Are we done with the 40-hour week?

Still, workers are feeling pressure on the job. Both manufacturing and high-tech employees told ISR that their workload was too heavy and they had trouble balancing their work and personal lives.

That’s a common theme in workplace studies. If the 1950s family breadwinner — almost certainly Dad — provided for his family on 40 hours a week, today’s working couple often more than doubles that in combined hours. University of Pennsylvania sociologist Jerry Jacobs points out that if one half of a couple exceeds 40 hours, his or her partner usually does too. More hours can provide more disposable income, but Jacobs finds that doesn’t necessarily translate into a better standard of living. “The salaries for a lot of these jobs have stagnated. The expectations while you’re working these long hours have gone up,” he says. “It’s putting a tremendous amount of pressure on family life.”

Many families have tried to adapt, of course. Frequently, one half of a working couple — still Mom, usually — opts to scale back: fewer hours, telecommuting or part-time jobs. Yet those decisions can often come at the cost of promotions or bonuses.

And many part-timers would like nothing more than to take more work. In surveys Jacobs conducted for an upcoming book on work-family balance, professionals putting in over 50 hours a week usually wanted to shave hours, while those working 20 to 30 hours a week felt underused.

Who’s behind this disparity? Employers, for one. When you consider that benefits account for 25 to 30 percent of each employee’s total compensation, fewer employees doing more saves companies big money.

Greater productivity is another reason. As workers do their jobs better and work harder, fewer new staff need to be hired — one reason economists think the recovery hasn’t necessarily translated into more jobs. Many firms found they could cap the workforce without losing productivity.

Yet Jacobs argues that strategy has its limits. The length of the work week soared during World War II, for example, but productivity in many factories plateaued as bosses found they couldn’t get much more from a worker doing a 12-hour shift than one doing 10 hours.

Is 40-hours history?
“Your surmise is exactly wrong,” says Daniel Hamermesh, a labor economist at the University of Texas at Austin. His view is that the brave new world of work — focused on goals, unbound by hours — is more fiction than fact.

According to his data, taken from Labor Dept. statistics, workers say they put in 42.7 hours a week in 1979 and 42.6 in 2002, and the percentage who worked exactly 40 hours a week rose slightly. Moreover, he argues, a perceived trend away from hourly wages to salaries simply hasn’t happened. In a 2000 paper titled “12 Million Salaried Workers Are Missing,” he noted that perceived trends toward a skilled, salaried workforce — more educated workers and skilled occupations, fewer manufacturing jobs and union labor — weren’t supported by hard numbers.

Hamermesh admits his findings are “mindboggling,” contrary to every expected trend. Some of the perception of more work, he posits, may come from those who already worked beyond 40 hours spending even more time at their desks. In other words, not everyone is working more, just those who already were.

Yet the composition of those would-be workaholics has changed. Many blue-collar jobs have morphed into the white-collar world, particularly in the information economy. For those folks, and their bosses, office walls often don’t hem in the job. High-tech tethers to the workplace — pagers, e-mail, take-home laptops — extend work weeks. It’s no longer enough to just tally up your hours at the office. Many employers now assume work can be done anytime, anyplace.

But many workers, particularly younger ones, are more concerned about work-life balance than money or advancement, ISR found. It may in part be a sign of how many recent grads became disillusioned with wired workaholism as the paradigm-shift hoopla of the ’90s was uprooted. “They’re not necessarily bought into the notion of work 80 hours and life will be grand,” says ISR’s Patrick Kulesa.

Even among corporate innovators, it’s harder to inspire loyalty. Nokia has faced layoffs. Microsoft ended employee stock options and signaled an end to many millionaire dreams. Southwest has been hammered by its unions, which want the airline to overhaul salaries and work rules. Unions also see the overtime changes, as well as the growing number of tech jobs being shipped overseas, as a rallying point. “The working conditions, while they’re not inside a factory, are in many ways every bit as exploitive as in the old-line factories,” says the AFL-CIO’s Owens. “I really do think that there is a change in the air.”

And so exists the American workplace, confused and complex, its workers unsure how long and how hard to work. U.S. employees still have some of the highest work hours among developed nations. There have been calls to echo European nations like France and Germany, where shorter work weeks were mandated as full-employment engines.

The 40-hour figure seems to be holding: Though they disagree about whether it should be law, both employers and unions acknowledge 40 hours as a cultural benchmark, something we’ve all come to accept. Still, those 40 hours are tallied in far more diverse ways and that flexibility can be tricky to accomplish. The overtime overhaul may simply hint at a larger fight to come over worker rights and pay. Companies want clarity on work rules and HR costs under control, but also want workers motivated. Employees want enough time to enjoy life, but not at the cost of a decent paycheck.

As Don Kranz drives his daughter to cheerleading camp, he considers the 10-hour days he’ll have the rest of the week to make up for it: “It is a balancing act.”

This was originally published August 25, 2003.

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