CHAPTER 6
The nine-to-five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. You give your life away to a function that doesn’t interest you. This situation so repelled me that I was driven to drink, starvation, and mad females, simply as an alternative.
—CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Consider the headline for a full-page story in the New York Times on July 31, 1910, more than one hundred years ago: HOW LONG SHOULD A MAN’S VACATION BE? PRESIDENT TAFT SAYS EVERY ONE SHOULD HAVE THREE MONTHS. We’re not making this up. Three months! President Taft! A conservative Republican president best known for his appetite.1
“Two to three months vacation,” Taft was quoted as saying, “are necessary in order to enable one to continue his work the next year with that energy and effectiveness which it ought to have.” He suggested that men and women alike should have “a change of air where they can expand their lungs and get exercise in the open.”
The article contained a subhead: WHAT BIG EMPLOYERS OF LABOR AND MEN OF AFFAIRS THINK ON THE SUBJECT. Leading industrialists and bankers of the day were asked their opinions regarding Taft’s suggestion. Some actually thought it was a good idea. Not surprisingly, others thought it was crazy, but conceded that a month off wouldn’t be a bad idea.
That was a century ago, when our economy was one tenth as productive as it is today. But woe awaits any modern American politician who advocates a month off each year (as in Europe), much less three. At least, that’s what politicians think. Polls actually show fairly strong support for a paid vacation law in the United States—though most people think two to three weeks would be about right. But in our view, if our economy were really to serve the greatest good, a month off for everyone would be a no-brainer.
Why? Once we get past the basics—food, shelter, clothing, adequate health, and a sense of security and trust—what Abraham Maslow refers to as higher-level needs, or metaneeds, begin to assert themselves. Subsequent happiness increasingly depends on our ability to satisfy those needs. For Maslow, metaneeds include such nonmaterial needs as “belongingness,” “esteem,” and “self-actualization.” Other needs researchers, including Manfred Max-Neef, challenge Maslow’s view that needs assert themselves in a hierarchy of potency. But most happiness scholars agree that once basic security has been guaranteed, life satisfaction is derived primarily from the following, each related to the nine domains of happiness identified in chapter 2.
1. Social connection, including family and friends.
2. Value in the eyes of others, coming especially from productive contribution to the community.
3. Freedom to choose one’s activities as much as possible.
4. Access to nature and beauty; what Maslow refers to as aesthetic needs.
5. Access to art and culture and a reasonable degree of “novelty.”
6. Tolerance and appreciation of other cultures and lifeways.
7. The opportunity for creative expression: following one’s “bliss.”
8. Competence to care for oneself.
9. The opportunity to participate actively in the governance of society.
There is one common denominator for each of these contributors to happy lives.
Got Time?
A typical day for many Americans (especially those with children) now consists of rising earlier than a generation ago; rushing through or skipping breakfast; checking to see if any emergency e-mails or texts arrived during the night; urging the kids to get dressed for school or child care; dropping them off; commuting half an hour in heavy traffic to the workplace; dealing with the myriad extra demands of new “laborsaving” technology (e-mails, voice messages, texts); meeting ever-more-demanding deadlines with fewer staff; catching a twenty-five-minute lunch at one’s desk while shopping online; mainlining coffee to keep from dozing in the afternoon; working later than expected, then fighting the still-snarled evening commute; picking little Jimmy up after six at day care (and paying the fine); popping dinner into the microwave while checking the BlackBerry; wolfing dinner down; fixing a plugged toilet; slumping in front of the television until it’s time to put the kids to bed; dealing with an emergency phone call from a co-worker; checking last minute e-mails from work; and finally, stumbling into bed for six and a half hours fitful sleep.
Okay, you can breathe now. For many of us, it’s like this five days a week, fifty weeks a year. At a minimum.
Aren’t you exhausted just from thinking about it? No wonder Americans are 20 percent happier on weekends than on workdays! It’s no wonder, either, that they’ve been reporting increasing levels of stress in recent years and that a quarter of them report feeling constantly rushed and another half often feel rushed, while barely a quarter report having time for all the things they want or need to do.
Life wasn’t supposed to be this way.
John started the Take Back Your Time organization (www.timeday.org) because he still remembers a sociology class he took way back in the fall of 1968. Among the many social problems facing our country that year—the bloodiest of the Vietnam War, when American students were shutting down universities, when poor urban blacks were rioting, when both Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated—was a surprising fear for the future.
A U.S. Senate subcommittee had predicted in 1965 that as a result of increasing labor productivity from automation and “cybernation”—the computer revolution we’re all enveloped in today—Americans would be working only about twenty hours a week by the year 2000, while taking seven weeks or more of vacation a year. Even in the 1950s, newsreels showed the wonders of the laborsaving future: lawnmowers that figured out how to cut the grass so no one had to push them; miracle homes full of push-button appliances that saved Mom the inconvenience of baking a cake or even setting the table.2
We would, John’s sociology professor explained, have more “leisure time on our hands than we’d know what to do with.” John confesses that even then, it was a problem he thought he could deal with, a problem to look forward to. The “problem” gave birth to widespread efforts to help Americans figure out useful and enjoyable ways of using their leisure time besides watching television.
Overworked Americans
But “too much leisure time” turned out to be the problem that wasn’t. By 1991, the sociologist Juliet Schor was arguing that the average American worker was putting in 163 hours more on the job per year than in 1973.3 And since far more families had two parents working, the increase in working hours per family was much higher—500 to 700 hours more per year than in the 1970s.
Not everyone agreed with Schor’s claims. Two prominent researchers, John Robinson and Geoffrey Godbey, using time diaries instead of Labor Department data, argued that Americans actually did have somewhat more leisure time than before, time they spent in front of the tube. But Godbey and Robinson agreed that Americans “felt” more pressed for time than before.4
Both Schor and Robinson/Godbey present strong evidence for their conflicting findings, and it’s not necessary to decide who is most convincing. Some of the debate involves what we choose to call leisure and what activities we categorize as work. No one disputes that time spent preparing and consuming meals has been reduced, for example. If we define such activity as work, leisure time appears to grow. But in many families, cooking and eating together were times for socializing and strengthening bonds, and at the same time improving life satisfaction, a form of leisure in a way.
It should also be noted that increases in labor productivity are not “energy-free” advances for the workers whose productivity increases. In fact, the workers are required to get much more done and ever more quickly. Almost no studies have been conducted in this area, but we suspect they would find that working hours today are more mentally draining than in the past, while the hypercompetition of today’s workplace makes them even more stressful.
Productivity for Whom?
Productivity, a hugely important term for economists, is itself a nebulous expression. Ironically, higher productivity now means that consumers perform a variety of pro bono tasks that companies once had to pay someone to take care of. We pump our own gas, make our own travel reservations, and use automated checkout lines at the grocery store. Productivity is said to have increased because the companies don’t have to pay anyone to help us out anymore. Output per dollar spent by the companies goes up—that’s what is defined as productivity by most economists. Automation can be a time saver—ATMs certainly are—but that’s not necessarily the norm.
Often, we do the corporations’ work for free, adding our free time to their bottom line. The total time spent doing the work doesn’t really decline. Take automated operators, for example. For many of us, they are a time sink. Got a problem with your billing statement? Call the number on the statement. You’re likely to go through something like this (forgive some exaggeration here to make the point):
First you hear irritating music. Then a recorded operator says: Thank you for calling Consolidated Megacorporation, where we care only about you. Yeah, sure, you think … For English, press 1.
You press 1. The operator continues: Please enter your account number. If you wish to thank Consolidated Megacorporation for our awesome personalized service, press 1 … Press 2 … Press 3 … Press 6 … etc. Your fingers are tapping on the table … If you have a question about your billing statement, press 9.
Relieved, you press 9. The operator returns: Enter the last four digits of your social security number … Enter the last four digits of your maternal great-grandmother’s social security number.
Now, you’re getting a bit frustrated.
You press hard on 0 several times. The operator scolds you: You have pressed an incorrect key. To speak to one of our customer service representative, press 1.
You pump your fist—“Yes!”—and press 1. All of our representatives are serving other customers. Your call will be answered in approximately fifty-seven minutes. Do not hang up or you will lose your place in line.
Sound familiar? Such demands on consumers’ free time outside the workplace may mean it is insufficient for working hours to simply remain relatively constant; in light of these demands and the greater toll of speed-up on the energy of the workers, working hours need to be reduced simply to end the upsurge in workplace stress.
The American Way?
Why have American working hours been so stable in the past half century and even risen for many workers? For one hundred years, from the Civil War onward, hours had been falling, thanks in no small part to the demands of workers. As long ago as May 1, 1886, half a million of them filled the streets of America’s major cities, demanding an eight-hour workday.5
On January 11, 1912, thousands of poor women speaking a babble of twenty-five immigrant languages left the textile mills of Lawrence, Massachusetts, to march in its icy streets, demanding an increase in pay of two cents an hour (from sixteen to eighteen cents) and a decrease in work hours of two per week (from fifty-six to fifty-four). Legend has it they carried banners reading: WE WANT BREAD AND ROSES TOO!
Bread (higher wages) and roses (shorter hours—time to smell the roses!) were the twin demands of the labor movement until after World War II, when the roses were left to wilt. The historian Benjamin Hunnicutt of the University of Iowa has shown clearly how important securing more leisure time was to the unions, and how labor leaders of the era made the case that shorter hours were needed so that workers could have the opportunity for cultural experiences, greater education, and the life of the mind.
By the 1920s, led by Jewish garment workers who wanted their Sabbath off too, unions had successfully won the two-day weekend. By the early 1930s, they were pushing for a thirty-hour official workweek as a job-sharing program to reduce unemployment during the Great Depression. They almost got it. On April 4, 1933, the U.S. Senate passed the Black-Connery Bill, establishing the thirty-hour week. But under pressure from the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), President Franklin Roosevelt, an early supporter of the bill, got cold feet, and the bill was never approved by the House. In 1938, Americans got a forty-hour workweek instead, as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act.
While the National Association of Manufacturers opposed shorter hours in practice, it took credit for them in propaganda. A 1937 photo by the famous Dorothea Lange shows a giant NAM-sponsored billboard on a hardware store in California. The headline on the billboard reads: WORLD’S SHORTEST WORKING HOURS: THERE’S NO WAY LIKE THE AMERICAN WAY!
Yet even without a law, many businesses adopted thirty-hour weeks during the Depression. The Kellogg’s cereal company was the most prominent, and its experiment was viewed by management and workers alike as a huge success, until benefit packages after World War II made it cheaper to hire fewer workers and require longer hours of them.6
After the war, interest in shorter work time waned in the United States, even as a buffer against unemployment. Since federal jobs programs helped lessen the impact of the Great Depression, and massive military spending during World War II finally ended it, the ideas advanced by the British economist John Maynard Keynes—countering recessions and unemployment by deficit spending on jobs programs—generally replaced calls for sharing work during economic slowdowns (though Keynes himself, before he died in 1946, had become a staunch advocate of shorter work time). The ascendant idea was to create jobs by promoting economic growth, which would eventually produce new tax revenues and bring down the deficits.
There were, however, momentary exceptions when political leaders once again raised the possibility of shorter working hours. In 1956, Vice President Richard Nixon suggested that the time would come—and it was “not too far distant”—when Americans would be working only four days a week and “family life will be even more fully enjoyed by every American.”7
During a recession in 1958, the AFL-CIO passed a resolution calling again for job creation through shorter working hours: “The time has come for wide-scale reduction in work hours so that more people may be employed … We call upon Congress to take as rapidly as possible the steps needed to amend the Fair Labor Standards Act to provide for a 7-hour day and a 35-hour week … The AFL-CIO also urges its affiliated unions to press in collective bargaining for reduction in hours of work with no reduction in take-home pay.”8
Guns Instead of Hammocks
Nonetheless, not all labor leaders were cheering. Leon Keyserling, a United Auto Workers consultant and former economic adviser to President Truman, was a strong opponent of shorter workweeks.
“Instead,” writes William McGaughey, a coauthor with the late senator Eugene McCarthy of the book Nonfinancial Economics: The Case for Shorter Hours of Work, Keyserling “preferred increased military spending and production to meet the dual needs of a flourishing global economy and containing Soviet expansion.” McGaughey’s explanation of the connection between military spending and longer working hours is worth quoting at length.
A National Security Council memorandum, NSC-68, written by State Department analyst Paul Nitze with Keyserling’s help, argued that the United States could best achieve economic growth through an arms build-up to counter the Soviets. Preparations for war would produce a “growth dividend” so that the weapons program, he argued, would practically pay for itself …
When the AFL-CIO Executive Committee announced in 1962 that a 35-hour workweek with no cut in pay would be its top priority in the 1963 bargaining sessions, representatives of the Kennedy administration announced their opposition …
John Kennedy himself had said during the 1960 campaign: “In the face of the Communist challenge, a challenge of economic as well as military strength, we must meet today’s problem of unemployment with greater production rather than by sharing the work.”9
Besides the loss of enthusiasm for further shortening of hours, the postwar era, encouraged by the incessant messages of a new medium, commercial television, ushered in what came to be known as the consumer society. Expectations, for larger homes, cars, and shiny products, soared. Easier credit brought a cornucopia of stuff within easy reach of the middle class. At first, it seemed that Americans could have their bread, and roses too.
But by the mid-1970s, and especially after 1980, median wages weren’t keeping pace with increases in America’s capacity to produce. (We touched on this trend in the previous chapter, and explain it in greater detail in chapters 7 and 8.) Flattening incomes didn’t derail the consumption train, however. Americans continued to buy more, in part by going deeper into debt, by having more members of the family enter the workforce, and by working more overtime. Juliet Schor refers to this phenomenon as the work-spend cycle.10
Indeed, debt made overtime hours, with their time-and-a-half-pay premium, a prize instead of a burden. Short on cash, many workers tried to grab all the overtime they could. In a twist of fate, a penalty that was supposed to keep working hours from expanding actually encouraged their expansion. By the boom times of the late 1990s, Americans were actually working more than the notoriously workaholic Japanese.
What Did the Other Guys Do?
The Europeans took a different path after the late 1960s. At that time, the average western European was still working a bit longer than his or her American counterpart. The Netherlands, for example, didn’t end Saturday work until 1968. European technologies weren’t as sophisticated. Some countries hadn’t completely recovered from World War II damage. European hourly productivity lagged far behind that of Americans. The average western European workers produced only about two thirds as much in an hour of work. Consequently, they consumed far less as well; also about two thirds as much.
Fast-forward to 2005. During the intervening years, western European productivity per hour nearly caught up with America’s. The hourly productivity of certain European countries even surpassed that of the United States in some years. And yet, despite prominent exceptions such as Norway and Luxembourg, western European per capita GDP, on average, is still only about two thirds as high as America’s. So what gives? How is it that the Europeans caught up to Americans in hourly productivity but still lag so far behind in actual production and consumption? What in the world are they doing wrong?
Actually, we would argue that they’ve done something very right. Europeans, prodded by strong and active labor movements and social-democratic political parties, have taken a large chunk of their productivity gains in the form of more leisure time instead of putting all their apples into the barrel of increased GDP. They now work only 80 to 85 percent as many annual hours as Americans, and when you consider that fewer of them work and they retire earlier, the difference is even greater.
The nose-to-the-grindstone Brits average two hundred hours less paid labor each year than Americans do, while for the slacker Norwegians and Dutch the difference is twice as great. They put in ten to twelve full weeks less than Americans do each year. They’ve accepted their smaller houses and cars. In return, they’ve gotten six-week vacations, shorter workweeks, early retirements, and a host of other time-related benefits.
More Taxes, Anyone?
How did Europe turn out so differently? The Nobel laureate Edward Prescott of Arizona State University, a conservative, says taxes are almost the sole reason for the differences in hours worked. Those dumb Europeans, he suggests, have taxed themselves so much they discourage extra work—their taxes are a disincentive to long hours.11 Prescott gives speeches in Europe, during which he tells the Europeans they should cut taxes so they can work more. Some German industrialists, who’d like to squeeze their workers as much as their American counterparts do, pay Prescott to preach his gospel. But most ordinary Germans laugh at this; they actually enjoy their free time. They like doing different things, not just the job they were trained for. It adds novelty to life and reduces boredom. And if not, they still get paid to visit the spas during their generous breaks.
The European disdain for attitudes like Prescott’s was made plain to John when he participated in the Economist magazine’s online debate in December 2009. The resolution: This House believes that Europeans would be better off with fewer holidays and higher incomes. John’s opponent, the prominent Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon, took Prescott’s position: Those long European holidays were depriving them of precious cash.
John opposed the motion, and so did the vast majority of readers who left comments on the site (www.economist.com/debate/overview/160). Most of the Europeans and at least half the Americans writing in were derisive of Gordon’s position: Give up my holidays for a few extra euros? Are you nuts, man? John takes pride in having won the debate 79 to 21 percent, but he’s just fooling himself. He could have written nonsense in Martian and won. People like vacations. They like time off.
So why did Europeans get this right while Americans didn’t? No doubt Prescott is correct that taxes play a role. High burdens at the top mean long work hours don’t bring the same monetary rewards they do in the States. But the more important reasons have to do with specific policies mandating time off or ensuring workers a choice between time and money.
The Netherlands Takes the Lead
A few years ago, John met with a University of Amsterdam professor who recounted a conversation with the manager of the Dutch division of an American company. The manager had come to the Netherlands from the United States two years earlier.
PROFESSOR: Do you notice a difference between the approach to work time and free time here compared to the United States?
MANAGER: Yes, it dawned on me my second week on the job. It was a Friday evening, eight o’clock, and we had an important shipment to get out on Monday. I called my assistant at home and told her to call some of the workers to get some things done on the weekend in preparation for the shipment.
PROFESSOR: And what did she say?
MANAGER: She said, “Excuse me, sir, but I don’t work on weekends, and I don’t expect to be called at home about work when I’m not working.”
PROFESSOR: And what did you say?
MANAGER: I said, “Well, excuse me, but I’m the new manager here, and we’re a company that competes in the global economy, and we have an important shipment to get out, and we appreciate employees who are team players.” Then she said, “OK, I can do what you ask of me, but I have to remind you of a couple of things. First, under Dutch law you have to pay me double time for unscheduled, overtime work performed on the weekend. Now I could use the money and have no other big plans. But if I call these people, they’ll just get mad at me for interrupting their family time, their sports, whatever it is. Don’t worry, we’ll come in Monday, work hard, and get the job done.”
PROFESSOR: So what was your response?
MANAGER: I said, “Oh, forget it, then!” And I hung up the phone in frustration and stewed all weekend.
PROFESSOR: And then what happened?
MANAGER: They came in Monday and got the job done. They work very hard when they’re working, so everything was fine. And that’s how it’s been ever since. I’ve actually gotten to like it that way because now even I have a life.
Less work, more life. It’s a trade-off that many American workers might appreciate.
The Netherlands today, along with Norway and Germany, has the shortest working hours in the world. The average Dutch worker puts in less than 1,400 hours a year, compared with nearly 1,800 for Americans.12 And yet the Dutch economy has been very productive. Unemployment in recent years has been much lower than in the United States, while the Netherlands boasts a positive trade balance and strong personal savings. Gallup ranks the Dutch fifth in the world in life satisfaction (2010), behind only the Nordic countries (excepting Iceland), and well ahead of Americans.
Dutch emphasis on free time dates to at least 1982, when Dutch employers and unions agreed to a landmark pact called the Wassenaar Agreement. The unions agreed to restrain wage growth to combat inflation in return for reductions in working hours and the expansion of part-time employment. The agreement ended the inflationary pressures of the 1970s, while greatly reducing unemployment. The International Labor Organization called it “a ground breaking agreement, setting the tone for later social pacts in many European countries.”13
Wassenaar led to an economic turnaround that came to be called the Dutch miracle. Unemployment fell from 12 to 5 percent. The number of part-time workers increased sharply. The average workweek was cut by three hours. And the Dutch, while continuing to be the hard workers they’d always been, began to take leisure time just as seriously.
The Working Hours Adjustment Act
Since the Wassenaar Agreement, the Dutch have continued reducing time on the job through work-sharing policies. Ruud Lubbers, the former conservative prime minister of the Netherlands, explains why.
It is true that the Dutch are not trying to maximize gross national product per capita. Rather, we are seeking to attain a high quality of life, a just participatory and sustainable society. While the Dutch economy is very efficient per working hour, the number of working hours per citizen are rather limited. We like it that way. Needless to say there is more room for all those important aspects of our lives that are not part of our jobs, for which we are not paid, and for which there is never enough time.14
Amen!
In 2000, the Dutch parliament passed the Working Hours Adjustment Act, perhaps the most important piece of time-balance legislation ever approved anywhere. The law requires that employers allow workers to cut their hours to part-time. Employers can refuse this only if they can demonstrate that such a reduction would cause serious financial hardship for the firm—something that happens in less than 5 percent of cases.15
Employees keep their jobs, opportunities for promotion, hourly pay (in any case, European law requires that part-time workers be paid the same hourly rate as full-timers doing the same work), health care, and prorated benefits such as sick leave, pensions, and vacation time. Employees are also allowed to increase working hours, though few choose this option. The law means a lot to working parents, who wish to reduce the combined stresses of working and caring for children.
Marius de Geus, a Leiden University professor, used the law to cut the number of his workdays from five a week to three. His salary was cut by 40 percent, and so were many of his benefits. But his health care, like that of all Dutch workers, is a universal entitlement and remained unchanged, except that his own monetary contribution to it was reduced in accord with his lower income. On top of that, his smaller salary put him in a lower bracket in the Netherlands’ steeply progressive income tax system. He estimates that he takes home 70 percent of what he did before for 60 percent of the work. He told John he was delighted with his new situation and thankful for the law that made it possible.
Anmarie Widener, a health researcher and part-time instructor at Georgetown University, bubbles with enthusiasm as she discusses the Dutch devotion to time balance she witnessed while earning her Ph.D. at Leiden University. Her dissertation compares life satisfaction among Dutch and American parents.16 Not surprisingly, she says, “My polling showed that in almost every area of life, Dutch parents are substantially more satisfied than their American counterparts.”
And so are their children. A 2007 UNICEF study ranked children’s welfare in the Netherlands as the highest in the world.17 The United States was twentieth of twenty-one wealthy countries studied. Talking over dinner at her suburban home in McLean, Virginia, Widener says that she and her husband thought hard about staying in Leiden to raise their two children. They came back to the United States only to be closer to other family members.
On the other hand, Annette van der Feltz, who was born in Holland but now lives in New Jersey, says she remains in the United States because she likes the climate, the less formal culture, and the open space. Her Swedish husband has a good managerial job here, with benefits, so she can stay home as a full-time mom.
However, I do some freelance work on the side, just to stay sane. If we were in Holland, I would work three days a week and my husband would work four days a week (at least all of my friends do). The days off are accepted and respected by co-workers. We would take vacations to other European countries twice a year. It sounds so ideal and we would not mind moving back, but we are very happy here (perhaps because we already have the European work ethic and refuse to work ourselves to death).
But the U.S. work ethic should change. I worked for an airline—a ground staff position which required only a high school degree. I loved the job but had to quit because of the work-life balance; I was “punished” for taking time off to be with my son in the ER. I worked every single weekend and holiday for two years straight—no overtime or weekend compensation. I had three vacation days the first year, which were assigned to me. Meanwhile, my counterparts in the Netherlands scratched their heads and wondered how this was possible and why we accepted this.18
The Netherlands provides a clear example that you can have a thriving economy while working reasonable hours. One recent study, the Legatum Prosperity Index, ranked the Netherlands second in the world in “optimism about job availability” (the United States was eighty-sixth) and third in “satisfaction with standard of living” (America ranked twenty-eighth).19
Whose Freedom?
The Working Hours Adjustment Act is very popular (and Germany now has a similar law) and has led the Netherlands to the world’s highest percentage of part-time workers. (With benefits and security, part-time work is not stigmatized as second-class work, as it is in the United States.) On the other hand, the Dutch have the lowest percentage of people in Europe who overwork; less than 2 percent of them toil more than forty-eight hours a week, compared to more than 20 percent of Americans and 28 percent of Japanese.20
The act isn’t perfect. The gender gap is still strong in the Netherlands, and Dutch feminists point out that by far the majority of part-time workers are female. And of course, some employers complain that the law creates scheduling stresses and other problems for their companies. But the law (passed with broad multiparty support) is very popular, and the Dutch economy is one of the most productive and competitive in the world.
In the United States’ present ideological climate, such a law would be dead-on-arrival in Congress, though there is some hope of a “Right to Request” law like that in the United Kingdom, which guarantees that workers who ask to have their hours reduced cannot be fired for asking. But a policy like the one in the Netherlands would be seen by practically every legislator as an unwarranted restriction of the free market and the freedom of business owners.
A restriction it might be, but employers are far fewer in number than employees. So consider “the greatest good for the greatest number over the longest run.” For hourly and salaried workers, who constitute some 90 percent of the U.S. workforce (the rest are business owners or self-employed), such an act offers an enormous expansion of real freedom to choose.
Think of what it would mean to you to be able to decide your own hours of work and shorten those hours if you wanted to, without losing your job, promotion opportunities, health care, and other benefits. Hundreds of thousands of Americans feel forced to stay in jobs they hate so as not to lose their employer-provided health care or other benefits. Many would accept less money in trade for more time, but they do not have the opportunity to make that choice.
In practical terms, there could scarcely be a law that offers more freedom to shape one’s life according to personal ideas of happiness, or to determine one’s own quality of life, than the Netherlands’ Working Hours Adjustment Act. It offers real choice regarding what amounts to more than half the waking hours of average workers—time spent on the job or commuting, the two activities ranked lowest in studies of daily life satisfaction (see chapter 2).
Moreover, if it existed in the United States, such a law would offer that choice to 90 percent of the population, while restricting the freedom of only 10 percent (many of whom might actually find that the law, by making employees happier and healthier, actually boosts their own bottom line as well).
And finally, the law matters for “the longest run.” It improves the prospects of each worker for having a longer run—that is, longer life expectancy. But more important, it leads the Dutch to simplify their lives in ways that are essential for long-term environmental quality. (In chapter 9 we’ll show how precarious our environmental future actually is, and how American economic policies actually exacerbate impact on the planet.)
Trading Productivity for Time
Working fewer hours also produces tangible environmental benefits.
• Less need for convenience products. Fast food, for example, is in part a response to an increasingly pressured way of life. Highly packaged and processed foods and other products, including throwaway products, also appeal to those who feel time is at a premium.
• More time to reuse and recycle. Separating wastes into paper, plastics, metals, compost, or trash takes time. People often skip this activity if they are feeling rushed or overwhelmed.
• Time to make other behavioral choices, such as drying one’s clothes on a clothesline rather than in a dryer. When pressed for time, “convenience” tends to take priority.
• Time to choose slower and more energy-friendly forms of transport, including walking, cycling, or public transit, rather than driving, and trains rather than planes.21
Moreover, reductions in work time translate into reductions in energy use, carbon output, and air pollution (as seen in the 2008 recession). A study conducted by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a prominent Washington, D.C., think tank, concluded that if Americans were to reduce their working hours to European levels, they would almost automatically reduce their energy/carbon impacts by 20–30 percent.22 Another, conducted by the Swedish researcher Jörgen Larsson at the University of Gothenburg, found that a 1 percent decrease in working hours results in a 0.89 percent drop in energy use and CO2 output. Longer hours increased those impacts by a similar percentage.23
The Great Vacation Squeeze
Europeans have a multiplicity of ways to reduce work time, including such policies as mandated paid sick days and paid family leave, Kurzarbeit, offerings of sabbaticals to workers outside academia, phased retirement plans, and other ideas. But perhaps the single benefit that most improves their time balance is the fact that, by law, every European worker gets at least four weeks of paid vacation time a year. You can’t join the European Union without guaranteeing this benefit to your workers, and even European nations that haven’t joined the EU, like Switzerland and Norway, still mandate four weeks or more of paid time off.
In many European countries, the norm is more like five or six weeks, and it’s not uncommon for workers in these countries to get two months off every year. France’s famous thirty-five-hour workweek doesn’t fix that limit for each week of work; what it requires is that a worker’s average annual hours cannot exceed thirty-five per week. If they work longer, as John’s French cousin, Bertrand Jacquier, does, they cut their overall average to thirty-five hours by taking more vacation time—Bertrand gets ten and a half weeks, all paid.
Back to reality. As John was writing this, he received a call from a woman named Olga who works in a furniture store. She told him that her company had just eliminated paid vacations for employees. “I couldn’t believe they could do this, so I went to see what the law said. I found out there is no law. People here in USA have no rights to vacation at all. I came here from Ukraine, and there everyone gets two days paid vacation per month. People would be in the streets if they didn’t get that, but here people don’t even realize what they don’t get. They just take it; they don’t complain. Now I wonder why I ever came to America. It’s just bullshit, that’s all it is.”24
The United States is one of only a handful of countries (the others are Guyana, Suriname, Nepal, and that paragon of human rights, Myanmar) that mandate no vacation time at all for workers.25 As a consequence, paid vacation time in the United States has actually been declining in recent years. And since real wages have stagnated, many Americans can’t afford to take unpaid time off.
Remember the two-week family vacation—the road trip with the kids fighting in the backseat until they got to Disneyland or a national park? The stuff memories were made of. Gone, the way of the dinosaurs! Only 14 percent of Americans took an actual two-week vacation in 2007. The median annual paid vacation time for Americans has now dropped to little more than one week, according to recent polls.
Twenty-nine percent of Americans got no paid vacation time at all in 2007, and that number has grown, especially during the current economic downturn. In Washington State, for example, 73 percent of businesses offered paid vacations in 2007; by 2008, that number had dropped to 63 percent, and it is still falling. Vacation time is becoming increasingly a privilege of the elite. Low-income workers are least likely to receive any paid time off.26
House Resolution 2564, the Paid Vacation Act of 2009 (sponsored in Congress by Democratic representative Alan Grayson of Florida, would mandate at least some paid vacation time for American workers. It’s a very modest proposal: one week for workers in companies with over fifty employees; two weeks in companies with more than a hundred employees. It would be laughably inadequate almost anywhere else in the world, but in the United States, conservative bloggers excoriated it as wildly radical, threatening the end of Western civilization as we know it.
Yet modest as it is, the law would be an important first step toward “the greatest good for the greatest number over the longest run.” To begin with, vacation time is essential for good health. Arnold Pallay, a cherubic and loquacious family physician from New Jersey, has been an active supporter of Grayson’s bill. He always tells his patients just how important vacations are: “They have to get away. They come in and they’re stressed out and they’re bouncing off the walls and they need help, and I tell them that before they take a pill or get therapy they need to take a vacation. Many of them haven’t had one in six years or more. I tell them, ‘Take two weeks off and call me in the morning.’ Usually it works.”27
But Pallay’s wife, Robin, says many of his poorer patients can’t get any time off. “They have no paid vacation time, and they are working two or three jobs. They don’t even have weekends off.”28
Centennial Freedom
The Grayson Bill is history. Grayson was badly defeated in the 2010 election. One hundred years ago, President Taft would have signed a far more ambitious bill into law—though Congress never gave him one. But today’s leaders are not yet enlightened (or gutsy) enough to advocate what most American corporate leaders thought reasonable then, much less what a conservative president championed. We have gone steadily backward.
Taft was actually a latecomer to the issue. It was John Muir, the prime advocate of our National Park System, who first advocated mandated vacation time for workers. As recounted in Donald Worster’s biography of Muir, A Passion for Nature, he did so in 1876, when he called for “a law of rest” that would provide “Centennial Freedom” for all Americans, regardless of race, gender, or station in life.
“Compulsory education may be good,” Muir wrote, but “compulsory recreation may be better.” “We work too much and rest too little,” he declared. “You cannot leave your business? Yes, but you will leave it. Killed by overwork, you will end up in the hearse of the jolly undertaker.” Muir’s solution was simple: “Set free the many urban slaves who are duty bound,” Muir concluded. “Give every person enough leisure to go into nature.”29
“Climb the mountains and get their good tidings,” Muir wrote of his favorite haunt, Yosemite. “Nature’s peace will flow into you and your cares will drop off like autumn leaves.” He would be appalled if he knew that the average visitor to Yosemite now spends less than five hours there. Those who spend more are as likely to be European as American. Visitors dash through magnificent Yosemite Valley, oohing and aahing for a moment and snapping quick photos of its granite cliffs and shining waterfalls while trying to talk on their cell phones at the same time.
Time’s Future
Driven by the insatiable demands of an economy that understands neither happiness nor limits, time in America grows increasingly scarce, leaving simple pleasures lost in the rush. By contrast, a friend of John’s (a very conservative Republican legislator, actually) told him of a summer trip her family took to visit relatives in Norway. “Everybody left work at five. They had long dinners, time with family, walks in the woods, bike rides. And the best part of it all,” she recounted with a gleam in her eye, “is that everybody wasn’t trying to get filthy rich!”
Some say that if Americans had more time, they’d simply spend it watching even more television. And perhaps they would, but probably only at first. For it’s in countries where people work the longest (Japan, South Korea, the United States) that they spend the most time watching the tube. In short-work countries like the Netherlands and Norway, people have enough energy after work to make plans with friends and engage in more active and satisfying leisure. Think about it: When do you feel most like flopping on the couch and flipping between channels, when you’re exhausted or when you feel refreshed?
Time for life may be the greatest difference between the social-democratic, softer capitalisms of Europe and the turbocharged market fundamentalist laissez-faire American model. Surely any economy based on the “greatest good” would take seriously the need for leisure, which the philosopher Josef Pieper called the basis of culture.
But wouldn’t that make us less competitive? Jody Heymann and Alison Earle don’t think so. In Raising the Global Floor, they use data from the World Economic Forum to demonstrate clearly that countries with generous policies affecting work time are every bit as competitive as the United States and other workaholic nations, and do not have higher average rates of unemployment.30
Moreover, Leslie Perlow and Jessica Porter of the Harvard Business School have shown that “Making Time Off Predictable and Required” results in better economic performance. They conducted a study wherein a Boston company provided two control groups. The first worked long hours (fifty or more a week), skipped part of their vacations, and were constantly on call when not at work. The second worked a shorter forty-hour week, took their full vacations, and left their BlackBerries at the office.
At the end of their study, Perlow and Porter found that “people on time-off teams reported higher job satisfaction, greater likelihood that they could imagine a long-term career with the firm and higher satisfaction with work/life balance.” No surprise there. But the time-off control group also reported increased learning and development, better communication with their teams—when they could not reach everyone all the time, they learned to communicate more effectively face-to-face—and, most surprising of all, they actually produced more total output than their workaholic colleagues.31
The Vancouver-based activist Conrad Schmidt uses humor to warn his fellow Canadians not to fall into the American trap of work without end. He started the Work Less Party, which competes in British Columbian elections under the slogan WORKERS OF THE WORLD, RELAX! They haven’t won any elections yet but get lots of press attention for their annual “rat race” through the business district and other antics. Humor can help us see just how destructive of life our time pressure can be. Cecile Andrews, an equally fun-loving American leader of the voluntary simplicity movement, has suggested that America doesn’t need the Tea Party, or even the liberal Coffee Party. It needs a Decaf Party, so we all can slow down the pace of life.
There are those who would suggest that work is what the economy is for. They believe the long-working-hours culture in the United States makes Americans stronger and more competitive. We believe it has little, if any, impact on competitiveness, while having a huge impact on Americans’ health, social connections, and environmental stewardship. It is clear that, as in many other areas of the economy, the United States can learn from the experience of other countries, particularly those such as the Netherlands that pay great attention to time balance. Americans can begin now to do something about this, and they should, because there’s no present like the time.