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In 1991, Juliet Schor, an occasional writer for Z Magazine, published The Overworked American.
"One of the great ironies of our present situation," Schor writes, "is that overwork for the majority has been accompanied by the growth of enforced idleness for the minority. The proportion of the labor force who cannot work as many hours as they would like has more than doubled in the last twenty years. Just as surely as our economic system is "underproducing" leisure for some, it is "overproducing" it for others." The total of unemployed or underemployed in 1987 was about 17 percent of the work force.
Schor also tells us, "In the 1910s, [the housewife] was doing about 52 hours a week. Fifty or sixty years later, the figure isn't much different. In the 1960s and 1970s, more surveys were undertaken. A large one in Syracuse, New York, in 1967 and 1968, found that housewives averaged 56 hours per week. And according to my own estimates, from 1973, a married, middle class housewife with three children did an average of 53 hours of domestic work each week." The reason, in large part, is due to escalating standards of household cleanliness (leading to endless purchases of commodities) and huge increases in time spent carpooling and otherwise dealing with car-dominated life.
So, the point is, many people have little time, working god awful hours -- sometimes at two jobs -- while others don't work at all.
Was there an alternative we might have chosen over the past few decades? It turns out that compared to 1948 -- we actually could have chosen the four-hour workday. Or a working year of six months. Or every worker in the United States could now be taking every other year off from work -- with pay and the national per capita product would be the same now as it was then. In other words, had we opted for leisure over output, we could be working half as much now as in 1948 for the same output as we had then.
Instead of less work, today 40 percent of USA workers are working 50 hours a week or more.
Source: Z Magazine, May 1993
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