Do Americans Work Too Much?

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We all play our part in this marathon of overwork, seduced by the culture into believing that who we are is what we do. It’s this lack of a non-work identity that allows so many of us to be consumed by the workaholic frenzy. “Americans compared to almost any other society are encouraged to achieve and display identity through labor,” explains Mark Liechty, professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “Most Americans labor to consume and construct the self.” In Europe, he points out, there’s more of a separation between identity and work; work life is “subordinate to other kinds of social spheres.”

The leading casualty of all this is our time, that commodity we seemed to have so much of back in sixth grade, when the clock on the wall never seemed to move. Time is the fastener of friendship and family; it gives us the space to explore more than a button on the snooze alarm. Without it, we’re a nation of strangers, even to those closest to us—and to ourselves. Families are taking a beating.

“People are spending less time with their family,” observes Barry Miller, a career counselor at Pace University in New York. “They’re not taking the time to rejuvenate and connect with their family members. Intimate relationships are falling apart, their relationships with their children are falling apart.”

I used to think that the issue of vacation time was complicated. There’s the almost religious stigma in America against government regulating the private sector, the pressure on runaway consumers to support their shopping habits, and the paranoia that global competitors would outpace our economy if we took half the time off that they do. But they’re all just excuses and pretexts that crumble with a hard look at the facts. Business, for instance, can be regulated for the good of the citizenry without jeopardizing profits. Some of the most basic tenets of the working world come out of federal legislation, from Social Security to the minimum wage to the 40-hour week—passed by Congress in 1938 as the Fair Labor Standards Act. Business was dragged kicking and screaming every time, but today these laws enjoy universal support.

Some on the left hold that we don’t really want the extra time, because we’re too busy consuming goods and running up our credit cards. Yet a survey by the Families and Work Institute found that 64 percent of Americans want to work less, up from 47 percent in 1992. As for the threat of instant economic demise once Americans get real vacations, it doesn’t appear that the Swiss or Swedish economies are in danger of immediate collapse. In fact, Löfgren points out that 25 percent of Swedes are able to afford second homes in the countryside.

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