution -- Americans would be working only about 20 hours a week by the year 2000, while taking seven weeks or more of vacation a year.

But in 1991, the average American worker put in 163 more hours on the job than in 1973, according to the sociologist Juliet Schor, the author of “The Overworked American.” Since many more families had two parents working, the increase in annual working hours per family was much higher -- 500 to 700 hours more than in the ‘70s.

It should be noted that increases in labor productivity are not “energy-free” advances for the workers whose productivity increases. As it happens, workers are required to get much more done and more quickly. Working hours are more draining, while the hyper-competition of today’s workplace makes them even more stressful.

Increased productivity means that consumers perform a variety of pro-bono tasks that companies once had to pay to accomplish. We pump our own gas, make our own travel reservations and use automated checkout lines. Productivity is said to have increased because the companies don’t have to pay anyone to help us out anymore. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-03/americans-work-too-much-for-their-own-good-de-graaf-and-batker.html

[RKP5637]

1. In short, all it does is raise the bar, and raising that bar does not mean we're

a better or smarter society.

[Lorien]

2. No, just more exhausted and burned out

I'm tired of working 80 hour weeks. I'm sure that millions of others are as well. It seems like it's either no work or work yourself sick, there's not much in between anymore.

[RKP5637]

15. Yep!!! Agree! Absolutely true! n/t

[Skittles]

3. 14 hours all last night

time change stuff

[xchrom]

4. Recommend

[tabatha]

5. And those two idiot repubs last night

like to paint Americans as lazy.

[Initech]

6. And we're one of like 3 countries in the WORLD without mandatory paid vacation laws.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

17. My friend in Norway gets 4 weeks vacation automatically as her right plus

an extra week as a government employee and an extra week beyond that for being over sixty.

[knitter4democracy]

7. Can I hear an amen? Amen!

I'm a long-term sub (read: contracted teacher for a defined assignment with full teacher duties at one-third the pay and no benefits), and I cannot believe how much work I bring home. Given what I've seen, I'm not even giving as much homework, etc., as the other teachers. This is crazy.

It's not just teaching, though: everyone's bringing home work to do after massively long hours, and the pay's getting less and less all the time. It's insane.

[GreenStormCloud]

8. I remember when gas stations started allowing customers to pump their own gas.

At that time you had a choice between having an attendant pump your gas or doing it yourself. The do-it-yourself was cheaper, even at the same station. Soon all stations began to offer the option. Then some self-service only stations began to appear, and they were cheaper. The lower prices forced the higher prices out and the gas station attendant became a memory.

I have no objection to pumping my own gas. Why should I pay extra for someone to do what I can do?

[LWolf]

9. I work to much to have a real life,

and burn-out and health issues are reality for me.

The geniuses at the American Enterprise Institute think I'm overpaid. I'd like to see them do my job.

[Papagoose]

10. I know this is true in my house

My wife and I work in the same office. We feel lucky to have what we consider to be good jobs with a stable company that treats us much better than most. That being said, our company's revenues are nearly double in 2011 what they were in 2007 when we started...with fewer employees than 2007.

We work harder and harder every year, and the push to work even harder in 2012 is in full swing.

[The Wizard]

11. The most well behaved

productive subjects in the history of civilization. Amazing what conditioning can do. This is the greatest country on Earth with the world's best health care.............blah blah blah yak yak yak.

[RKP5637]

16. Yep, the propaganda runs thick and heavy in America. Keep up the lies and

distortions long enough and eventually everyone believes them. Much as a lawyer once told me, right or wrong, if you keep telling people the same thing long enough, they'll believe it, right or wrong.

[woo me with science]

21. +100000 nt

[annabanana]

12. "Increased productivity" is CorpoSpeak for

squeezing a little more labor out of your workers for nothing.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

13. Work is a highly acclaimed but highly overrated pastime.

Now that I'm retired I look on it even more unfavorably than when I was doing it.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

18. So much work done in corporate America is really useless

There's an old Doonesbury cartoon in which Mike or someone is working late in an office and starts talking to the janitor, who reveals that until two weeks ago, he was a corporate lawyer who spent two years working on some quibbling lawsuit between two corporations. In the last frame, the janitor says, "I've done more good for humanity in two weeks as a janitor than I ever did as a corporate lawyer."

[drokhole]

22. Useful Work vs. Useless Toil

I feel like this 1884 essay becomes more and more relevant with each passing day:

Useful Work versus Useless Toil
by William Morris

"The above title may strike some of my readers as strange. It is assumed by most people nowadays that all work is useful, and by most well-to-do people that all work is desirable. Most people, well-to-do or not, believe that, even when a man is doing work which appears to be useless, he is earning his livelihood by it - he is "employed," as the phrase goes; and most of those who are well-to-do cheer on the happy worker with congratulations and praises, if he is only "industrious" enough and deprives himself of all pleasure and holidays in the sacred cause of labour. In short, it has become an article of the creed of modern morality that all labour is good in itself - a convenient belief to those who live on the labour of others. But as to those on whom they live, I recommend them not to take it on trust, but to look into the matter a little deeper.

Let us grant, first, that the race of man must either labour or perish. Nature does not give us our livelihood gratis; we must win it by toil of some sort of degree. Let us see, then, if she does not give us some compensation for this compulsion to labour, since certainly in other matters she takes care to make the acts necessary to the continuance of life in the individual and the race not only endurable, but even pleasurable.
...
Now, the first thing as to the work done in civilization and the easiest to notice is that it is portioned out very unequally amongst the different classes of society. First, there are people - not a few - who do no work, and make no pretence of doing any. Next, there are people, and very many of them, who work fairly hard, though with abundant easements and holidays, claimed and allowed; and lastly, there are people who work so hard that they may be said to do nothing else than work, and are accordingly called "the working classes," as distinguished from the middle classes and the rich, or aristocracy, whom I have mentioned above.
...
Next there is the mass of people employed in making all those articles of folly and luxury, the demand for which is the outcome of the existence of the rich non-producing classes; things which people leading a manly and uncorrupted life would not ask for or dream of. These things, whoever may gainsay me, I will for ever refuse to call wealth: they are not wealth, but waste. Wealth is what Nature gives us and what a reasonable man can make out of the gifts of Nature for his reasonable use. The sunlight, the fresh air, the unspoiled face of the earth, food, raiment and housing necessary and decent; the storing up of knowledge of all kinds, and the power of disseminating it; means of free communication between man and man; works of art, the beauty which man creates when he is most a man, most aspiring and thoughtful - all things which serve the pleasure of people, free, manly, and uncorrupted. This is wealth. Nor can I think of anything worth having which does not come under one or other of these heads. But think, I beseech you, of the product of England, the workshop of the world, and will you not be bewildered, as I am, at the thought of the mass of things which no sane man could desire, but which our useless toil makes - and sells?"

(more at the link: http://libcom.org/library/useful-work-versus-useless-toil-william-morris)

[HughBeaumont]

14. Protestant work ethic worn on our sleeves will be the death of us all:

http://journals.democraticunderground.com/HughBeaumont/46

[lumberjack_jeff]

19. We need a referee.

The government needs to actively set the boundaries that will encourage a healthy society.

Instead unemployment is kept high to assure zero inflation (wage-price spiral). So wages stagnate and people work harder to keep their jobs. Profits accumulate and are spent on lobbyists.

The end point of this cycle is not a democracy.

[RegieRocker]

20. Republican moto

Arbeit macht frei

[nashville_brook]

23. 60 hours a week, and the constant drone in my head of "i'm lucky to even have a job"

which is bullshit. i'm not lucky...i have skills that are valuable that my compqny insists on devaluing, and i have no ability to fight back.