Middle class Canadians may have more disposable income than they did 20 years ago. But they’re working longer hours to get it.
Between 1980 and 2001, the average disposable income of couples with children and full-time jobs increased by just over eight per cent. But In 2000, Canadian parents were actually working 206 more hours per year for pay – equal to 26 more eight-hour work days – than they did in 1981.
A comparison of work hours vs. income shows that a substantial portion of people’s increased income comes because they are working more. They have essentially “bought” their increased disposable income with increased work effort. Yet at the same time, many of these same Canadians feel overworked and none the richer.
Economist Juliet Schor finds the roots of today’s long work hours in “the work and spend cycle.” High levels of consumption keep us moving on a “treadmill,” says Schor, requiring long hours of work to provide us with more money so we can buy more goods and services.
Average Americans, for example, now consume more than twice what they consumed 40 years ago. According to Schor, between 1983 and 1987 alone, Americans purchased 51 million microwaves, 44 million washers and dryers, 85 million colour televisions, 48 million VCRs, and 23 million cordless phones – all for an adult population of 180 million.
The same trends can be seen in Canada. In 1982, for example, only six per cent of Nova Scotia households had microwave ovens. By 1997, 87 per cent had them. During that period, the fastest growing industries in Canada were computers, audio and visual electronics, trucks and vans, and child-care.
Are all our new ‘labour-saving’ devices and appliances saving us time? Studies of U.S. women have found that those with more consumer durables in their homes work no fewer hours than those with less.
Bigger houses, fewer people, more stuff
The growth in consumption is compounded by the fact that our houses are larger than they were 60 years ago, even as families have become smaller. In 1943, the average Canadian house was 800 square feet. Today, the average house has more than doubled in size, to 1,800 square feet. Yet the decline in family size means that these large houses are occupied by fewer people than ever before. In 1961, for example, there were 4.2 persons per household and 1.6 rooms per person in the average Nova Scotia home. By 1997 there were only 2.5 persons per household, but 2.4 rooms per person.
It’s also costing Canadians more to work those extra hours. The inflation rate for child-care and eating out has been much higher than the overall inflation rate, and very much higher than the increase in real wages. So Canadians have to work longer hours to pay for those services, which in turn makes them even more dependent on paid child-care and restaurant food.
This article was originally published in Reality Check: The Canadian Review of Wellbeing, a joint project of The Atkinson Charitable Foundation and GPI Atlantic.