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Time - Man of the Year
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1992-10-19
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BUSINESS, Page 57LABORWork Ethic -- In Spades
Feeling rushed? Americans are working much harder than before
Kiichi Miyazawa was playing to the hometown crowd when he
told the Japanese parliament last week that American workers are
lazy, greedy and lack a work ethic. Insulting as the Prime
Minister's comments were, they were not the worst thing that
Japanese politicians have said about Americans in the past few
weeks. No wonder Americans are wounded. It isn't just that the
Japanese view of U.S. workers is degrading, it's that it is
wrong -- and woefully out of date.
There are two kinds of U.S. workers: the ones the Japanese
imagine and the ones Americans see around them, putting in long
hours and worrying about the future. Miyazawa's description of
poorly motivated workers, unwilling to put in long hours, sounds
like the classic management view of featherbedding autoworkers
in the 1960s. While he imagines workers who are doing less and
less, the truth is that Americans are working longer and longer
hours. Perhaps Miyazawa has the right to strike back at the
quality of American effort after listening to Lee Iacocca blame
his problems on Tokyo. But are the problems of U.S. companies
the result of a lack of effort by the average worker?
Not according to Juliet Schor's impressive new book, The
Overworked American (Basic Books; $21). A Harvard economist,
Schor charts the relentless expansion of American work and the
steady erosion of leisure time over the past 20 years. It turns
out that the average U.S. employee puts in 163 more hours a year
now than in 1970. And while it is true that Japanese
manufacturing workers put in six weeks' worth of hours more
every year than their U.S. counterparts, they do it by working
six-day weeks and skipping most of their vacation time.
Meanwhile, Americans are laboring eight weeks' worth of hours
more than the Germans.
Moonlighting has proliferated as businesses have shifted
to greater use of part-time workers. More than 7 million
Americans hold two or three jobs to make ends meet. Overall,
women are paying the highest price: for every additional hour
they have added to their jobs, they have shaved less than half
an hour from their labor at home. Certainly American business
must find ways to operate more efficiently. But simply keeping
employees in the office longer is not the answer.
By Janice Castro.