"An epidemic of overwork among ordinary Americans"?

patiodog wrote:

For this to change, the people at the top of the ladder and/or the vast majority of the people on the ladder have to agree that things should change. As long as there are enough, say, young lawyers willing to step up and work 6 day, 80 hour weeks, big firms are going to keep demanding that young lawyers do so.

Yup. Its like with the debates you used to have around strikes (anyone seen a strike any recent year?).

People like nurses are often the last ones to go on strike, even if their working conditions are so that everyone is overworked, overstressed and underfunded. Because many of them will say, I cant possibly leave my patients, they will go without care, what will happen to them? But as long as there are enough nurses who say that and shy away from action, the care those patients will receive will remain one by overworked, overstressed and underfunded nurses. Which is hardly in their best interest either. But short-term considerations usually trump long-term ones, especially in an individualised society where workers are ever less organised.

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Doubly an issue when you think about the atmosphere of interfirm and interindividual competition that is fostered in the sort of high-rent jobs we're implicitly talking about in this thread. People working to get an edge on their peers for the next promotion, the next bonus, the next big career move aren't too likely to get together and say, "Hey, let's all agree not to work such long hours."

And I certainly don't think that nurses and the like are the last to go on strike. I've seen nurses strike. I've never seen stock brokers go on strike (though the industry is fraught with labor issues, interestingly enough).

Money is certainly a big player, of course. If you get a big salary, whoever pays said salary can reasonably expect you to work your little tuckus off, right? And they should, to a certain extent. It's the inability of both employer and employed to say "enough is enough" that leads to problems.

Side thought: do the white-collar workaholic and the self-sacrificing, long-hours altruist have similar neural wiring?

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patiodog wrote:

Doubly an issue when you think about the atmosphere of interfirm and interindividual competition that is fostered in the sort of high-rent jobs we're implicitly talking about in this thread. People working to get an edge on their peers for the next promotion, the next bonus, the next big career move aren't too likely to get together and say, "Hey, let's all agree not to work such long hours."

And I certainly don't think that nurses and the like are the last to go on strike. I've seen nurses strike. I've never seen stock brokers go on strike (though the industry is fraught with labor issues, interestingly enough).

Money is certainly a big player, of course. If you get a big salary, whoever pays said salary can reasonably expect you to work your little tuckus off, right? And they should, to a certain extent. It's the inability of both employer and employed to say "enough is enough" that leads to problems.

Another completely different aspect of this is the basic change in the labor force and the relationship between employer and employee.

For most of us, you have to get a job and then earn your vacation time before you can actually take any. For the "average" worker (which is what the original article referenced) that means you have to work for 6 months to a year before you have a week or two of vacation time to take.

In an environment where people are changing jobs every 2 or 3 years it means that the average person doesn't have any paid vacation time to take 1/3rd of the time.

I'm in between jobs right now and had 3 weeks vacation built up with my previous employer. I took it as a check (money) instead of time when I cashed out. When I start my next job I'll start with no vacation time on the books so I won't be taking any until next summer at least. (One could argue that not being employed is "time off" but it is unpaid and job searching is at least as stressful as paid employment.)

It would be interesting to see if there is some sort of correlation between time in a job and the aount of time off taken by the employee. Does someone that has been in their job for 20 years take more vacation time than someone who has only been in their job for 2 years?

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Excellent point, fishin.

I'd also be curious to see the other side of that coin: how much vacation time are the self-employed taking? (Not much, in my experience.)

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sozobe wrote:

Linkat wrote:
Honestly, what happened when you left your job? Did they go belly up?

Yep.

Well this is one of those rare cases - they should have had a back up - that is lack of management skills on the part of ownership.

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sozobe wrote:

In terms of becoming a tenured professor, it's do or die, yeah.

Same in Germany, though -- and it's not just professors. I never met a Ph.D student who didn't at least work 50 hours a week. My own workload, which I think was about average for my university, varied between 60 and 80 hours per week on a 19 hour contract. Reasons included genuine interest in the work, some kind of macho, "I can work harder than you" attitude, and the nasty habit of our experimental setup to start running flawlessly around 5pm on Friday afternoons.

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I was the ownership. Laughing

I started the agency because there was a pressing need -- did a ton in my time there, convened a panel to conduct an intensive, several-month search for my replacement, hired the best of the applicants, she wasn't able to do it. <shrug>

It's definitely depressing, but I figure that on the balance it's probably better that my agency existed for a while and accomplished what it did than if it had never existed.

Anyway, all that is really off-track, sorry.

And Thomas, I agree, I mentioned that the tenure stuff was off-track in terms of this discussion (American work habits) too because of the universality of the phenonomenon.

And now I'll try to stay on track. Interesting stuff from fishin', nimh, and patiodog.

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I don't think it's off-track at all. If anything, it's an interesting slice -- moreso because of the apparent universality of the work ethic expected of academic up-and-comers. Traditionally, we think of academic pursuits as having multiple rewards: financial, to be sure, but also intellectual, spiritual, involvement in the advancement of human knowledge, prestige, all that hoo-hah. It's also inherently competitive: your idea catches on, you move ahead.

So, it makes a certain amount of sense to dedicate most of one's life to such a pursuit. To expect that sort of dedication from somebody in some unstimulating, soul-killing job is... I dunno what it is, but I find it a little depressing. Like my cousin's husband who kills himself to get a little extra juice out of his cookie-cutter-home-building business. Sure, he's loaded, he'll be able to retire comfortably at 45 (he probably won't, but he'll be able to, at this rate), but he's also got gout at the age of 36 and is perpetually exhausted and ill-humored. There's no passion there, just compulsive work. And it's entirely of his own choosing.

And I don't think there's anything exceptional about his particular situation, either.

Whatever, not my bag, baby.

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Poor guy.

Yeah, not mine either.

I definitely had the passion when I was working my butt off, and am hoping that when I re-enter the workforce I can find something half as fulfilling.

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sozobe wrote:

Anyway, all that is really off-track, sorry.

I think it's perfectly on track. At the very least, it gave me a clue on a question that occurred to me when I read nimh's initial post: What hours should people work? How many days a year should they take off? Your experience might well be a good starting point.

When you basically employed yourself, you paid the cost of working (wearing your employee hat) and received the benefits of your work (wearing your employer hat). The terms of your `work contract', which you negotiated with yourself, reflected what you thought was the optimal tradeoff between your costs and your benefits. If you're like most self-employed people I know, you worked sixty hour weeks and took maybe a week a year off, most of it on long weekends such as Thanksgiving, taking Friday off when July 4th is on a Thursday, and the like. If there's a big difference between German and American freelancers there, I don't see it.

Now, if these conditions are the optimal tradeoff when people work for themselves, why wouldn't it be the optimal tradeoff when the work contract is between distinct employers and employees? Why wouldn't Americans be the ones who get work contracts right, and why aren't Europeans the ones whom their governments force into needless slackerdom?

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Another aspect of all of this popped into my head just a few minutes ago. "Work" in this context seems to be directed at "income producing" expense of energy (whether the person is actually paid overtime or not).

I wonder how much of that is a shift in how we live?

If we look back say.. 100 years and compare that to know how much labor was done on things at home that we now pay someone else to do for us or pay for a convience to take care of for us? Not many homes heat with coal or wood any more so most of us have never had to split firewood or haul wood or coal into the basement. We have an electric fridge now so we don't have to worry about chasing down blocks of ice and we can buy our groceries every two weeks instead of daily. Most people don't work on their own cars any more (horses are strictly a pleasure pursuit now), most don't do their own home repairs (many don't even mow their own lawns!) and the home garden has become a leisure novelty for a few instead of a standard fixture in the backyard. There are hundreds of other similar things that fall into the same sort of grouping.

We seem to have given up on much of this sort of "work" in favor of "work" that produces (or maintains) income for us to pay someone else to handle all of these things for us.

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What fishin posted above might be a difference to the situation in Europe: most (Germans) work at their home (brother-in-law - with a 300k job - did and does nearly everything in building up his home and entertaining it, alone with his father), most people like to buy food fresh and daily, at least do so twice times per week.

When I look around in my neighbourhood - with three direct neighbours with 500k plus per annum, nearly do themselves what they can do (restrictions only due to age or by two left hands).

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True, the income does take care of all of that. Personally, though, I'd rather have some variety in my work -- do 30 hours of schlep job plus the other stuff that it's becoming more and more common to pay to have done.

That's if it's a schlep job. If it's something I love (and I hope it is, given how much debt I'm incurring in pursuit of the requisite skills and licenses), I'll do more than 30 and give up the honest pleasure of taking care of some of the other things. But if I'm working to live, I'd rather cut firewood than sit behind a desk working to pay the gas company.

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Walter Hinteler wrote:

When I look around in my neighbourhood - with three direct neighbours with 500k plus per annum, nearly do themselves what they can do (restrictions only due to age or by two left hands).

Same in my parents' neighborhood. My parents' three closest neighbors are basically regular employees, one blue-collar, two white. They have typical German work contracts: 35 hours a week, six weeks of paid vacation a year. What do they do with all that leisure time Germany's strong trade unions fought out for them? Why, they work. When we first got to know them, on weekends and in their vacations, they showed up on their slot of land with their relatives and built their houses together. When the houses were finished, they spent their free time building and fine-tuning their Ikea furniture. When that was done, they went working on their relative's building sites.

I really think there's nothing sinister about people working long hours. People want to work that long if it means that something they care about gets done.

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Walter Hinteler wrote:

What fishin posted above might be a difference to the situation in Europe: most (Germans) work at their home (brother-in-law - with a 300k job - did and does nearly everything in building up his home and entertaining it, alone with his father), most people like to buy food fresh and daily, at least do so twice times per week.

When I look around in my neighbourhood - with three direct neighbours with 500k plus per annum, nearly do themselves what they can do (restrictions only due to age or by two left hands).

That is a part of what I was thinking Walter! When I lived over their my next door neighbor was a very nice older gentleman (by the name of Edouard) that was out tending his garden every morning at 5am. He'd go in to work later on in the morning and then come home in the late afternoon and do his chores. He still had a combination wood/gas stove in his kitchen so many evenings he was out in the yard chopping wood to heat his kitchen/house with. On Saturday morning he'd hook up a small trailer to his car and bring back a trailer load of coal bricks for his coal stiove in the basement.

His gardening and evening chore hours are still labor but they probably don't qualify as "work" in the context of the original article.

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Thomas wrote:

I really think there's nothing sinister about people working long hours. People want to work that long if it means that something they care about gets done.

Depends on.

Brother-in-law is heading a software company within one of Europe's biggest insurance companies. Works about 80 - 90 hours per week (no overtime paid), has about three weeks holidays (by contract 6 weeks) .... and the children .... to put it mildly: you notice that they see their father only some hours on Sundays and during the hoildays.

Same with some friends.

On the other hand: I worked about 50/60 hours myself .... and got only 38.5 paid (besides that I should have been in moral conflict, since I was vice-chaiman of our works council, both in the local/regional as well as on state level.

:wink:

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Walter Hinteler wrote:

Thomas wrote:
I really think there's nothing sinister about people working long hours. People want to work that long if it means that something they care about gets done.

Depends on.

Depends on what? Both of your examples seem to confirm what I said. Am I missing something?

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fishin wrote:

Another aspect of all of this popped into my head just a few minutes ago. "Work" in this context seems to be directed at "income producing" expense of energy (whether the person is actually paid overtime or not).

I wonder how much of that is a shift in how we live?

On reflection, I think it actually isn't that much of a shift to begin with. Then as now, there are projects in your life that you care about, and you are working to get them done. For example, suppose you're a lawyer who wants his lawn mowed. One way to do this is to mow your own lawn. Another way is that you pursue somebody else's lawsuit, and somebody else mowes your lawn. It barely matters to you that money changes hands in the latter case but not in the former. The basic deal remains the same: you work so your lawn gets mowed.

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Thomas wrote:

Am I missing something?

No, chose the wrong wording Embarrassed

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Walter Hinteler wrote:

Thomas wrote:
Am I missing something?

No, choose the wrong wording

No problem, and thanks for betraying your work council's principles with your impermissably high work ethic. Wink

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"An epidemic of overwork among ordinary Americans"?

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