Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 10, 1990 TAG: 9006130466
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By PETER T. KILBORN THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
He would amble back as his colleagues arrived and would glide through the day, impressing everyone with his effortless mastery of his chores.
Today the worker would have nothing on anyone else.
Among 88 million people with full-time jobs last year, nearly 24 percent - largely executives, professionals, self-employed people, journalists, bureaucrats, and the secretaries and clerks who toil alongside them - spent 49 or more hours a week on the job, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Ten years ago only 18 percent worked so much.
A management training concern, Priority Management Systems Inc. in Vancouver, British Columbia, recently surveyed 1,344 American and foreign business executives and found 57 percent of them worked six to 20 hours beyond the 40-hour week - 20 percent longer on average than a decade ago.
"The leisure society in America is a myth," said Jerome M. Rossow, president of the Work in America Institute in Scarsdale, N.Y.
Last year in the United States the sales of the Filofax company, whose elaborate notebooks help people navigate through the clutter of their lives, hit $4.2 million, more than double the amount in 1987.
The American work ethic seems to have become an obsession.
Part of the problem is that salary increases continue to lag behind inflation, so workers have to run harder each year just to stay even.
Students of the psyches of hard-toiling workers say many people thrive on 60- and 70-hour weeks and the fast pace of the electronic work place.
But others find it a sweatshop.
One result is a surge in early retirement among men, who have been in the work force longer than most women. In the end, some economists say, it is not even clear that the economy is benefiting from all the frenetic activity.
The government says more workers than ever held both a regular job last year and at least one part-time job - 6.2 percent of all working people.
The moonlighting among men hasn't changed very much over two decades, but among women, it has soared.
Some managers say even in a conventional eight-hour day they work much harder, thanks in part to their arsenals of technological gimmickry.
Peter A. Hoffman is the partner in charge of litigation consulting at the accounting firm of Deloitte & Touche in New York.
He recently spent three or four days a week for 14 weeks in Denver advising a company the Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating.
"During that time I was asked to work on a lawsuit relating to a hostile takeover attempt," Hoffman said. "From Denver, I was able to put together a team in New York, and material they produced in the day was faxed to me so I could work on it at the hotel at night. Some nights it came to 200 pages."
People give many reasons for working harder or longer.
Some are running scared.
In the 1980s, hundreds of American companies eliminated whole layers of middle management to cut costs. Those remaining fear they will be next.
Some people are getting nudged.
Gil Gordon, a communications consultant, said many employers arrange generous discounts for their workers to buy computers for their personal use.
"But part of me wonders if that just makes it easier for them to extend the work day," Gordon said. "You can get creeping expectations on the part of managers that it should be the norm for people to put in two or three extra hours a day on home computers."
Some employees find that the pace is burning them out.
"They're in a time-compressed state," said Joseph Ruffin, a psychiatrist in Oklahoma City. "They've got more bellyaches and more headaches. They've got more diarrhea. I ask my patients: `What if you were an automobile? What shape would you be in?' They say, `I wouldn't last three weeks.' "
Boris Rifkin, a psychiatrist in New Haven, said anxiety disorders have mushroomed.
Many analysts suspect the extra work does no more good for the economy than it does for the health.
Indeed, they ask, if people are producing more with their labor, why is the economy so sluggish?
And why is American productivity - the value of goods and services workers produce - growing so much more slowly than in Asia and Europe?
One explanation might be that many people are just spinning their wheels.
Executives hustle from meeting to meeting and make calls to disembodied voices on answering machines because those people, too, are in meetings.
Michael Fortino, a management consultant in Pittsburgh, says the average professional worker will spend three years of his life in meetings and two playing telephone tag.
"Working longer and harder is not the same as working smarter," Rosow said.
Ronald E. Kutscher, associate commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, said, "We may be getting more throughput but no more output."
Or perhaps, he said, people really are producing more but no one has figured out how to gauge their production.
Kutscher said he can write seven drafts of an economic analysis with his computer now in the same time it took to write two or three a few years ago.
"Can I argue that the article is better?" he said. "I don't know. It isn't being measured."
by CNB