The Unemployed and the Overworked

A paradox of our times

from The Jobs Letter No.14 / 3 April, 1995

As unemployment rates stubbornly resist the recovery in Western economies, we are also seeing the rise of another phenomenon of our time - a rise in the numbers of people who are over-worked. It is a strange paradox of our times that alongside fewer jobs for the unemployed, there are workers now working longer hours than they've done before. Our researchers and Media Watch are following the trends ...
"For the first time since the middle of the nineteenth century, we are working more for less money", says Michael Yates, in his recently published book on employment and unemployment in America. "Very few new entrants into the labour force can count on finding high-paying secure jobs like the ones our parents had. To keep up their living standards, many workers have been forced to increase their hours of work by working overtime, moonlighting, or sending other members of their family out to work.
Yates believes that "...the cycles of boom and bust and the poles of wealth and poverty cannot be eliminated unless and until we are willing to contemplate an entirely new organisation of our production and distribution..."
Longer Hours, Fewer Jobs, by Michael Yates (1994) published by Cornerstone Books
The average American is working more hours just to keep the standard of living they once enjoyed twenty years ago. The ILO Workplace reports that to reach the same standard of living as 1973, four out of five Americans need to work 245 more hours each year, the equivalent of six normal working weeks. The average working week in American industry has climbed to 41.6 hours in Oct 1993, the highest level since 1968. Author and researcher Juliet Schor estimates that men in the 1990's perform two and a half more weeks of paid work every year than they did in the 1970's. Women are working an additional seven and a half weeks of paid work than they did twenty years ago.
Similar trends are appearing in NZ. As we reported previously in the Jobs Letter, NZ'ers are working longer hours than ever before - a total average of 39.18 hrs a week. This is the highest figure since Statistics NZ surveys began.
Where do these extra weeks that we have added to our workload come from ? American author Dr Susan Albert writes and lectures on the impact of the career culture on people's personal lives : " These extra working weeks have been subtracted from the rest of our lives - from family time, from sleep time, from relaxation time, from time spent working on behalf of our communities."
Albert concludes that the "mushrooming of work time" means that many of us suffer from deficits. "We suffer from sleep deficit, from leisure deficit, from a deficit of spirit, from a parenting deficit when children are left alone more, from a deficit of friends - have you noticed what happens when two career people try to maintain a friendship ? "
Finding Our Right Livelihood, by Dr Susan Albert, (series of four audio-tapes) available from the Centre for Renewing Work, P.O.Drawer M, Bertram Texas 78605.
The rise in working hours seems to bear little relevance to the increasing levels of productivity that have occurred in the last 50 years. Since 1948, the level of productivity of the US worker has more than doubled. But between 1948 and today, American employers did not use any of the productivity dividend to reduce working hours for their workers. In lieu of this, the average American now owns and consumes more than twice as much as they did in 1948, and also has less free time.
Juliet Schor says that , in other words, Americans could now produce their 1948 standard of living in less than half the time it took in that year : " We actually could have chosen a four-hour day. Or a working year of six months. Or, every worker in the US could now be taking every other year off from work - with pay... Incredible as it may sound, this is just the simple arithmetic of productivity growth in operation. "
The Overworked American, by Juliet Schor (1991) published by Basic Books.
Workers in America are complaining that the current recovery and economic expansion is spelling worker exhaustion. Time magazine reports that throughout American industry, companies are using overtime to wring the most out of their labour force. Their workers are putting in a average of 10 hours overtime a week and labouring an average of six eight-hour Saturdays a year.
The recovery began in March 1991, and had companies hired at the pace of past expansions, Time calculates the increase in employment in the US should be now at 8 million jobs. But new jobs since 1991 only stands at 6 million, leaving it 2 million short. Companies are simply not hiring ... and if they are, they are preferring to take on temporary workers.
Case: General Motors. They have done no significant hiring since 1986. Overtime is expensive for them, but the combined wage, fringe benefit and training costs of hiring new workers would be more expensive still.
When GM is forced to add more workers, they have turned to temporary help agencies. Time : " Once more, the reason is economics : the temps draw only wages, not health insurance and other expensive fringe benefits, and they can be used and let go as needed without drawing the unemployment benefits that GM must pay to laid-off regular workers..."

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