Labor: Work Ethic -- In Spades Feeling rushed?

By Janice Castro

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 It isn't just that the Japanese view of U.S. workers is degrading, it's that it is wrong -- and woefully out of date.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.