Too Little Time on Our Hands

...Schor's point is not only that we are lagging behind others in the amount of leisure time we enjoy...

...One of Schor's contentions is that while the employed are working more, the unemployed and underemployed are working less...

...In the 1950s, she reminds us, the worry among academics was that we were developing too much leisure for ourselves...

...If 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 1920s...

...In Sweden, some lucky souls receive as much as eight weeks...

...Nor does an indictment of capitalism help us to understand the almost 100 years during which worktime was steadily declining despite the robber barons, red in tooth and claw, then roaming the earth...

...These figures on vacation time, and many other eye-opening statistics, have been collected by Juliet Schor, an associate professor of economics at Harvard, in a fascinating, albeit deeply flawed book entitled The Overworked American...

...but she proceeds to tie herself in knots trying to sort out real needs from created ones...

...CEOs, doctors, lawyers at the fancy Wall Street firms...

...As analysis, that is fine as far as it goes, but it hardly explains why capitalist Europeans are working less while capitalist Americans are working more, or why those in what used to be called the Socialist countries seem to work longer hours still...

...and they certainly couldn't afford Social Security, or an end to child labor, or occupational safety and health, or minimum wages, or environmental regulations...

...Schor does concede along the way that people may enjoy purchasing all of that stuff she disapproves of...

...And if our values are indeed shifting toward more leisure, then the political appeal of four-week vacations probably is a lot larger than any of the Presidential candidates currently realize...

...She even manages to take a swipe at gourmet cooking...

...A writer in the Harvard Business Review, for example, stated that "boredom, which used to bother only aristocrats, had become a common curse...

...but that over the last 20 years the hours we spend at our jobs have actually been increasing...

...These figures, it should be pointed out, are for working Americans...

...Factories and offices have to keep their expensive equipment operating as many hours as possible, and the benefits companies dispense make it less costly for them to pay overtime to current employees than to hire new ones...

...They couldn't afford to limit the work week to 50 hours or 40 hours...

...But there are easy responses to this, beginning with the observation that employers have always complained whenever a reform to improve workers' lives has been proposed...

...Schor says that "working hours are already longer than they were 40 years ago...

...The author has an explanation, and it is here that she gets herself in trouble, for her explanation is much too easy...

...who put in horrendously long days, yet Schor says that what was once the case only for the upper echelons is now trickling down to the rest of the economy...

...The culprit she uncovers is that old villain, Capitalism...

...Schor is probably closer to the mark when she points a finger at the consumerist ethos that has gripped the country through much of this century (helped along by a postwar religion of Keynesianism that has concentrated almost exclusively on growth and production...

...For the first time in 15 years," she writes, "people have cited leisure time as the 'more important' thing in their lives...

...in these days of high capital costs and extensive fringe benefits, that interest has become an imperative...

...Surely it is more sensible simply to look for the signs that Americans may no longer want what they are getting...

...Republicans would of course scream that employers can't afford so radical a change...

...The result: fewer workers, longer hours...

...we should never underestimate the appeal of consumption itself...

...not in the United States, to be sure, but throughout Western Europe...

...What has produced this dire prospect...

...Reviewed by Barry Gewen New York "Times Book Review," preview editor I have long felt that if the Democrats were serious about wanting to win the Presidency, they would include a plank in their party platform calling for a guaranteed four-week paid vacation for every working person in America...

...One can readily imagine where she would have stood on the liquor question in the 1920s, and somewhere in the background one can hear echoes of the Socialist authoritarian ready to tell everyone else what is good for them...

...In the past we were told businesses couldn't afford the 12hour day, or the 10-hour day, or the 8hour day...

...And those numbers do not tell the whole story, because in many countries collective bargaining agreements provide for more than the law allows...

...as if the hidden persuaders had merely failed to ring the proper bells to get consumers salivating for New Coke and Edsels...

...We are used to thinking it is the highpriced professionals...

...Never before, Schor observes, has this been true...

...Besides (and this seems to me the clinching argument), employers have already adjusted to long vacations for their employees, adjusted and prospered...

...Other surveys she mentions show that a majority of workers would even be willing to trade some income for additional free time...

...Around the middle of the 19th century, Schor observes, the worktime of Americans began to decrease, and this trend continued for almost 100 years, down through the 1940s...

...In this section of The Overworked American Schor occasionally adopts an unpleasant puritanical tone, suggesting that people should not want the things they want...

...A Harris Poll confirms these findings...

...Even youngsters at fast-food joints are spending more time flipping hamburgers...

...The average work week began to increase, and so did total annual work hours...

...she says Americans work the equivalent of two months more a year than the Germans or the French...

...In Holland, Belgium and Switzerland, the figure is four weeks...

...Parents wish to spend more time with their children, yuppies with their barmates...

...We in the United States, with our grudging two weeks or so of vacation a year, should feel outraged or embarrassed at such comparisons, and I hope some Democratic aspirant will give sufficient attention to them to see that we do...

...But just as the experts were polishing up their projections of 22-hour work weeks and retirements at age38,areversal of the longstanding patterns took hold...

...Because of the free enterprise system, she says, employers have always had an interest in imposing long hours on their work forces...

...Schor has calculated the changes over almost two decades and she finds that Americans worked 163 hours more in 1987 than they did in 1969...

...Perhaps the people in the worst position of all are working mothers: One Boston survey found that they now average over 80 hours of housework, child care and employment each week...

...It would not be the first time that a social revolution took place while no one was looking...

...Schor herself tells us that leisure has become an increasingly valued, and scarce, commodity as we have grown busier...

...Making an argument we have heard many times before, she says the public would not crave air-conditioned cars and electric toothbrushes had those products not become available...

...Her evidence is compelling...

...It discovered that leisure time has fallen 40 per cent since 1973, from an average of 26 hours a week to less than 17 at present...

...There was talk of three- and four-day weekends...

...In Germany, where the legal minimum is three weeks of paid time off, workers get five and a half to six weeks...

...Yet in this case, too, she verges on maintaining that bulging supermarkets and department stores are all part of a capitalist plot to keep us chained to our desks...

...In France, Sweden and Austria, workers are entitled to five weeks of paid vacation by law...

...The truth is that lengthy guaranteed vacations are just one more advance they would learn to live with if they had to...

...Our society may well be undergoing a profound cultural change: We may have finally decided to abandon the rat race for a more easygoing way of life...