with Our Personal Time
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Time Bandits page 2 of 5 | |||||
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How Work Sneaks Away with Our Personal Time |
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Jennifer Vogel & Robin Marks | |||
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American workers are spending
longer
and longer hours in the trenches, armed with beepers and palm pilots,
driven
by bosses who demand more time than commanding officers, and forgetting
that
there might be something better to do. We've begun to live our jobs and
we're being told by big companies that there's something heroic in it for
us.
According to a recent study by the Families and Work Institute, employees today spend an average of 44 hours per week working. If you take part-timers who put in less than 20 hours out of the equation, the average work week expands to 47.1 hours. That's 3.5 hours more than we were working in 1977. On top of that, the study shows that one-third of employees bring their work home at least once a week. So it's no surprise that the number of employees who would like to work fewer hours has risen 17 percentage points in the last two decades. Employers want us to feel good about putting in more hours--after all, getting more work out of fewer people saves dollars on health insurance and other benefits. They offer stock options, "incentives" to make us feel like we have a stake in the company. They organize us into teams so we feel like we can't let our co-workers down. They even train us in groups, to create bonds not unlike those established in army boot camp. They call us "associates," rather than employees. Our workaholism is rewarded with tickets to the ball game or a company mouse pad or maybe, if we're lucky, a cheesy recognition ceremony. |
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