The 40-Hour Work Week Is Obsolete Futurists 50 years ago were projecting a 20-hour work week in the United States and Western Europe by the dawn of the 21st century. In most developed nations, their predictions have proven directionally correct: total work time has moved downward.
But not in the United States. Todays Americans report that they are working even longer and harder than their parents and grandparents.
Americans are often viewed as the developed worlds workaholics. We spend about half our waking hours working. Nearly a third of Americans regularly work more than 40 hours per week, and almost a fifth put in over 50 hours. In fact, three years ago America eclipsed Japan to become the worlds most hard-working nation.
U.S. workers clocked an average of 1,825 hours in 2002, according to the International Labor Organization. By contrast, the average Norwegian worker put in only 1,342 hours, nearly a third less than the average American. The average employee in Canada worked 1,778 hours; in the U.K., 1,711 hours; in Germany, 1,444 hours; and in France, 1,545.
The drivers behind this workaholic trend are actually very simple. The key driver appears to be that the U.S. workers have more opportunities to increase their earnings than they do in other countries. Researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research compared workers in the U.S. and in Germany to find the differences in the amount of hours they work.
They found that in Germany, people who work more hours do not tend to earn a significantly higher salary than people who work fewer hours. Therefore, there is less incentive for a German worker to stay at his desk at the end of the usual workday.
In the U.S., by contrast, people who work longer hours tend to make more money and earn more promotions than employees who race for the door at the end of the day.
Greater job insecurity is a second explanation. A tight job market and insecurities about their current situations have encouraged workers to put a premium on holding onto their current jobs, according to Randstad North Americas research. Over 74 percent of employees are "very, or somewhat, willing" to work more hours in order to avoid layoffs. Employers have even higher expectations about employees willingness to accept cutbacks. Eighty-four percent of employers estimated their employees would work longer hours in order to avoid layoffs.
Holding multiple jobs is a third explanation. According to research by the Gallup Organization, while 86 percent of Americans have just one job, 11 percent work two jobs, and 3 percent hold three or more. About 2 percent of American workers have a secondary job lasting 20 or more hours per week, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.
A surprisingly large number of employees work on weekends. Nearly 20 percent of male American employees work on Saturdays, and 8 percent work on Sundays. Among female American employees, 14 percent work on Saturday and 6 percent on Sunday.
There has been an overall rise in hours worked by couples with families. Combined weekly work hours for dual-earning couples with children rose 10 hours per week, from 81 hours in 1977 to 91 hours in 2002, according to a study by the Families and Work Institute.2
Even vacations are going by the wayside: Employees are handing companies more than $21 billion in unused vacation days each year, according to a study by Expedia.com. Research by NFO WorldGroup found that 84 percent of workers worked during their last vacation; 55 percent received calls or pages; 27 percent read e-mail or faxes; and 58 percent of men and 44 percent of women checked their voice mail.
Employees are feeling the strain of all of this work. Mounting research shows there’s a tangible downside to overwork ? from mental health problems to physical ailments and job injuries caused by fatigue and stress.
It’s also a bottom-line issue: A study by the Economic Policy Institute found that mandatory overtime costs industry as much as $300 billion a year in stressand fatigue-related problems.
However, it’s hard to separate the downside of longer working hours from the benefits of growing productivity. Over time, higher productivity is a good thing; it leads to better wages and living standards. And U.S. workers are the world’s most productive. Output per person employed in the United States last year was $60,728. In contrast Belgium’s output, the highestscoring European Union member, was $54,333.
But Americans put in more hours than Europeans to score higher. On an hourly basis, workers in Norway, France, and Belgium beat the Americans in productivity.
Norwegians were first, with an output of $38 per hour worked last year. French workers were second at $35; Belgians were third at $34; and U.S. workers were fourth at $32.
Recall that labor productivity measures real output per hour of labor. There are serious problems in estimating both the numerator and denominator of the productivity equation. The labor inputs to the productivity calculations are not hours worked but hours paid, as reported by employers to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is no small distinction.
Government data on hours worked don’t capture time put in off the job, such as during weekends, or after-hours work that many salaried employees do on laptops, cell phones, and e-mail. It’s a problem most workers understand on a personal level, since many feel like they’re working harder than ever.
But the point of increasing productivity is, or should be, to improve our material standard of living and make our lives a little easier. Many feel the American productivity miracle has done neither. Even at the peak of the boom, more than 60 percent of respondents to a Business Week poll said the miracle had done little to raise their incomes or improve their job security.3
Over the longer term, productivity gains have done little to ease required work effort. A worker paid the average manufacturing wage would have had to work 62 weeks to earn the median family’s income in 1947. In 2001, he or she would have had to work 81 weeks. So, despite the fact that productivity was up more than threefold over the period, the average worker would have to toil six months longer to make the average family income.
There is also some evidence that workers must strive for higherpaying jobs that require longer hours, because the traditional middle-income job is “disappearing.” Research presented at the conference of the European Association of Labor Economists showed that in the U.K. there has been rapid growth in recent years in the best-paid and worst-paid jobs.
Many of the old middle-income jobs, the research showed, have been replaced by technology and automation. While well-paid jobs have increased in business and financial services, so have the number of low-paid jobs, such as waiters, grocery shelf stockers, and gardeners, which still need manual input or face-to-face contact.
This polarization of the jobs market, noticeable also in the U.S., is a worrying development. Long hours are a feature of many of these lower-skilled, lower-paid jobs. But they are also characteristic of many higher-skilled, higher-paid jobs, especially those that are in I.T. or are I.T.?related.
In a National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper, Richard Freeman uses regression analysis to demonstrate that computer and Internet use at work is associated with 5 to 6 percent higher hours worked. He also found a sizeable premium on wages of those workers using computers and the Internet at work.
Since the demand for computer and Internet-savvy individuals should affect the quantity as well as the price of their labor, working with a computer ought to be associated with greater hours worked as well as higher hourly pay. In fact, to the extent that computerization, particularly the Internet, allows workers to work at home more easily, the effect of the new technologies on hours worked could be more important over the long run than the effect of those technologies on wages.
Based on the previous discussion, we predict the following developments:
First, we anticipate a growing desire by working couples to reduce their working hours, with one spouse giving up paid work altogether to improve family life. Concurrent with the rise of 24/7/365 operations, the number of Americans who cite “family” as their top priority grew to 68 percent in 2002, from 54 percent in 2000. Surveys find that boomers and mature workers aged 60 to 65 are more likely than Generation X/Y to list family as a top priority. While 76 percent of employers believe that they’re much more understanding than previously about workers’ need to take care of families or private lives, only 61 percent of employees agree. We anticipate that there will be many more tired parents working longer hours with a growing amount of dissatisfaction over this disconnect. This will result in a movement among many families to live simpler but more home-based lives.
Second, we expect an even more intensive work week as employers begin to experience the tightening labor market and skills shortage we explored earlier in this program. This will increase demand on the individuals in the existing labor pool, resulting in even longer but better-paying workdays for highly skilled workers. We anticipate a rise in the number of successful, younger, single professionals over the coming decade, who adopt the norm of a 60-hour work week.
Third, we predict continued flattening of the wage “bell curve” for American workers, as well as European workers, over the coming decade. The U.S. labor market will be reshaped by the tremendous wealth-generating opportunities that are created for highly skilled workers and the need for lowerskilled employees to work longer days to maintain a desired standard of living. The European bell curve will be primarily reshaped by the introduction of a large labor pool in Eastern Europe. These lower skilled workers are used to longer hours than Western European norms, and the higher skilled workers will immigrate to Western business centers for increased career opportunities.
Fourth, we expect that America’s image as a country of unbridled opportunity for hard work and for selfadvancement will only increase in the eyes of potential immigrants over the coming decade. Given the opportunity to earn higher wages by working longer hours, immigrants will continue to seek jobs in the U.S. Ultimately, employers in Germany and other European countries will face a crucial choice: Pay higher wages to people to work more hours, or watch their best workers move to American companies.
References List :
1. Associated Press, September 4, 2003, "American Worker Is Worlds Most Productive, but Some Europeans Do Better per Hour," by Alexander G. Higgins. ⓒ Copyright 2003 by The Associated Press. All rights reserved. 2. USA Today, December 17, 2003, "U.S. Workers Feel Burn of Long Hours, Less Leisure; Employees Pay Cost of Rising Productivity," by Stephanie Armour. ⓒ Copyright 2003 by Gannett Company, Inc. All rights reserved. 3. The Guardian, February 2, 2004, "U.S. Miracle Is Based on Longer Hours for Less Pay," by Doug Henwood. ⓒ Copyright 2004 by Guardian Newspapers, Ltd. All rights reserved.
