Doing Nothing, Reagan Revolution Style

These facts and figures have been floating around out there for a while, if you read the right blogs and the right back-page news articles. But I found it nice and succinctly laid out here in Tom Lutz’s Doing Nothing (FSG, 2006), in the chapter on the 1950s and The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit:

What the academic play theorists and many others assumed was that the reduction of work hours would continue, that the long-held, often-argued-for dream of the three- or four-hour wage-earning workday (if not [Diane] di Prima’s* three- or four-hour workweek) would become a reality. In fact, however, the opposite, the slow creeping up of weekly work hours, had already begun. The suburban middle-level managers who stayed longer at work, and often brought work home with them, may have been the first to feel it, but the century-long reduction in the length of the workweek had stalled and gone in reverse.

What Lutz lays out for us is that, after World War II, the century-long decline in wage-earning work hours reversed, and in the last half of the twentieth century, the number of job hours increased steadily with an abrupt rise in the 1970s and 1980s.

…the average employed person worked 305 more hours per year in 1987 than in 1969. By the late 1980s one-eighth of the labor force averaged fifty hours a week, and another eighth averaged sixty. In addition, paid leave was shrinking. By the end of the 1980s the average worker in America had three and a half fewer paid days off than a decade before, even as workers in many European countries had moved from a standard four to five weeks of paid vacation a year.

Quoting Juliet B. Schor’s The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (1992), Lutz explains that this increase in work hours was caused in part by a steady decline in hourly wages. To maintain a 1973 standard of living in 1990 required 245 more hours of work (an extra six weeks).

So now, women no longer have to fight to work. Mothers have to work. Fathers have to have second jobs. Morning in America, folks.

Of course, since most Americans are convinced that they’re going to get rich as entrepreneurs, voters have gone along with these changes.

And then there’s our consumer lifestyle to maintain. Most of us, I fear, would rather have TiVo than be free. (I don’t except myself from this condemnation. Though the boogerman that keeps me working somebody else’s hours is health insurance, I do like my electronic toys.)

So here may be a big reason why George W. Bush can’t convince us that our economy is booming even though all his oil-company cronies are making record profits. Somewhere in the backs of our minds there’s this notion that the time is out of joint.