Work Is Eating Up Americans’ Nights And Weekends

Americans don’t just put in more hours at work each week than residents of many developed countries. We’re also putting in more hours on our supposed free time.

A new paper from Daniel S. Hamermesh and Elena Stancanelli finds that the average American puts in 41 hours at work each week, compared to 38.4 in the United Kingdom, 36.9 in Germany, 35.7 in France, 34.6 in Spain, and just 32.7 in the Netherlands. And more of us are working even longer: while half of Americans work 35-44 hours a week, about 8 percent work 55-64 hours and nearly 4 percent work 65 or more hours. Nearly double the share of Americans are working 45 or more hours than in Germany, and it’s more than double compared to France, the Netherlands, and Spain.

Even worse, more than a quarter of Americans do some work between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. That’s far higher than the share of people working during those late hours in any of the other five countries. Just one in every fourteen French and Dutch workers does the same. Nearly a third of Americans work on the weekend, also higher than all the other countries.

Those who work longer are also more likely to work at odd hours: an American who works 55-64 hours a week is twice as likely to be working on nights and weekends than someone putting in 35-44 hours.

And it doesn’t appear that Americans are working on their free time because they want to. The researchers note that immigrants and the less educated are more likely to work on weekends, which “suggest[s] the undesirability of work at such times.” Similar trends are true for working at night.

We may think that our standard workweek is nine to five, five days a week, adding up to 40 hours, but in reality surveys find it’s more like 47 hours. While advanced countries have all been reducing work hours since the 1970s, other countries have made far more progress: Americans reduced their yearly hours by 112 since then, while the French have dropped 491 hours, the Dutch 425, and Canadians 215.

These longer hours aren’t necessarily making us more prosperous, as they don’t correlate with more productivity. In fact, the countries that put in fewer hours tend to be the most productive. And while clocking more than 60 hours a week boost productivity at first, it wears off after three or four weeks, as a variety of studies have found.

It may not just be that Americans have a harder work ethic, but that our policies are failing to curb the workweek. Fewer and fewer workers have been covered by the requirement that employers pay time and a half when someone goes over 40 hours a week, allowing that standard to slip away. President Obama took some action on this front, announcing an executive order to update the salary cutoffs and other loopholes so that more workers will be covered.

But the country also doesn’t require that workers get any time off during the week — we’reone of just 16 around the world without have such a requirement — nor does it guarantee that workers can get paid vacation, paid holidays, paid sick leave, or paid parental leave. All of those make us an extreme outlier among developed countries (or, when it comes to paid maternity leave, nearly all countries).

Original Article
Source: thinkprogress.org/
Author: BY BRYCE COVERT