America is the fabled land of plenty, and according to Juliet Schor, most of us seem to be lining up for more than our share of work hours. In our unabated obsession to get more than our fair share of the virtual cornucopia of goods and services out there in the marketplace, we seem to have become collectively addicted to working more and more hours in a devil's bargain with our employers. This book is a wonderful overview of this long-term trend toward overwork, where the average American now works the equivalent of an extra month a year. Since it is cheaper to pay someone overtime than it is to hire new workers and pay the associated benefits, corporations gladly ante up to pay for our increasing presence at work. Yet this mysterious and unexpected contemporary American addiction to being on the job has its associated costs (as well as causes).
Harvard professor Juliet Schor spins a convincing and disturbing tale regarding the increasing numbers of hours we spend each week at work rather than leisure. This is a historical surprise, since most baby boomers emerged from the colleges and universities convinced we would have more leisure time and better ways to pursue our many avocational interests than any generation in the past. In this entertaining, topical, and quite readable book, the author surveys a plethora of reasons for the surprising trend toward overwork. The principal dynamic she pinpoints in influencing this trend is an economy that literally demands extra effort and time from its employees, an economy which until quite recently had a chronic shortage of available jobs and "surplus" labor pool of potential workers. Under such circumstances, anyone lacking the requisite willingness to work extra hours was indeed dispensable. Thus one becomes a careerist in an effort to survive. She also details how our culturally conditioned goal-oriented attitude toward time as a resource to be used effectively and efficiently rather than as a precious resource to be used to increase the quality of our own lives plays into the situation.
For Schor, we are on a treadmill, if not to oblivion, then to an impoverished cultural life where we are what we do occupationally rather than what we do and what we become in our leisure hours pursuing our avocations and our personal lives with family and friends. This is an important and path breaking book, one that we should find especially relevant given the fact that many of the jobs we are so seemingly addicted to will soon fade away in the new markets and new economies of the so-called "Third Wave". Anyone who has experienced "downsizing" at the hands of a large and impersonal corporation can tell you how quickly all those sacrifices and long hours are disregarded and forgotten by your employer. The emotional and economic impacts of such events can be devastating to the individual and his or her family. As a friend said to me recently, anyone who is what they do really isn't very much at all. Read and heed.
