Somebody posted this essay by Juliet Schor (not Schorling!) from Technology Review on the web. Possibly a copyright violation but I doubt linking to it constitutes one, so I did. Here's a brief (fair use) excerpt:
The leisure crunch didn't have to happen. Whenever productivity grows, we are presented with the possibility of receiving either more free time or more money-and since 1948, the productivity of the U.S. worker has more than doubled. In other words, we could now produce our 1948 standard of living (measured in marketed good services) in less than half the time it took in that year. We could have chosen a four-hour day. Or a working year of six months. Or each worker in the United States could now be taking every other year off from work, with pay. Some economists in the 1950s even predicted that today's standard retirement age would be 38.
But between 1948 and the present, we did not use any of the "productivity dividend" to reduce hours. Although productivity grew rapidIy-at about 3 percent a year-in the first two decades after 1948, work hours have held steady. Since 1969, productivity growth has been slower, averaging just over 1 percent a year. Yet hours have risen markedly.
What went wrong? Why has leisure been such a conspicuous casuality of prosperity? Much of the anwer lies in our insidious cycle of "work-and-spend."
In its starkest terms, the cycle operates like this: Employers ask for long hours from employees. They do so in part because long-hour jobs pay more and thus are more desirable to workers, who will labor more productively to keep them. Also, the fewer workers a firm needs to hire, the less it has to spend on fringe benefits. The high pay, in turn, creates a high level of consumption. People buy houses and go into debt; luxuries become necessities; Smiths keep up with Joneses-and workers accept, or even ask for, longer hours so they can go on spending. Work-and-spend has become a powerful dynamic keeping us from a more relaxed and leisured way of life.
Posted by sandwichman at September 28, 2004 09:42 PM