billbeuttler.com

Sidebar 1: INTERVIEWS

(Conducted and edited by Bill Beuttler)

ROBERT B. REICH

Why? I go into detail in my new book, The Future of Success, but here are the three major reasons:

First, earnings are less predictable than they used to be. So people figure they'd better make hay while the sun shines — work when the work is available. If there's overtime, take it. If there's an extra project, do it. If another customer comes along, put in the extra work the customer needs.

Second, the emerging economy has only two tracks: fast and slow. If you want to be on the fast track, you've got to keep up with the latest technological advances and keep courting clients or customers. You've got to be "on call" 24/7, and be prepared to give it your all. You might prefer a slightly slower track, but it's not available. The only alternative is a very slow track. On it, you're a second-class worker. Your job is less secure than the jobs of people on the fast track. You're the first to be laid off in a downturn. You're passed up for promotion.

Third, inequalities of income and wealth are widening. As a result, if you're in the bottom 20 percent, you've got to work harder than before just to make ends meet. If you're in the top 20 percent, you work harder because the rewards are so much greater than before — and you take a bigger hit if you decide to simplify your life and work less.

Robert B. Reich
Professor of social and economic policy, Brandeis University; U.S. secretary of labor, 1993–1997; cofounder and national editor, The American Prospect; author, The Work of Nations and other books.

JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH

What you must do is correct the major error in talking about this matter. You cannot generalize for the population as a whole. You must make a clear distinction between those who are well off and those who are poor. If you have a sufficient level of income, people will always say you're working too hard. Leisure becomes a good thing. This is true for businessmen, corporation executives, but extends even to college professors. Summer leisure, an occasional sabbatical, is considered very good. In past times I could scarcely walk across the Harvard Yard without being stopped by some friend or other who said, "Look, Ken, aren't you working too hard?"

But if you're poor, if you're in the lower income brackets, your problem is generally that you're not working or not working hard enough. Work becomes a very good thing, a gift, and we have a wealth of social complaint that people who do hard work — as distinct from the leisurely existence of a company executive or even of a salesman — you're not working hard enough. You lack energy. You lack will. You lack strength. You're too easy on yourself. Or, in the case of the very poor, or those who can't find work easily, you're not working at all.

So that is the vital distinction, and to generalize as to whether people are working too hard or too little misses the whole point. Broadly speaking, the more unpleasant the job, the more routine the activity, the heavy lifting, the more people are told to do.

The richer you are, the more you can justify a life half of work and half of leisure.

Without doubt one of the manifestations of economic and social progress has been a greater freedom of choice in general and a greater opportunity for leisure. But that some people will have a different exploitation of that choice and work harder than they need to, than any visible economic compulsion requires, I can't doubt either.

And there's something that has to be added, too, and that is that a lot of the more fortunate people are controlled by a sense of virtue and guilt. If they are idle, and enjoying themselves, they have to have, as an excuse, that that allows them to work better later on, that they needed the rest. That again is a sense of guilt, a way of ameliorating a sense of guilt from enjoyed leisure.

John Kenneth Galbraith
Professor of economics emeritus, Harvard University; U.S. ambassador to India, 1961–1963; author, The Great Crash: 1929, The Affluent Society, and other books.

JULIET B. SCHOR

I have this model, or theory, that I call the cycle of work-and-spend, in which what happens is that employers set working hours. They are very reluctant to allow reductions in working hours, and in recent decades they have also put a lot of pressure on workers to increase working hours. So when we have productivity growth it's not going to reduce working hours, which is one of the things we could do with it. Instead, it goes to increased output. So the first thing to understand about why we work such long hours in this country is that, for the most part, workers don't have a choice. Hours go with jobs, and if you're in a job there seems to be a schedule associated with it. Typically, to reduce hours, people have to change their jobs. And over time what happens is that employers keep that resistance to shorter hours.

The most important causal factor in the rising working hours in the United States is from employers. Now, of course, the movement of women into longer-hours jobs, into career jobs, has been important as well. But you have to understand, in the context of this downward rigidity of hours, the fact that we have a structural bias in the system that makes it very difficult to get reductions in the average number of hours per job.

Consumerism, the desire for goods, plays an important role in my model, in that you start out with the structural bias, as I said, that people don't have the choice between taking more free time or taking more income. They're offered only the income. So they spend it. And they are involved in a consumer society. There are lots of social pressures to spend. But there's no counterweight in the other direction.

Juliet B. Schor
Professor of sociology, Boston College; author, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, The Overspent American: Upscaling, Downshifting, and the New Consumer, and other books.

ALAN WOLFE

I found in One Nation, After All that people want to lead what I call a balanced life. They are extremely upset about the fact that they have to work so hard. On the other hand, it's their choice, and they do. I don't think anyone's forcing them to.

So I think Americans have a very complicated relationship to it all.

Juliet Schor and others will talk about how people consume too much. It sounds like a joke to say that it's very difficult for people to live on a six-figure income in a small city, but it is difficult. And I don't want to sound in any way as if I'm putting down people who live on much less, but it's very hard. In some ways, I still believe people are working hard because they're sacrificing for the next generation, like our parents and grandparents did. It's part of that. I feel that way personally. I can't earn enough. I want my kids to have opportunities, and opportunities cost money. If you send your kids to a private college, they're going to do better in life, and everyone knows it.

I personally don't see it as a public-policy problem. You have to let people do what they want to do. In some ways, this is what people want, even if they complain about it — because they do it. And I think if you get public policy involved, you never know what kind of crazy consequences could follow. So it's just done best by letting people themselves realize that there's a problem and taking the steps to correct it.

In my newest book, Moral Freedom, I talk about how people increasingly appreciate that companies are just doing what's best for the company, so they're going to do what's best for themselves. And there is a lot more of that, and that's part of the decline of the organization man. People aren't going to sacrifice for an organization. So if they work hard, they're working hard for themselves. That creates a kind of individualistic society, which some people are very critical of. But it's not so bad, either.

It's better to work for yourself if you're going to work hard than to work for somebody else.

Alan Wolfe
Professor of political science, Boston College; director, Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life, Boston College; author, One Nation, After All; Marginalized in the Middle; Moral Freedom; and other books.

JILL ANDRESKY FRASER

A lot of this has its roots going back decades, actually, to the economic crisis that the U.S. went through in the mid 1970s. What originated as perhaps even a very justifiable sense among American business that operations were not as efficient as they could be — that there was a lot of fat in these organizations — transformed itself during the '80s, and then most especially into the '90s, into cost control run amuck. These companies became very addicted to cutting costs, in good times and bad times, and to a real change in what had been the traditional paradigm of business management during this whole post-World War II era. The old theory was that these big corporations were being run for three constituencies: the customers, the shareholders, and the employees as well — that if you were an employee, you were part of the reason these companies were in business. You weren't here today, gone tomorrow; you were one of the interested parties. And I think that what we saw especially in the '90s was an idea that these companies were really being run for one reason and one reason alone, which was to bring as much down to the bottom line and, therefore, to the investors, as possible.

The 1990s was a very crazy time. By anyone's measure, the economy was booming. The stock market was booming. And yet if you look at a year like, let's say, 1998 — which was really an extraordinary year for the economy and the stock market — it was also the year of the heaviest layoffs of the decade. So people were doing the jobs that once were done by two or three or four people. People were working hard, not because we're a nation of workaholics, but — you know, many of the people I interviewed had no choice but to stay in their offices until 7, 8, 9 o'clock at night. Come into their offices on weekends, work on vacations, bring their work home with them. Because otherwise there is no way to keep up with this enormous workload.

Jill Andresky Fraser
Finance editor, Inc. magazine; author, White-Collar Sweatshop: The Deterioration of Work and Its Rewards in Corporate America and other books.

© Boston Magazine

Sidebar 2: EXCERPTS

(Selected by Bill Beuttler)

In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return.
The Holy Bible, King James Version, Genesis 3:19

Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the sabbath.
The Holy Bible, King James Version, Exodus 20:9-10

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, of nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world in its own image.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848

Since the consumption of these more excellent goods is an evidence of wealth, it becomes honorific; and conversely, the failure to consume in due quantity and quality becomes a mark of inferiority and demerit.
Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899

The "this-worldly asceticism" of early Protestantism placed a premium upon and justified the styles of conduct and feeling required in its agents by modern capitalism. The Protestant sects encouraged and justified the social development of a type of man capable of ceaseless, methodical labor. The psychology of the religious man and of the economic man thus coincided, as Max Weber has shown, and at their point of coincidence the sober bourgeois entrepreneur lived in and through his work.
C. Wright Mills, White Collar, 1951

You can't eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor make love for eight hours — all you can do for eight hours is work. Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so miserable and unhappy.
William Faulkner, Writers at Work (First Series), 1958

This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence — to the spirit as well as to the body. It is about ulcers as well as about accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us.
Studs Terkel, Working, 1972

The big difference is that young business and professional people work. The truly rich, like the courtiers who surrounded Nancy Reagan, do not work but drift easily from fashion show to award dinner, from winter townhouse to summer home, from one vaguely "cultural" entertainment to another. But those who wish to succeed in such richly remunerative fields as corporate law and finance banking must work, at least in their early years, 70 or so hours a week. Most of those who merely wish to participate in the consumer binge must also work beyond the required eight hours a day. And those who only want to look as if they hold important positions in lucrative fields must at least look as if they are overworked. Work was essential to the yuppie style, not only as the means to wealth and hence indulgence but as the moral antidote to indulgence.
Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling, 1989

To get a firsthand glimpse of these new codes, go down to your local park in the summertime. You’ll see women jogging or running in sports bras and skin-tight spandex pants. Imagine if the Puritans could get a load of this! Women running around in their underwear in public. They’d pull out the tracts on Sodom and Gomorrah. Even a cosmopolitan historian such as Edward Gibbon would take a first glance at these women and begin speculating about the decline of empires. But look at the bra joggers more closely. It’s not wanton hedonism you see on their faces. They’re not exposing themselves for the sake of exhibitionism. Any erotic effect of their near nudity is conteracted by their expressions of grim determination. They are working out. They are working. They’re building their muscles. They’re setting goals and striving to achieve them. You never see them smile. On the contrary, some of them seem to be suffering. These near-naked young women are self-discipline personified — no pain, no gain — and the reason they are practically naked, they will tell you, is that this sort of clothing is most practical, most useful for strenuous exercise. What we see at the park is near nudity, but somehow it’s nudity in the service of achievement. Dionysius, the god of abandon, has been reconciled with Prometheus, the god of work.
David Brooks, Bobos in Paradise, 2000