Americans work more, seem to accomplish less

Technology has eclipsed what the average male/female can handle. I support computer users at my company and some of users just can't handle the software applications that they need to do their jobs today. Most of the masses can only handle a dumb terminal or paper and pencil.

 

Yea! Right now I'm gonna turn off my compu

 

The Sarbanes-Oxley Act has made work a living nightmare. Thanks, Enron! You can't even wipe your butt now without having a document that describes how you did it, what toilet paper you used, how dirty the paper was post-wipe, how that affected the water color in the toilet, how the flush was affected, etc. . Work has to be documented out that wazoo, now. As a developer, I spend way more time on project-related documentation than I do actually coding.

I guess technology has, too. I feel it. Technology overload is what I feel. A tool exists for everything these days. Tool this...tool that. I got your tool!

 

The title is a bit misleading. Productivity is way up. The word "seems" is key. Workers feel like they are accomplishing less but that isn't the case.

 

With the increase is productivity, companies are able to put more responsibility on fewer workers thus saving money. The downside is workers are more stress and feel like they are accomplishing less because they are required to do more. Americans are being mentally worked to death. For centuries the powerful worked the lower classes to an early grave by physically working them to death. Now in our "advanced" culture we are mentally worked to death.

 

I like my work and can handle the load, but I understand where this is coming from.

I worked 3 interships before I actually was hired full time out of college.

My first intership, I got 10 emails a day. The second one I got 15 a day, and probably around 20 a day for the third one.

Now that I have been on full time for about 3 years, I probably receive 150 emails a day. About 20% I don't even look at, and about 20% I have to take action on. That is still a good chunk of my day sifting through email. We have a pager rotation for on call so that's not too bad, but I refuse to get a blackberry or something like that to be connected all the time.

I'd never have a life. I work hard to keep a good balance...off time is off time, but I still find myself logging on a couple of hours in the evening 3 or 4 times a week.

Oh well...save every dime I can so I don't have to do it forever!

 

Knowing a lot about what state employees in Texas have to put up with, I can tell you that many of them work overtime and never get compensated for it. They are salaried, and recieve "comp-time" for the overtime they work. In theory, they should be able to take it as extra paid vacation time, but the reality for many is that they are so busy, they have a hard time using all their vacation time, much less the comp-time. If you don't use it after a certain period (2 or 3 years. Can't remember at the moment), you lose it. That's a real bummer.

In general, Americans work too many hours, and take too little time off. In my opinion. I personally know far too many folks who don't get to spend the time with their family on vacation that they deserve. They're too damn busy with work. I also agree that technology is both a blessing and a curse. It can create more productivity, and steal your time as well. Supermac, your example of wading through e-mails is one of many. With cellphones and pagers, you are now never really away from the office. Sometimes, I just turn the things off. It feels great.



Keep D&D Civil.

 

That's because

A) Globalization when foreigners are working much much more and earning much much less.
B) Money saved from outsourcing went into big boys

 

??? Obviously you didn't even bother to read the article. This article is about technology, not some Chinese villager who goes to the city to make 25 cents an hour sewing shirts and sleeping in a dorm bunk bed.

 

I'm sorry, but no state employee has a clue as to what real work is. Government workers are lazy, coddled, and have no idea how to compete in a competitive workforce. Hell, a friend of mine who used to work for your very own city of Austin claimed that it was IMPOSSIBLE to get fired! Working overtime without compensation??!??? Oh the horror. Welcome to the real world. If you want to reduce the hours in the work week to work less, we'll start to look more and more like France and Germany, both of which have 10% unemployment. If you thought people cried and moaned about 5-6% unemployment here in the US post 9/11 (you'd have thought the economy was the worst of all time according to many posts on this very board), then I'd love to see your reaction at 10%.

 

Your making me side with bigtexx so you need to explain how this relates to the article that started this discussion.

A textile working in the U.S. wouldn't be bombarded by email.

Even a customer support call center in India wouldn't cause Americans to be more stressed at work and work longer hours. The outsourcing of a job would just take the Americans job and send them home unemployed. The American might be stressed, but not from being overworked, spending to much time at the office or getting too many emails.

 

With all due respect, texxx, where do you get this stuff? From a radio talk show? Texas state employees haven't recieved a salary increase worth mentioning in years, unless it was from getting promoted, or moving to a higher level position with the state.

A very large number of them have been laid off, and incentives to retire early surprised the state, as thousands said, "**** it!," choosing to work in the private sector, where they always knew they could make more money, but they liked to work in public service, and liked the benefits available.

So many top employees retired that the state ended the program. Agency heads were dealing with a huge loss of "institutional memory," as well as having green employees, straight out of school, who didn't have any experience, and didn't know how to deal with the Lege and the Governor's Office, as well as a host of other things people with experience could do because, golly, they have years of experience in state government.

I could go on, but I doubt you truly have an interest in the subject, being more interested in spouting BS, in an attempt to play the fool for laughs. I certainly hope so, because otherwise it would display simple ignorance, and I'm sure you are not ignorant of how the state really works, texxx.



Keep D&D Civil.

 

The problem with state jobs is that most people want to work hard, but there is no incentive. Eventually, you either become a worthless state employee, or you leave. A few manage to get salary increases by bouncing to a different job every couple of years, but not many.

It is very difficult to fire a state employee for disciplinary reasons. The system is set up where incentives are placed at having a large organization, and efficiency is not really examined over headcount. Managers get promoted to director if they have large enough organizations. If they fire someone, all they get is a big pain in the ass. So, you have large organizations that have no incentive to fire someone when they can just hire someone else to do the job that the first person was doing.

Unfortunately, this means that any growth area is constantly overworked, because the organization can't afford to hire people where the need is, because they're too strapped for cash paying for all the career employees that they can't fire. I've seen the same thing happen in large corporate organizations, but luckily there is usually some bottom line that comes through and cuts out all the fat through layoffs and the like. There is no bottom line in the state system. And layoffs in the state system are usually done by senority, with means that you are dumping all of your new blood and keeping all your career state employees, further crippling the system.

 

I help fire state employees all the time, if the manager wants to do it, its not that hard.
Problem is there are a lot of bad managers at the state so they don't want to bother with problems, just ignore it and hope if will go away
Not all state workers are bad but there are a lot of bad ones. there are also a lot of dedicated hard workers too. Its the same thing as any big corporation, some great employees and some dead wood. Different divisions in power struggles etc. (I've worked at all sizes and types of places so I've seen it all)
Bigtexxx = clueless

 

Depends on the industry too. My friends in accounting, law, or investment banking work ridiculous hours and often don't get overtime. But the reward comes later. The people in trading hardly work any overtime.

 

I was just curious, and this is an honest question... what is the reward that comes later? When you are "stealing time" from your family and your life outside of work, how can you get it back? If you mean the monetary rewards, how old do you have to be to enjoy them? And what value can we really place on the time "we've lost" to work?

My point is that I believe Americans have gone too far in the other direction, of putting the job before family, friends, and the life away from it. We need to find a better balance, in my opinion.



Keep D&D Civil,

 

Yes, the reward that is later is more money and also a new job with better hours at a different company. Out of college, the big accounting and law firms work the new people to death. If they do well they can make partner or be a manager at some other company. Then their workload decreases (I think). Also, most are in their 20's and dont have spouses or kids so they still have time to go out and have fun.

I agree with your point though. Some people keep working those hours even when they have families. My managers at my last job worked tons of overtime and they had kids. It must have sucked for them. I'm not going to do that.

I look at it another way- these people choose this life. They get paid well, but then they spend it all. If I was them, I'd hold off on buying the BMW or house. Save up until you have a comfortable retirement, then use your experience to get a job that doesn't require so many hours. But it seems like people just pile on the debt.

 

The land of leisure

Feb 2nd 2006 | CHICAGO
From The Economist print edition
http://www.economist.com/World/na/displayStory.cfm?story_id=5476124

Why Americans have plenty of time to read this

AS MOST Americans will tell you if you can stop them long enough to ask, working people in the United States are as busy as ever. Sure, technology and competition are boosting the economy; but nearly everyone thinks they have increased the demands on people at home and in the workplace. But is the overworked American a creature of myth?

A pair of economists have looked closely at how Americans actually spend their time. Mark Aguiar (at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston) and Erik Hurst (at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business) constructed four different measures of leisure.* The narrowest includes only activities that nearly everyone considers relaxing or fun; the broadest counts anything that is not related to a paying job, housework or errands as “leisure”. No matter how the two economists slice the data, Americans seem to have much more free time than before.

Over the past four decades, depending on which of their measures one uses, the amount of time that working-age Americans are devoting to leisure activities has risen by 4-8 hours a week. (For somebody working 40 hours a week, that is equivalent to 5-10 weeks of extra holiday a year.) Nearly every category of American has more spare time: single or married, with or without children, both men and women. The only twist is that less educated (and thus poorer) Americans have done relatively better than more educated ones (see chart). And that is not just because unemployed high-school drop-outs have more free time on their hands. Less educated Americans with jobs—the overstretched middle class of political lore—do very well.

These findings will no doubt be scoffed at by many Americans who are certain that they, and nearly everyone they know, are overworked (and who may find time to write letters to the editor saying so). Indeed, a 1992 book by Juliet Schor, “The Overworked American”, became a best-seller by telling people something that they thought they already knew.

In fact, most of the official numbers have shown that American toil has not changed that much over the past few decades. Americans may put in longer hours at the office than other countries, but that is because average hours in the workplace in other rich countries have dropped sharply. In America, official studies tend to show women working more and men less, but the average working week has been fairly constant.

How then have Messrs Aguiar and Hurst uncovered a more relaxed America, where leisure has actually increased? It is partly to do with the definition of work, and partly to do with the data they base their research upon.

Most American labour studies rely on well-known official surveys, such as those collected by the Bureau of Labour Statistics (BLS) and the Census Bureau, that concentrate on paid work. These are good at gleaning trends in factories and offices, but they give only a murky impression of how Americans use the rest of their time.

Messrs Aguiar and Hurst think that the hours spent at your employer's are too narrow a definition of work. Americans also spend lots of time shopping, cooking, running errands and keeping house. These chores are among the main reasons why people say they are so overstretched (especially working women with children).

However, Messrs Aguiar and Hurst show that Americans actually spend much less time doing them than they did 40 years ago. There has been a revolution in the household economy. Appliances, home delivery, the internet, 24-hour shopping, and more varied and affordable domestic services have increased flexibility and freed up people's time.

So women are devoting more hours to paying jobs, but have cut their housework and other burdensome tasks by twice as much. Men have picked up some of the slack at home; but thanks to technology and other advances, there is plenty of free time left over for them as well, since they have yielded some of their paid working hours to women.

The data for Messrs Aguiar and Hurst's study comes from time-use diaries that American social scientists have been collecting methodically, once a decade, since 1965 (the latest one used in their paper was from 2003). These diaries ask people to give detailed information on everything they did the day before, and for how long they did it. The beauty of such surveys, which are also collected in Australia and many European countries, is that they cover the whole day (not just the time at work), and they also have a built-in accuracy check, since they must always add up to 24 hours a day.

Time-use diaries have long been a treasure trove for sociologists. (John Robinson, who helped oversee the diary surveys for years at the University of Maryland, co-wrote a book in 1997, “Time for Life”, that aimed partly to rebut Ms Schor's claims.) But economists in America have only recently begun paying much attention to them. The BLS started using them in 2003.
Keep reading...you have a moment

Do the numbers add up? One thing missing in Messrs Aguiar's and Hurst's work is that they have deliberately ignored the biggest leisure-gainers in the population—the growing number of retired folk. The two economists excluded anyone who has reached 65 years old, as well as anyone under that age who retired early. So America's true leisure boom is even bigger than their estimate.

Another question-mark has to do with child care. When the BLS took over the time-use diaries for the 2003 survey, it changed the measures for what parents do when their kids are around. That cast some doubt on comparisons between the 1993 and 2003 diaries. Against that, the 1965-93 figures are consistent—and over that period, even working women with children enjoyed an increase in leisure time of more than six hours a week.

The biggest theoretical problem with time diaries is “multi-tasking”. Do you measure the time you spend cleaning your house while listening to portable music as “leisure” or “work”? This problem may be exaggerated: usually people seem to combine two work activities (using a laptop computer on a plane), or two leisure ones (watching television and doing something else). The two economists counted many combinations of work and leisure—such as reading a novel while commuting or goofing off on the internet at the office—as time spent working.

Richard Freeman, a labour economist at Harvard, reckons that, despite the inability to measure multi-tasking, the finding of a big increase in leisure is “basically right”. Another well-known work-watcher, Daniel Hamermesh at the University of Texas at Austin, who has worked with various countries' time-use diaries, agrees.

Is all this leisure a good thing? Some part-time workers might well wish they had less leisure and more income. For most Americans, however, the leisure dividend appears to be a bonus. Using average hourly wages after tax, Steven Davis, a colleague of Mr Hurst's, reckons that the national value of five extra hours of leisure per week is $570 billion, or $3,300 per worker, every year.

But why do Americans feel so harried? Weirdly, prosperity may be to blame in two ways. First, thanks to rising real incomes, an American's time is worth more now. A walk in the park is more expensive than it used to be. (When people complain to him about being too busy, Mr Hamermesh tells them that their real problem is too much money.) Second, economic advances allow people to squeeze ever more possible activities, both work and leisure, into a day, which encourages people to try to do too much.

Mr Robinson reckons that people will feel less busy to the extent that they can control their schedule and gain flexibility. It is easy to see why a personal video recorder, which offers near-total mastery of the television, is such a popular device; and why traffic jams and security queues at airports exasperate modern workers.

Finally, there is the changing nature of work. Mobile phones and e-mail make people accountable on short notice, and competition may make them less secure in their jobs. So even if they are playing golf or walking in the park, they may feel as if they are working. It is surely nicer to feel overworked in the park than to be overworked at the office, but few Americans seem to look at it that way. Think about that in your spare time.

Link to the Fed report:
http://www.bos.frb.org/economic/wp/wp2006/wp0602.pdf