YES, A PROBLEM
So what’s the problem? Just this: The amount of paid work in most people’s lives is increasing dramatically. And it’s not just formal work hours that are expanding, as measured by official surveys. The very character of paid work is becoming far more intrusive on the rest of our lives. Much of it is becoming more emotionally or intellectually taxing. It preoccupies more of our waking hours, and sometimes even reaches deep into our sleep. It also intrudes more unexpectedly, and makes more unpredictable demands.
There’s something insistent about home faxes, voice mails, e-mails, beepers, cell phones, and car phones. They must be responded to. Or you have to use them to contact someone else if you gain some piece of knowledge that the other person is likely to value and
expects
you to share at once. After all, the sole purpose of these gadgets is to locate us when we’re doing something else. They put us, literally, on call. They break into our lives like burglars. They lay claim even to those small units of time and space that used to be entirely private, like when we’re behind the wheel of a car, in an airplane, or walking from place to place. Even the possibility that they might intrude requires that a tiny piece of our brain remain ready to respond to the intrusion when it comes, like a sentry on continuous alert. Presumably we’d be less efficient at our jobs if we didn’t have these gadgets, but they overrun more and more of our personal territory. In a few years, each of us is likely to have a universal connection attached to a wristband through which, at any time of day or night, certain people (whom we’ve designated in advance) will be able to find us and speak with us, perhaps even see our faces as we see theirs. We’ll be at liberty to shut off the device, of course, and it will also be our decision to whom we give such unbridled power to intrude. But imagine the pressure to keep the device turned on at least eighteen hours, and to extend the list of potential intruders to include not only loved ones but also those who seem (and consider themselves) important to our working lives.
Commuting time has lengthened. Time away from home on business has increased, too. According to the Travel Industry Association of America, Americans took 42.9 million business trips in 1996 (the most recent data available), a 21 percent increase from just five years before. Another survey, this by the Family and Work Institute, reveals that one out of five working people now regularly takes an overnight business trip (the survey did not define “regularly,” but it can safely be assumed to be at least once a month).
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Add to this the ever more frequent and ubiquitous corporate conferences, retreats, seminars, and meetings at remote locations—totaling 805,000 corporate overnight “events” in fiscal year 1998, compared with 580,000 in 1996, according to Meeting Planners International.
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There is no way to measure the preoccupation and emotional energy demanded by this new work, but it is certainly greater than before. The percentage of Americans who say they “always feel rushed” jumped by more than half between the mid-1960s and the mid-1990s, and significantly more Americans also said they “work very hard most of the time” and “frequently stayed late at work.”
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Home computers are now “work stations,” even for people who have separate offices outside the home. Work is trundled back and forth from home to office not in bulky briefcases stuffed with papers and reports but in little diskettes and weightless e-mail attachments. A quarter of all regular Internet users say they’re now working more hours at home but no fewer hours at the office.
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Markets are open all the time and gadgets are potentially connected all the time, so there is no good excuse
not
to work except for intervals when one has made a clear and principled decision not to, in order to do something else. But the threshold for deciding to do something else keeps rising as work keeps getting more accessible. Architects Frank Lupo and Daniel Rowen recently designed a Manhattan apartment for two young Wall Street currency traders. The abode comes with six strategically placed video monitors so that the agile couple can keep track of world markets twenty-four hours a day from any vantage point in their new home, including the bathroom.
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As paid work pushes on the rest of life, other things, inevitably, are compressed, or pushed out. Substantial public attention has been focused on the dwindling time parents give to their children. According to the White House Council of Economic Advisers, American parents now spend, on average, twenty-two fewer hours each week with their children than did parents thirty years ago. (But this doesn’t necessarily mean that each child is losing twenty-two hours of attention, because adult Americans are having fewer children to begin with. In fact, there’s evidence that mothers in 1998 were spending about as many waking hours with their kids as did mothers in 1965, while sleeping less.
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The point is that adults are devoting fewer hours to children in general.) Other aspects of life are being pushed out as well—friends, spouses and partners, voluntary work in the community, housework, one’s “calling,” tasks that are enjoyable as well as those that aren’t, unpaid activities that are deeply fulfilling as well as those that are regarded as mere duties.
Because of the press of paid work, everything else has to be more regimented: children bustled from activity to activity according to ever more precise schedules; weekend calendars crammed with errands, events, drop-bys, fleeting meetings; upcoming vacations planned far in advance with contingency plans in case something goes awry. And all the while, there are continuing preoccupations—work yet undone, clients not yet pursued, deadlines looming—that distract attention from the rest of life even when you’re trying to live it, like noisy traffic just outside the living room window.
Paid work is crowding out the rest of life even if—especially if—it is interesting or rewarding, as I discovered when I was in the President’s cabinet. If you have managed to find the time and energy to read this book to this point, you are not yet in dire straits. Still, the pressure is mounting. Why is that?
PROPPING UP FAMILY INCOMES
The first and most obvious reason that Americans are working harder is to prop up family incomes. Many women began streaming into the workforce in the late seventies and eighties as their husbands’ paychecks began to flatten or decline. As noted, the midcentury system of large-scale production, with its fleets of routine workers linked to steady jobs with ever-rising wages, has been disappearing. It ushered blue-collar America into the middle class. Its replacement—innovative production of anything, from anywhere, at the lowest price and best quality—is ushering blue-collar America out. In 1979, a thirty-year-old man with no more than a high-school diploma earned an average of $32,000 if he worked full time (in today’s dollars). Today, his thirty-year-old counterpart earns about $5,000 less. To fill the gap, more women have gone into paid work, or work longer.
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Something else has also happened. An increasing number of people—mostly women—have become single parents. Thirty years ago, fewer than 15 percent of all families were headed by a single parent. Today the figure is more than 30 percent.
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This trend is often cited as another reason that women have moved into paid work. They have more responsibilities now. But the actual direction of cause and effect may be the reverse. Arguably, more women have left their male spouses or partners (or decided not to marry them in the first place) precisely because the women now have jobs and men have been losing ground economically. Why take on the additional “home work” of supporting a man, who might also be abusive or unappreciative, when his earnings are dropping and you can earn money on your own? More on this later.
MAKING HAY
The need to supplement male earnings, however, can’t be the sole reason that people are devoting more time and energy to paid work, because upper-income people have been working harder as well. What else has stimulated the extra effort? As noted, almost everyone’s earnings are now less predictable. You may be earning good money today, but the flow might slow down tomorrow, and the spigot be turned off next week. You simply don’t know. In the old economy of steady jobs, you were reasonably assured of receiving the same wage in the future, adjusted upward for inflation. This confidence allowed you to buy cars on credit, and take out a home mortgage. Now you don’t know how much you’ll be earning, yet you still need to buy a car on credit, you still need a home mortgage, and you also have a credit card or two, or ten. And then there are all the monthly bills that come with normal living—gas, electricity, telephone. So how do you reconcile your unpredictable earnings with your predictable bills?
Here’s an aspect of the new work that’s rarely mentioned but affects almost everyone—rich, poor, and middle—and forces people to work harder
today
than they otherwise need to in order to pay
tomorrow’s
bills. Unable to predict future earnings, people tend to work as hard as they can when jobs with decent pay are readily available to them. They also fall into debt. But this only adds to the pressure on them to accept any opportunity today that may not be there tomorrow. In other words, they make hay while the sun shines.
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Even in the old economy, blue-collar workers had an incentive to put in “overtime” when it became available because they never knew how long an economic upswing would continue to provide overtime work. But during the boom years of the 1990s, hourly wage earners put in much more overtime than they did during typical expansions. Some of this was involuntary. Companies haven’t wanted to bring on additional workers, and under American labor law they can demand that hourly employees work overtime. But more workers also volunteered for overtime even when their companies didn’t insist. They did so because America’s dwindling number of blue-collar workers know how precarious their paychecks are. They want to take advantage of any extra work hours that might come along—not just because the extra hours may not be there in the future but because the jobs themselves may not be.
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The company might “downsize” and move operations abroad at any time, or it might merge with a company in another state and move there. Workers’ monthly household bills will continue, regardless.
Even professional and managerial workers are busy making hay in sunny weather. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the proportion of them who put in more than fifty hours a week has risen by more than a third since 1985.
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And they’re working harder than people in most other occupations. Nearly 40 percent of male college graduates and 20 percent of female graduates are working more than fifty hours a week—quadruple the proportion of people with less than a high-school degree.
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What’s going on? Remember that even though many of these workers are considered “full-time employees,” a growing number depend on commissions, billable hours, performance bonuses, and continuing grants and projects for their incomes. They have no way of knowing for sure how much they’ll earn six months from now, or even next month. As their companies or nonprofit enterprises busily turn all “fixed” costs—like steady payrolls—into “variable” costs in order to become more agile, the enterprises in effect shift to their employees the economic risks of an uncertain market. But these employees face “fixed” costs of their own, like mortgage payments and electricity bills. In consequence, even higher-wage workers are likely to go full-out when the work is available—accumulating more commissions, billable hours, bonuses, grants, and projects—against the time when there may be less.
A friend, a new father who works for a consulting firm in New York, is putting in fourteen-hour days and seventy-hour weeks. He says he’d rather not be working so hard, especially now that he has a child. No one in the firm has asked him to put in so many hours. In fact, the firm is trying to cultivate a “family friendly” image in order to recruit other talented young people. The problem is, he says, that it’s a small firm, and demand for its services goes up and down. My friend figures he should put in all the hours he can as long as the work keeps coming.
In the emerging economy, as I have emphasized, consumers have almost boundless choice, and they can switch in an instant. So if you, as a seller, are “hot” right now, you’re likely to want to take maximum advantage of it. Andy Warhol once famously declared that in the future everyone will have fifteen minutes of fame. It’s now more likely to be thirty seconds. In the growing portion of the economy that depends on attracting attention—on being in the “buzz,” being hip or cool, or riding some wave of public fascination—the pressure is on to make the most of it when you get it. These people, too, will work longer and harder than they might otherwise want to work, in order to make hay while the sun shines more brightly on them than it ever did before or may ever again.
KEEPING UP TO SPEED
A third aspect of the emerging economy compelling harder work is the necessity of staying even with, or beating out, the competition. Again, recall the contrast: The midcentury system was premised on stability and tame competition, with minimal innovation. The new, emerging system is premised on instability and fierce competition, with maximum innovation. These days, there’s no coasting. Competitors are eager to break into your market.
“This is not about business hours. It’s about
waking
hours,” says Todd Wagner, thirty-seven, co-founder and CEO of Broadcast.com, a Web company based in Dallas, Texas. Wagner’s new idea was to broadcast live programming over the Web—“streaming media” programming, it’s called. But Wagner and Broadcast.com had to move fast if they were to make a mark and capture consumers, and the race is still on. There are thousands of potential rivals, each trying to run faster with the same or a similar idea. Wagner’s days start before the sun rises, and rarely end before midnight—meeting with investors, trading ideas with technical people, checking in with marketing and advertising staff, considering consumer ideas and complaints. “You try to do as much as you can for as long as you can stay awake,” he says. Mark Cuban, cofounder and president of the company, asks, rhetorically, “What price do you have to pay to win? That price is the ‘sprint.’ You have to build your business faster than anyone else. The ‘sprint’ doesn’t have a finish line. There’s never a point where you can say, ‘We’ve made it.’ ”
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