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by Anders Hayden
One of the top challenges facing most of us in today’s fast paced modern world is that there is so much to do and seemingly so little time to do it in.
This article looks at how we can heal what has become a dysfunctional relationship with time. This apparent lack of time causes stress, anxiety and disease.
It’s late October. You’ve been working hard all year and feel like you’re ready for some time off. How about taking the rest of the year? If you’ve been working as much as the average American employee, you’ve already clocked as many hours as a full-time worker does over an entire year in many European countries.
Of course, Europeans don’t just stop work nine to ten weeks before the New Year. Instead, European nations have introduced a wide range of shorter work-time policies. Their goals, which vary in importance in each country, include: improving the quality of life for working people, promoting work-family balance and gender equity, creating opportunities for skills-upgrading and lifelong learning, and reducing unemployment by better distributing the available jobs.
While Western Europe is not a worker’s paradise, its various shorter work-time policies are valuable examples of ways that public policies can foster “time affluence” alongside material affluence.
International Work-time Gap
One of the first products of the industrial revolution was a dramatic increase in work hours for most people, with 13- and 14-hour days, 70- or 80-hour weeks, or more, common in many countries in the nineteenth century. In response, working people embarked on a difficult struggle for work-time reduction, which, over time, has delivered achievements such as the eight-hour day, the two-day weekend, and paid vacations.
The United States was once an international work-time reduction leader. Henry Ford’s auto plants introduced a 40-hour week in 1926, while German autoworkers had to wait until 1967 for a similar standard. In the 1930s, the U.S. and France were among the first countries to legislate a 40-hour week, and Congress seriously considered a 30-hour bill. By contrast, Saturday was a regular working day in the Netherlands until the 1960s. Sweden did not reach a 40-hour standard until 1973.
After World War II, the American shorter work-time movement ground to a halt, while many European nations caught up with and surpassed American standards. From 1979 to 2000, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway benefited from work-time reductions of nearly 10 percent or more. Work hours have also fallen dramatically in South Korea and Japan, which now has a lower annual estimate than the United States.
Workweek Below 40 Hours
While many Americans long for the days when they worked only 40 hours per week, several European countries have recently reduced the standard workweek below 40 hours.
The boldest recent initiative is France’s 35-hour week, which was announced in 1997 and became the legislated standard in 2000. The “shorter workweek” has taken many flexible forms, including extra days off (an average of 16 per year), shorter daily hours, and alternating four- and five-day weeks. In 2001, France’s national planning agency found “indisputable” evidence that work-time reduction was creating vast numbers of new jobs, helping to bring unemployment down from 12.5 percent in 1997 to an eighteen-year low of 8.6 percent.
A recent major study found that the majority of French workers (60 percent), said that shorter hours had improved their quality of life, versus only 15 percent with a negative experience. The effect on quality of work, however, has been more mixed. Roughly half said the 35-hour week had not changed their working conditions, with others equally divided over whether conditions had improved or deteriorated.
Where complaints exist, increased workloads, as a result of insufficient new hiring, and the effects of increased work-time flexibility - such as more evening and weekend work in return for shorter hours overall - are often the culprits. France’s 35-hour week is still a work in progress. But despite some concerns and controversies, it has delivered important employment and quality of life improvements overall.
Rather than a dramatic legislated leap forward, the Netherlands (36 or 38 hours), Denmark (37), Norway (37.5), and Belgium (39 in 1999, 38 in 2003) have relied on national agreements between employers and labor unions to gradually cut the workweek. By 1996, almost one-quarter of German employees enjoyed a 35-hour week through their collective agreement.
A shorter workweek is not only on the agenda in Europe’s wealthier northern nations. In the 1990s, Portugal cut its workweek from 48 to 40 hours. Portuguese unions, like those in Greece, are now campaigning for 35 hours. Shorter hours are also gaining ground in Spain, where 1.4 million workers had a 35-hour week by the end of 2001.
Not all European countries have been making similar progress. For example, in the United Kingdom, Europe’s “long-hours capital,” one in six employees works more than 48 hours a week. Still, on average, even British workers put in far fewer hours annually than do Americans.
Four to Six Week Vacations
Many Americans, who have no legally-mandated right to paid vacations, suffer from “vacation deficit disorder.” A typical U.S. worker earns only 13.8 vacation days per year, while 22.5 million private sector workers have no paid vacation at all.
Across the Atlantic, the European Union (EU) Working Time Directive requires a minimum of four weeks paid leave each year for all employees, and several EU countries have five weeks (25 working days) of vacation by law. Dutch, German, and Italian workers have gained roughly 30 vacation days, on average, through collective bargaining.
In 1998, a national strike shut down Denmark over the demand for a sixth week of vacation, later phased-in through five additional paid leave days. Some might think that Danish workers were asking for too much, but the strike is best seen as a struggle by working people to share in a booming economy, and as an enlightened choice of time over money as the way to take that share. In 2002, Sweden announced plans to catch up with its neighbor by phasing-in five more paid leave days, which employees can choose to take as vacation time, individual days off, or shorter daily work hours.
Paid Parental Leave
Spending time with newborn children is one of the most important reasons to scale back hours of paid work. The Family Medical Leave Act gives American parents the right to a mere twelve weeks of unpaid leave after birth or adoption. In Western Europe, parental leave is generally much longer and paid.
Sweden’s system is one of the most developed - parents can take 15 months of job-protected leave per child, at up to 80 percent of their previous pay. The leave can be taken flexibly, at any time until the child reaches eight years of age. A “father’s month” - 30 days reserved for the father - encourages men to play a role in child care. In Norway, parents can take 42 weeks of leave at 100 percent of their previous wage, or 52 weeks at 80 percent. German parents have a very lengthy leave entitlement - up to three years, full-time or part-time - but the rate of pay is relatively low: about $300 per month for two years or $450 per month for one year.
Right to Choose Conditions
Some European countries, most notably the Netherlands, have recently shifted emphasis from collective work-time measures, such as a shorter standard workweek, to individualized options. In 2000, a new Working Hours Adjustment Act gave Dutch workers the right to reduce their hours of work, while part-timers can request longer hours. Germany introduced similar legislation the same year.
The Price of Success?
There’s certainly no evidence to suggest that only the American long-hours model can deliver low unemployment. Work-time reduction has been an important job-creation tool in some countries, such as the Netherlands, although, on its own, it is no guarantee of low unemployment.
Now, what about productivity? Several shorter-hours innovators in Europe - Belgium, France, the Netherlands, and Norway - are actually more productive per hour of labor than is the United States. Higher hourly productivity in these countries is almost certainly due, in part, to shorter work-time’s beneficial effects on employee morale, less fatigue and burnout, lower absenteeism, higher quality of work, and better health.
Take Norway, for example. In 2001, its hourly productivity was 10 per cent higher than the United States, but its annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per person was about 17 per cent lower. The main difference was that Norwegians were working 29 percent fewer hours than Americans. (It’s worth noting Norway’s poverty rate is one-quarter, and its incarceration rate one-tenth of the US)
In the final analysis, the issue largely boils down to how nations choose to benefit from the capacity to produce more in each hour of labor. Is there more to the good life than maximizing output and consumption? Are work-family balance and a less stressful pace of life equally valuable? If so, then it’s time to ask how North America can regain its status as a world leader in creating not only material affluence, but time affluence as well.
Anders Hayden is the author of Sharing the Work, Sparing the Planet: Work Time, Consumption, & Ecology (London: Zed Books, 1999). Hayden’s essay is excerpted from John de Graaf’s Take Back Your Time: Fighting Overwork and Time Poverty in America (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2003). October 24 is the second annual Take Back Your Time Day.
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