Americans don’t just work more than they have in the past,
they work more than most of the industrialized world. American workers spend
more hours at the office — or on the assembly line or behind the coffee counter
— than Europeans. A 2004 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research
found Americans work “50 percent more than do the Germans, French, and
Italians.” More recent data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development found that in 2014, Americans outworked several expected other
countries, among them Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Finland, Switzerland and
Austria, all countries that rank higher than us on the most recent World
Happiness survey.
The most surprising discovery of the poll, though, is that
we have surpassed Japan, long stereotyped by Americans as a society far more
workaholic than our own, in annual hours worked by a tally of 1789 to 1729.
That means Americans now collectively putting in more work hours each year than
the country where necessity led to the invention of the term karōshi (“death
from overwork"). Japan, at the very least, demands a legal minimum of 10
paid vacation days (though many employers provide more) along with 14 weeks of
maternity leave. (The country has also undertaken a more aggressive effort to
get new fathers to take advantage of paid paternity leave.)
France goes even further, offering 30 days of vacation and
16 weeks of parental leave, while Scandinavian countries and Australia and New
Zealand top even the French. Yet in the United States workers have no legal
guarantee to any amount of vacation at all — or sick days, for that matter,
despite a report finding all those sick people at work ultimately cost the
country $160 billion in lost productivity each year. The U.S. has the
distinction of being the world’s only industrialized nation with no national
legislation demanding employers offer maternity leave. And paternity leave?
That is not even on the far horizon. With mainstream presidential candidates
suggesting Americans should just work a little harder, efforts to curb the
culture of overwork seem unlikely anytime soon,
Without any legal right to vacation, sick days or maternity
leave, nearly a quarter of Americans work jobs that offer no paid time off, per
a 2013 study from the Center for Economic and Policy Research. The study found
that part-time workers are “far less likely to have paid vacations (35 percent)
than are full-timers (91 percent).” Women are disproportionately affected,
since studies find they outnumber men among part-timers, 61 to 56 percent.
In the white-collar “professional” fields, technology,
changing cultural expectations around work, and for the last few years,
recessionary belt tightening now require they do more with less, a series of
factors that has given rise to what the New York Times calls a “24/7 work culture.”
The Times notes that “the pressure of a round-the-clock work culture — in which
people are expected to answer emails at 11pm and take cellphone calls on Sunday
morning — is particularly acute in highly skilled, highly paid professional
services jobs like law, finance, consulting and accounting…These 24/7 work
cultures lock gender inequality in place, because the work-family balance
problem is recognized as primarily a woman’s problem. The very well-intentioned
answer is to give women benefits, but it actually derails women’s careers. The
culture of overwork affects everybody.”
Across the board both men and women workers are sleeping
less and working more than in recent decades which, incidentally, means our work
isn’t nearly as good as it could be. Tired brains, which science tells us
inevitably result from working without reprieve for longer and longer, are less
creative and inventive, and more mistake-prone. The Harvard Business Review
notes that recent studies have found downtime helps us reboot, so we can
actually put our work goals in perspective. As the researchers explain, “when
you work on a task continuously, it’s easy to lose focus and get lost in the
weeds. In contrast, following a brief intermission, picking up where you left
off forces you to take a few seconds to think globally about what you’re
ultimately trying to achieve.”
Study after study shows that interrupting the work day for
brief intervals of “me time,” taking vacations and getting a full night’s sleep
are all key to maximizing productivity. For instance, air traffic controllers'
work schedules often lead to chronic fatigue, making them less alert and
endangering the safety of the national air traffic system, according to a study
the government.
Peonage under capitalism is all part of the ruling class plan
for America's “greatness”. The oligarchs and plutocrats don’t care about
people, just profits. Their objectives arr productivity and returns rather than
quality of life.
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