WITH LIBERTY AND
LEISURE FOR ALL
is not a good bargain.
We cling to the 40-hour workweek for cultural reasons as well.
We valorize hard work and hate
loafers. A shorter workweek? They
surrendered to that idea in France.
(Or at least they tried to — the
French workweek still pretty much
looks like ours.)
In a 2007 paper, economists
Lonnie Golden and Morris Altman
summarized the myriad reasons
research has shown workers don’t
seek fewer hours: Employers use
longer workdays to screen out less
productive workers, while employees put in more hours to build
up savings in case they’re fired.
They also out-work their colleagues to try to win promotions
or so they look good in the event
of downsizing. And while some
workers might be okay with less
pay for more time off, others want
to keep their income as high as
possible in order to maintain their
spending habits — and to keep up
with the neighbors.
High levels of unemployment
can also make workers even more
committed to long hours, as there
are so many others eager for your
job. Tom Allen said he witnessed
a pattern of burnout at his company. “They would hang in there
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as long as they possibly could,”
he said of his colleagues. “They
would gradually not be able to
hang on and end up getting fired.”
Then they’d be replaced.
In an interview, Golden, a professor at Penn State Abington, lamented that the U.S. government
so closely tracks underemployment
but ignores overemployment.
“National policy ought to make
it safe for people to use a wide
range of reduced-time options,”
Golden said, acknowledging that
“SO LONG AS THERE IS ONE WHO
SEEKS EMPLOYMENT AND
CANNOT FIND IT, THE HOURS OF
LABOR ARE TOO LONG.”
pushing such a policy would be
pretty difficult. “It’s a different
cultural standard. There must be
something about Americans who
think it’s not feasible.”
And yet the idea of shorter
hours is uniquely American.
Most people in the colonies in
the early 1700s had Sundays off
but still worked from sunup to
sundown the other six days of the
week, according to Our Own Time,
a 1989 history of the American
working day by David R. Roediger
and Philip S. Foner.