No. Working hours in the United States have increased substantially over the past 20 years. From the end of the 1960s to the present, Americans have increased the time they spend at work by about 160 hours–or nearly one month-per year. This is equally true for people in glamour jobs and line workers at McDonald’s. And it’s true for women as well as men.
It’s a fallacy that the productivity of American workers has fallen. The level of productivity of the U.S. worker has more than doubled since 1948. In other words, we could now produce our 1948 standard of living in less than half the time it took in that year. That’s largely because of technological change, greater investment and increased skills on the part of the work force.
Their comments were probably made for domestic rather than foreign consumption-possibly to forestall the growing pressure from Japanese laborers to reduce working hours. Japanese employees are asked to work grueling, even inhumane schedules. And right now, the issue of karoshi, death by overwork, is a topic of major concern. As in all industrialized nations, there comes a point when workers start to put a lot of pressure on their employers to reduce working hours. It’s happened in this country, it’s happened in Western Europe, and now, it’s happening in Japan.
Employers have been calling workers lazy for decades. America’s workers have been blamed for the trade deficit and the country’s economic problems. Part of the perception stems from the conservative political rhetoric surrounding government spending and welfare. And, of course, we’ve heard a lot about lazy workers from the automobile industry. It’s interesting that when U.S. politicians said these things there was very little reaction. But now that Japanese politicians say them, suddenly there’s a tremendous furor.
The Japanese do have longer working hours than Americans. The Japanese work something like 225 hours a year more than U.S. workers. But to put it in perspective, it should be noted that U.S. workers put in the second highest number of hours of anybody in the industrialized world. We work about 320 hours more per year than workers in such countries as Germany and France.
One of the things we have to understand about Japanese society is its gender structure, a structure similar to what the United States had in the 1950s. Women do all the domestic labor. Men are in the factories and shops and they’re working long hours, but they don’t do much work when the come home. They don’t take care of children, they don’t do housework, cooking, etc. In the U.S., there are both men and women in the work force and both men and women at home. Japanese workers may work longer in the marketplace, but you have to calculate the total amount of work that people do to figure out how hard people are working and how much leisure time they have. We need to look at things like stress and burnout, which are serious problems among U.S. workers.
Historically, as the number of hours in the workday has fallen, the pace of work has increased. This is why productivity can rise, even when hours are shorter. When Medtronic, Inc., in Minneapolis decided to give its employees 40 hours’ pay for 36 hours of work, it hired no additional personnel but found that output increased. That’s something the Kellogg Co. discovered years ago. When company officials made the switch to a six-hour day back in 1930, they were searching for a strategy to cope with the unemployment of the Depression. To their surprise, they found that workers were more productive, on the order of 3 to 4 percent. In some departments, the pace had picked up even more. The workers were pleased, preferring the quicker pace but shorter hours. What companies are saying today is almost the opposite. Employees are being asked to work more hours for the same pay.
Competitiveness is mainly a function of productivity per hour. If companies are saying you have to work more hours for the same pay, that’s basically saying that wages have to be lower. I think we’ve seen the fallacy in that. Undermining wages is a problem because it also undermines productivity and undermines demand. If we want to really cure our competitiveness problems, we need to look much more at factors like management, health-care costs and the education system. Hours are sufficiently long for enough workers.
People were talking a lot about the four-day workweek in the 1950s and ’60s. But we’re not hearing much about the concept anymore. What’s happened is that economic performance has worsened the position of workers. We’ve reacted to our economic troubles with a theory that says you have to lower wages and work harder. That’s been a foolhardy path that’s undermining our long-term viability.
Where the four-day workweek is becoming a reality, it’s coming under the guise of a longer workday, for example, four 10-hour days. Employers are resisting cuts in working hours. They’re saying we have to work harder, like the Japanese. THE LEISURE LAG
In many countries, employers are obligated to give more holidays than many Americans ever get.
VACATION TIME For employees with one year of service SWEDEN 30 DAYS FRANCE 25 U.K. 22 GERMANY 18 JAPAN 10 U.S. 10 MEXICO 6 LEGAL MINIMUMS EXCEPT FOR U.K. AND U.S. SOURCE: HEWITT ASSOCIATES SOTOODEH–NEWSWEEK
