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Workaholism in America Is Hurting the Economy

235 points by stevekinney 12y ago

coreymgilmore 12y ago
I feel this article is a little weak in one major sense: comparing the US to European countries based on non-working time is okay, but you also need to compare a metric like GDP. Using this, the US is #6 world-wide only behind two European countries. So yes, Euros may get more time off, but the US is a way more economically powerful and productive country economically. Hurting the economy, sure people get burned out, but it is hard to come to that conclusion based on the data given and the authors points.
- lallysingh 12y ago
  Well, normalized to working population, yes?
- autokad 12y ago
  it also tries to state that working hard leads to less productivity, when US productivity eclipses most european countries. i had a consultant complain that they hate working with europeans. the people always go on vacation and projects get held up, and they come back and have to get oriented with everything again. by the time they catch up they are on vacation again
  - thejosh 12y ago
    That's the funniest excuse I've ever heard for Americans not having holiday leave.
    - deleted 12y ago
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  - thegeomaster 12y ago
    How big a sample size of Europeans does your consultant have? Your claim that "Europeans go on vacation and projects get held up and they can never catch up again" is... dubious at best.
    - walshemj 12y ago
      Yes I know a CTO who worked in the valley (I think he reported to Vint at one point) and the UK. He commented that the USA workers didn't produce more even though they only had 2 weeks vs the 5+ the civil service T&C derived uk workers did. spent far more time goofing off and gossiping and taking sneaky long weekends to go skiing was his comment.
      - _delirium 12y ago
        Danes who work in the U.S. are often very surprised by the lack of organization in American workplaces. People work long hours but they seem somewhat haphazard hours, at least from a foreign perspective. Meetings are a particularly big cultural friction point: Danes expect a meeting to start exactly at a specific time, have an agenda distributed at least a day ahead of time, stick to the agenda, and end at exactly the agreed ending time. So you have a 10-11am meeting, you get going on the main topics of discussion at 10:00 (not 10:15 after 15 mins of small-talk and waiting for stragglers to come in), people have come prepared with what they're discussing, and it's guaranteed to be done by 11:00.
    - autokad 12y ago
      i made a statement, backed it up by mentioning productivity, and then made a reference to a real world example that I have observed, unlike the article that just mostly made platitudes. if you'd like further evidence, the EU area has an unemployment rate close to 12%. companies are not anxious to hire europeans for one reason or another.
      - _delirium 12y ago
        Almost all the EU unemployment is in the countries with long working hours and shorter vacations, oddly enough. Scandinavia, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands don't have high unemployment. People work reasonably short hours, take long vacations, and the many consulting companies here have no problem getting contracts, both within Europe and worldwide. The European countries with major economic problems are in the south and east, where they tend not to have as generous vacation and hour policies in the first place. If you work with a Greek or Spanish consulting company, they will be there any time you want, bringing everyone into the office at 3am on a Saturday their time, if you ask for it. Good luck getting a Danish company to do that! Yet the Danish companies are not having trouble getting work.
  - Nursie 12y ago
    >> the people always go on vacation and projects get held up, and they come back and have to get oriented with everything again. by the time they catch up they are on vacation again It's almost as if work is something they do to support a life outside the office. Outrageous.
  - Spooky23 12y ago
    All of the measurements are based on the workforce, which is a term of art that means something. When you get more efficient, lay off people and have everyone else do 1.5-3x more work, you get efficient. The problem is, many of the discarded people are ending up on disability, and are thus out of the workforce. I'd like to compare the productivity of various societies based on population.
  - kps 12y ago
    > it also tries to state that working hard leads to less productivity No, it says that working longer leads to less productivity.
  - autokad 12y ago
    i clearly set something off. I didnt mean to disrespect EU workers, but it does seem like their vacation time is on the extreme side where as our seemingly lack there of is weighted towards the over working side but not by a huge deal. IMO
- Someone1234 12y ago
  The US has had a GDP advantage since the second world war. But since then much of the EU has rolled out socialised medicine and more workers rights (maternity leave, mandatory vacation, even a higher minimum wage) and they haven't slipped down the rankings as a result. Understanding why the US's GDP is as positive as it is is a much bigger topic that takes us into areas like natural resources (e.g. oil, metals, etc) but also history (e.g. World War 1, world War 2, even the cold war). It is a pretty weak argument to dismiss all of the article's points just by repeating "but GDP!!!" over and over which is more or less what your post is.
  - JackFr 12y ago
    To quote Bobbi Flekman, "Money talks. Bullshit walks."
- lnanek2 12y ago
  Yeah, all these Europe's way are better articles and books fall a little flat considering how terrible their economies are nowadays. It sounds like they are saying, "come be like us! Our nations can't even make their debt payments!"
  - baq 12y ago
    as if the US didn't go through a debt-ceiling crisis every other year.
    - Karunamon 12y ago
      Which is a completely manufactured "problem" whereby the completely real problem the EU nations in question had was that the money simply wasn't there.
  - mike_hearn 12y ago
    If you want to compare individual EU countries with something, compare them against individual US states, which also vary widely in terms of how well they do economically.
- jcfrei 12y ago
  I think an even better statistic would be the following (GPD per hours worked): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_hour_worked http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_... The differences are remarkable. However the comparison is not entirely fair with countries like Norway resting at the top. Norway derives a large part of its GDP from industries which are not very labor heavy but contribute heavily to GDP (Norway's economy is >50% based on petrochemicals).
- pbh101 12y ago
  Quick note: according to Wikipedia (citing IMF, World Bank, etc) the US is #1 in GDP at ~$16 trillion, almost double China in the number two spot. We are number 6 in PPP, but if we're talking economic output I would argue the former is more relevant.
- deleted 12y ago
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- jbernier 12y ago
  But how much of that GDP is going to the workers who're putting in the long hours? Great time to be an employer in the US.
- rbehrends 12y ago
  The problem with GDP per capita comparisons is that GDP is a bit of a weak measure of economic performance. It is a measure of raw, unadjusted economic throughput (cash flow, essentially), not necessarily a measure of economic performance. It is increased by an inefficient healthcare system (healthcare spending makes up 17.7% of the US GDP all on its own, while most of the affluent European countries are in the 9%-11% range), by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by the United States' comparatively high energy usage per capita. See also RFK's famous quote one the GNP [1]. The reason why GDP is still used prominently as an economic indicator, while economists have been looking for better metrics, all those other metrics involve a fair amount of subjectivity. And GDP is still a pretty decent predictor of economic performance, despite its known weaknesses. But in the end, higher GDP does not necessarily translate into higher quality of life (of course, once the gap is large enough, it almost certainly does, at least for the average person, but we aren't talking orders of magnitude here). I don't think you'll see overall higher QoL in the US compared to Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, or France (the four OECD countries with the fewest hours worked per capita), regardless of where the GDP per capita is. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77IdKFqXbUY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77IdKFqXbUY
  - brightsize 12y ago
    In the past two years, I've spent six months living in Germany. The quality-of-life difference between that country and the US is striking. In Germany, it appeared that ordinary people could both afford to, and were inclined to, partake often in small pleasures such as having a Bier and a bite at outdoor cafes in the summer. The streets were lined with these cafes and restaurants, most doing a brisk business. I never saw so many cut-flower shops in my life. The small pleasure of flowers was both affordable AND something that was on the minds of ordinary people, something that one would never encounter in the US. Here, such things are looked upon as frivolous luxuries, and financially they are that for the 99%. If you can afford such things as cut flowers, then, we're told by our betters, you can also work for less money or work more for what you're earning currently. Why do you deserve luxuries, peon? Despite what the pro-workaholic, GDP-flaunting people in the US would say, Germans on the whole seem to be quite materially prosperous. But with that, they are culturally prosperous in a quality-of-life sense too. They seem to expect it, whereas in the US a high QoL is reserved for the wealthy. Obviously I'm not saying that every German lives this way, necessarily. But I think that this cultural observation is accurate. I think if average people in the US would be brought to understand that they too could have a modest life containing a big helping of everyday pleasures and without life-sucking, excessive work expectations, there'd be a revolution.
- Derbasti 12y ago
  If you compare countries, a more productive economy is a good measure. If you compare people and lives, not so much.
rayiner 12y ago
The article focuses on professionals, but I don't know if that's the angle I'm concerned about. American professionals work more, but they are also paid more. They also have much better vacation and leave policies. More concerning is the plight of median workers, who aren't making a lot more these days than their European counterparts, but have much worse vacation policies to deal with.
- dasil003 12y ago
  Vacation policies are the least of it. How about the lack of a safety net? Take health care. Civilized people should agree that medical care in a rich country should be available to everyone. The thought of people dying in the streets from preventable disease and injury sounds pretty horrendous. But for the past 20 years we've been fed the same fabricated FUD about socialized medicine that has no basis in reality. People still genuinely believe that America has the best healthcare, which is arguably true for the 1%, but not for the average person. We have major structural problems the media completely ignores. Just one personal example, last December I needed to buy a 6-pill dose of medication while visiting family for the holidays in the US (I currently live in the UK). This cost me $600, $100 per pill. And it turns out that this medication is not as effective as the generic that would cost $2 per pill. But because there is no profitability this medication is not currently manufactured in the US. Had I been in the UK I could have walked into a pharmacy and bought this medication for £10. Incidentally, while I was in line, the woman in front of me was purchasing a perscription of antibiotics, which cost $200, but she only had $100, so they only sold her half the dosage! I was shocked a trained pharmacist would be allowed to do this considering the perils of antibiotic resistance, but it's also pretty inhumane to withhold medication. Frankly, the patriotic bullshit that Fox News and CNN feeds the populace about how much better we have it than Canada or the UK needs to stop. America needs to pull its head out of its ass and realize we are little better than a third-world country for anyone below median income who doesn't have a good group health insurance policy.
  - maximumoverload 12y ago
    Obamacare argument was inevitable, wasn't it.
minikites 12y ago
It seems like study after study shows that longer working hours don't result in long term productivity increases, but managers aren't listening. Is this an example of market failure or is there more going on?
- thenipper 12y ago
  My guess is it is people trusting their 'gut' over a study. Working long hours looks impressive. If you stay late or come in early you look like a team player who is willing to put in the extra effort. Whether or not that effort is actually valuable is immaterial, the appearance is what matters. Call me cynical but I'd imagine that drives a lot of these overworked schedules.
- Zaephyr 12y ago
  My family had a manufacturing business employing ~100 people. When orders spiked, we found the performance gain from working overtime was consistently short term. Much beyond 3-4 weeks wasn't worth the effort and expense, and a decision to add additional people or extend delivery dates had to be made. That's not to say we couldn't get additional production out, it just did horrible things to the our cost structure. I think what you're getting at is the belief that working longer is equal to harder.
cmollis 12y ago
It's frowned upon to take any time off in the US. I've seen it viewed as a sign of a lack of commitment or even laziness. Consequently, we take less time off because we're scared we're going to lose our jobs. No one is congratulated for taking time off in the middle of a project for your 'sanity' or 'to re-charge'. Everyone is scared. There is no safety net. It's no way to live, but it's our reality.
- Someone1234 12y ago
  > There is no safety net. That's a wonderfully succinct way of describing the US. It seems like in a lot of EU countries if you fail there is something to catch you (higher, longer, easier to get unemployment pay for one example), whereas there really is no lower limit on how low the US will let you fall (e.g. healthcare is a privilege not a right in the US). They do say that the US has some of the highest anti-depressant medication usage in the whole world (or was it more than the rest of the world combined? I can never remember). That isn't a surprise when literally your health, shelter, food, etc is all riding on keeping a job. Thank god for Obama care and the new ban on pre-existing condition limits (i.e. that you could not get insurance if you were sick before). It kept people enslaved into a single job if they ever got sick since they could never afford to lose that health insurance or they'd die.
  - switch007 12y ago
    >It seems like in a lot of EU countries if you fail there is something to catch you (higher, longer, easier to get unemployment pay for one example) For the avoidance of doubt, that does not include England (these days). People with cancer in the final stages are declared fit to work
    - sitkack 12y ago
      I know right, perfect for uncontrolled cancer drug studies.
    - mike_hearn 12y ago
      Can you show me a link for that? I'd be interested in reading about it. What I've read is that a lot of people on disability benefits (higher than jobseekers allowance) were in fact just fine and when properly re-examined magically stopped being disabled. However, that assumes the review assessment was more reliable than the old one. I'd be interested in data showing whether it is or isn't.
peter303 12y ago
According to the BLS only 146M people are working in US - 46% of total population or 59% of working-age adults. And 26M of these are parttime. Goes to show you working hours are not evenly distributed among people.
AndrewKemendo 12y ago
>The United States is the only advanced country that doesn't guarantee that its citizens will get paid vacation time and holidays I find the reasoning consistently maddening. What they should be saying is that there is no federal mandate for private employers to pay workers during vacation/convalescence/maternity leave. In point of fact, for government workers there is paid annual/maternity/paternity leave which ends up being "use or lose" and in effect becomes a mandatory leave - something universally omitted in these articles. I think this just comes back to the classic debate about how the American economy is organized. Our constitution and US Code is not organized such that the government can easily dictate laws to private employers, that is by design.
- ghshephard 12y ago
  Which, of course, makes it great for the private employers (the 1%), but not so great for the private employees (the 99% that was mentioned in the article)
  - bradleysmith 12y ago
    over half of the 6mil firms in the US with payrolls in this country have between 1 and 9 employees. ('08 numbers[0]). "employer" != 1% "policies good for employers" != "policies only good for 1%" [0]-https://www.census.gov/econ/smallbus.html https://www.census.gov/econ/smallbus.html
    - VLM 12y ago
      A lot of them are "employee in name only" contractors. Doesn't mean much. I've done it myself. There are tax implications when you get 1099'd, as long as you go in eyes open it'll be OK. Don't forget to file your quarterly estimated payments, the IRS isn't amused if you skip one. There's a lot of talk on HN about the natural evolved tribal size of human orgs being only XYZ people so when we inevitably have a larger than XYZ group its epic fail. Well... it goes the other way too, and its quite possible that natural evolved civilization etc requires more than 2 guys on a "tribe" long term. It doesn't have to be the end of the world or apocalyptic, merely suggesting encouraging microfirms might not be a wise policy decision.
UweSchmidt 12y ago
Often, when articles highlight bad laws or customs, economical arguments are brought up. Workaholism -> backfires and is bad for the economy and in recent threads here on HN: Workplace surveillance -> backfires, people feel controlled and performance suffers Government espionage in USA -> backfires, people lose trust in US businesses I don't feel that this is the strongest argument. "Please treat us better, it is in your own interest!"? Germany's vacation was achieved through politics (labor laws) and unions (labor contracts). The economic argument probably won't work, since economic considerations (real or imagined/short-term/local maximum...) have led to the current situation in the first place.
- sashrive 12y ago
  Great point. One way to argue for more vacation time is that it's economically a better idea- but you're setting yourself up for a tough argument. Instead, it might be easier to argue it socially or through a simple declaration like, "this is what we want".
- cryoshon 12y ago
  It's the only argument here in the USA. It sucks that things are this way, but the only way to justify anything or argue for anything is an appeal to higher profits. Money is this country's highest value, and all other values such as decency or shared prosperity have been thrown into the garbage and decried as socialism or wishful thinking.
  - PythonicAlpha 12y ago
    And that is (in my opinion) the biggest problem of all. Focusing on profit margins alone (without any respect to the people), leads to burn-out, social discrepancies to the extreme (go to South Africa/Kapstadt, if you want to see, where it will end) and at last will dehumanize the human race. I write that, because I see in my country, where it goes and we long where an isle inside the ocean of capitalism. Now, capitalism has conquered humanity and capitalism will kill humanity finally, it seems. Our capitalism of today exploits all the resources of this planet (oil, water, air, environment, humans, ...) in an increasing fashion and because this planet has only limited resources, soon all will break down. The question only is, what entity will break down first: capitalism, this planet, the human race. What use will you make of your five smartphones, three tablets and seven cars, when your children will have no future?
JackFr 12y ago
And yet compared to those European countries, the US experiences significantly higher GDP per capita. Doing work and getting paid for it hardly seems like it's hurting the economy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP%29_per_capita http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP... As to the studies cited in the article I would point to the OECD labor productivity statistics which, in the aggregate, seem to disagree. http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=LEVEL http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=LEVEL The fact that Americans seem to only be able to find identity and meaning in their work, so much so as that it causes a psychic crisis to leave even temporarily, is the real problem, if it need be called such, rather than some imagined hurt to the economy. But that problem is so ingrained in our culture it is never going away.
- claybinion 12y ago
  Can you explain what you mean by your last paragraph? The inability to find meaning and indentity in ones work causes people a psychic crisis to leave their jobs even temporarily? That problem is an imagined hurt to the economy?
  - JackFr 12y ago
    What I mean to say is that Amercians are overworked because they like to be overworked. Typically an American's sole sense of identity comes from his or her job, and while we give lip service to 'happiness' as our life's goal unless happiness means ambition and success in one's work, you are an oddball. The problem isn't that Americans are hurting the economy with over work; the problem, if you want to call it one, is that because we have nothing else in our lives, we don't mind that we're overworked.
    - stedlev 12y ago
      I don't get how you come to the conclusion that no one minds it. I am very lucky and have built a business where I have lots of free time, and I have yet to find a person who says I am wasting my life by spending my free time learning new languages, teaching myself new things, backpacking the world, and developing new hobbies. People say they like their work and they "live" for their work because it's all they have, yet they aren't happy with it. If they were, they wouldn't be so compelled to go out and drink weekends away. Americans have no choice but to be overworked. I look at professional jobs where I could use my computer science degree, and I have no choice. I basically have to choose a job where I work more than 40 hours a week. And in the US, a lot of employers only pay you for when you work. So that hour lunch break doesn't count toward the time you're working. Neither does your commute. So there's a large swath of people in the US who work 10 hours a day, have an hour of two of commute each way, and an hour of idle time at work. meaning worst case scenarios, you're looking at 13+ hours a day spent at doing work related things. Something that people have to do that consumes their life will be perceived as something that that person likes, kind of like how Stockholm Syndrome works. No one ever speaks of how these long hours affect Americans to the point where they don't have time for constructive hobbies, time to learn about the world, etc, and that is going to hurt Americans far more than anything else. I realize that their is more distance for Americans to see the world than Europeans or Asians, however, you would think that if seeing the world was considered important, that Americans would have more time off and more paid vacation to make up for the fact that you need to travel so far to experience vastly different cultures. You've got to think about the fact that we have a generation of people raising children who only know how to work while the rest of the developed world is taking long vacations and living in the assumption that a worker should have access to health care, education, etc. I am terrified of how the next generation of Americans will turn out. They're going to grow up seeing both their parents work 50 hour work weeks, have no hobbies, never travel to anything inspiring and only travelling for escapism, and thinking that they have it better in the USA than anywhere else. I don't plan on having children in the USA. I don't think I could morally raise a child and fill their heads with delusions of grandeur and getting rich quick by working 65 hours a week, only to see them swallowed by student loans and debt, never escaping that mortgage until they die, while I look them in the eye and tell them the people in France work half as much yet make more money. Please, look at these numbers: http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=LEVEL# http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=LEVEL# I realize they are a bit dated (the new dataset doesn't include the metric I want to look at), but USA already works harder than the Japanese. USA works almost 30% more hours than Netherlands. That's massive. To put that into perspective, that means an 8 hour workday in the USA translates into a 5.6 hour work day in the Netherlands.
ghshephard 12y ago
Even worse is the new trend in technology companies to eliminate "Set Vacation". It used to be the case that you felt "obliged" somehow to take your 10 days of vacation a year, because you saw it piling up. Even better, if you were laid off, you could get the vacation in cash, and that helped when you were cut off without a job. But now, a lot of technology companies are saying, "No Set Vacation - you need to negotiate with your manager if you want some" - which, in my experience, has resulted in a lot of people over the last two years taking zero vacation. It's not good for them. It's not good for the company. About the only people who are happy about this are Finance who no longer have to carry that liability on their books.
- vvvv 12y ago
  Is there no legal requirement for minimum number of days off?
  - tokenadult 12y ago
    Is there no legal requirement for minimum number of days off? It depends on the nature of the employment. A few occupations (notably in banking) have MANDATORY days off. (Forcing bankers in certain categories of jobs to take vacations is a good way to detect long-term embezzlement schemes.) But there are definitely programming jobs in the United States in which the company says, "You can take time off whenever you like," which in practice means "You can take time off whenever the company isn't in crunch time," which ends up meaning never. Freedom of contract and flexibility in working arrangements is the hallmark of the United States economy and indeed is one of the reasons that the United States is as wealthy as it is--people choose the trade-offs they like among many possibilities.
    - brown9-2 12y ago
      The banking example you cite are voluntary industry practices or self-regulation, not legally enforced.
  - amalcon 12y ago
    No, there is not.
nuff 12y ago
Ninety-four percent of professional workers put in 50 or more hours, and nearly half work 65 or above. This sounds crazy exaggerated without any citation. According to wiki, "According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average non-farm private sector employee worked 34.5 hours per week as of June 2012." EDIT: reference.. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm
- _archon_ 12y ago
  Your quote includes Wal-mart greeters and burger flippers. I don't find it hard to believe that white collar professionals put in over 50 hours a week on average. My experience is in engineering for manufacturing.
- PythonicAlpha 12y ago
  If you cite government statistics you should also add, that government statistics have a long history of "white-washing" data. At least, that is what I experienced the last decades in my country and I don't live in a 3rd world country!
seventytwo 12y ago
One of the things the move towards a socialized healthcare system will do for this country is focus a debate on how to increase overall well-being within the country, and how to balance that with economic output. Something I think this article misses is the effect our work habits have on our health as a country. Studies have repeatedly shown that those last several hours per week are only marginally productive, but how detrimental might they be? I would imagine the health effects (stress, blood pressure, poor eating habits, lack of exercise, etc.) become amplified in those very hours in which productivity becomes nearly worthless. It's hard to quantify any of this, however, so it might be completely glossed over in the article on purpose. I'm sure that thinking like this will become more prevalent...
justintime2002 12y ago
> Professionals, managers, and executives with a smartphone spend 72 hours a week (including the weekend) checking work e-mail. No, they spend 72 hours a week "interacting with work" in any way. Though the thought of an executive sitting and refreshing an inbox for 10+ hours a day is quite amusing.
henrik_w 12y ago
Related: "Bring back the 40-hour work week" http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_week/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_...
- njharman 12y ago
  Fuck that. Computers, robots and the rest of automation / efficiency gains should (have been, and) be translated into 10-20 hour work week instead of increased consumption and consumerism.
crazy1van 12y ago
This seems too simplistic. The article focuses on one of the inputs to a nation's economic system -- labor and the price of that labor (wages). It seems to truly answer the question "What is it all for?" in an article whose title refers to "hurting the economy" it would make sense to at least discuss the output of that same system by citing GDP or some similar metric.
robg 12y ago
Even as a trained neuroscientist, I was amazed to learn that even mild stress impairs brain functions involved in memory formation and retrieval, attention, and decision making. If you are working long hours, you aren't really working. On less sleep, your brain has to work harder. With chronic stress, you start to impair your core competencies. Sleep is the body's way of mitigating the effects of daily stress.
tekalon 12y ago
While the lack of safety net and fear of being fired are all valid reasons for Americans not taking vacation, what about another reason- they don't know how to vacation. From personal experience, I get twitchy just from being sick/away from work for more than a day. I only take one day at a time of vacation (usually on Friday's to stretch out the weekend, and usually to get extra studying done or run some errands) only to feel like I wasted a day. It could be cultural, my family never took many family vacations (maybe 1 or 2). I'm lucky that my work encourages taking vacations, but the idea of doing so seems so weird for me.
- medell 12y ago
  I know what you mean! In my old office people would bank hours and rather get paid out then take their full vacation. Most of my friends in Europe tell me how their managers practically force them to take time off! (especially in the summer). It seems like it has become so ingrained in the culture that not taking vacation, working long hours and being "busy" has become a badge of honor. But with more and more articles like these I see a shift coming as the new generation seeks more balance and lifestyle.
  - tekalon 12y ago
    I'm 50/50 on the 'badge of honor'. For some it's true. For me, I don't know what to do on vacation. People get bored/anxious when they have nothing to do. Even going on a trip can be hard (planning, financing, dealing with changes, having to rest after the trip).
frozenport 12y ago
What about Asian cultures?
tokenadult 12y ago
Alas, this is about the level of analysis I've come to expect from years of reading The New Republic on issues like this. Neither cultural nor legal conditions surrounding employment in the United States are ideal for workers who have the preferences of the author of this article,[1] but neither are they so horrific that the economy is "hurt" in a big way, especially compared to the economies of other countries. Other comments posted before mine have already pointed out that overall prosperity in the United States is quite high, and I might add that many of the newly industrialized countries of east Asia (which characteristically have high population densities and limited natural resources, and thus are a model of what policies it takes to be prosperous despite a lack of natural advantages) increase steadily in wealth and general prosperity[2] despite ignoring parts of the author's advice. For me, the crucial fact to keep in mind in any of these decry-America threads on Hacker News is that people vote with their feet. The United States continues to be a highly desired country to immigrate to,[3] so whatever trade-offs the United States economy offers, there are still a lot of people who think they are better trade-offs than the trade-offs in the familiar home country they were born in. [1] http://www.newrepublic.com/authors/bryce-covert http://www.newrepublic.com/authors/bryce-covert [2] http://edition.cnn.com/2012/08/17/business/world-rich-list-singapore/ http://edition.cnn.com/2012/08/17/business/world-rich-list-s... [3] http://www.gallup.com/poll/161435/100-million-worldwide-dream-life.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/161435/100-million-worldwide-drea... http://www.census.gov/topics/population/foreign-born.html http://www.census.gov/topics/population/foreign-born.html http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/immigrate/immigrant-process/petition/file.html http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/immigrate/immi... AFTER EDIT: I note the downvotes indicating disagreement, and I am curious about what you disagree with. Please let me know. And I am amused by this correction to the submitted article: "Correction: This piece originally stated that workers with smartphones spent 72 hours a week on their off time checking work e-mail. In fact, the 72 hours include working hours, and the workers are just professionals, managers, and executives. We regret the error." We are not talking about a strongly numerate analysis here.
- Dewie 12y ago
  > Other comments posted before mine have already pointed out that overall prosperity in the United States is quite high, I've seen more that people have pointed out that America is prosperous, not necessarily that America is overall prosperous. The US seems to have one of the highest gini coefficients out of the OECD countries. > For me, the crucial fact to keep in mind in any of these decry-America threads on Hacker News is that people vote with their feet. Which can't be easily decoupled from how well America has managed to market itself in the last 60 or so years, and marketing does not necessarily reflect reality. While the US hasn't been universally loved in all that time - see for example US foreign policy - it seems to have been able to market itself as a great place to live, also for people from developed countries. How long has there been a noticeable trend of "decry America" w.r.t. living standard on the Web?
jasonkester 12y ago
That Cadillac ad is awesome. I'd never seen it before. It watches like a parody, but at the end you're hit by the reality that yes, this guy is being completely serious. The message really is "sure, I traded away my quality of life, but look at all this stuff!" That's actually the notion that Cadillac is trying to sell. Amazing that they're doing such a good job of it. Fortunately, there's no real trick to getting back that quality of life. You just need to take more vacation time. You can negotiate this in to your package, but if you're in as hot a talent market as we are today, you might find more success with simply taking it. "Hey, as a heads up, I'll be taking 3 weeks off at the beginning of June" followed a few months later by "Hey, I'm off to Kalymnos for a couple weeks in October", followed by "I'll probably be out of contact between Xmas and New Years." Note the lack of "asking" above. The correct attitude to take is that it's them who are acting irrationally by suggesting that you shouldn't take a healthy amount of time off to live your life.
- c_plus_minus 12y ago
  I thought that ad was more "look at me, I'm a crazy hard working American AND I drive electric. They're not mutually exclusive!"
- chimeracoder 12y ago
  > "'cause we're the only ones going back up there [the moon]" If only that were true. In many ways, we're further away from being able to reach the moon (or deeper parts of space) than we were 20-30 years ago[0] [0]http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/why-not-space/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/why-not-space/
- nickthemagicman 12y ago
  That guy is the poster child for the Materialistic Self Entitled Baby Boomer Me Generation. Materialism and greed are literally everything that is wrong with the world. Spoilied Douchebags like he and his generation are a legacy hangover from post-WW2 America, a time of middle class economic excess greater than any the HUMAN RACE has ever seen. Americans aren't exceptional in any way. We just got lucky by being the only 1st world country not in the middle of World War 2 so we reaped ton's of resources and opportunities from that and we have been coasting on it ever since and attributing it to our 'exceptionalism'. Americans love to believe that the individual is greater than his situation. Such bullshit. You want hard workers look at China. I can't wait until Communist ass China is the next world power and assholes like the guy in the commercial don't understand why 'Mericans aren't exceptional any more. I'm so grateful that the new American generation's self awareness, global consciousness, hacker ethic, lack of racism, community values, and so many more positive qualities are replacing douchebags like this.
nickthemagicman 12y ago
It's actually really hard to find a job that pays a decent wage and gives a good amount of time off. The kind of job where you can 'work to live'. Our mentality of "Americans love to work hard" is misleading. I'd say Americans are just optimistic. We are sort of 'forced' to work hard so we're optimistic and try to make the best of it.
orky56 12y ago
Since such trends are definitely harmful, at what point does it become a human rights issue? If so, the UN or some other organization should put their foot down and set some guidelines for which a country's citizens can sustainably achieve value to their employers and the economy.
radikalus 12y ago
There is surely some freedom in being able to set whatever policies you like at your company without having a federal entity stipulate you give each employee X days of paid vacation. If you want to heavily incentivize a cultural shift towards more vacation time for US employees, I don't think a federal mandate is as attractive as just an economic incentive. (Tax break to companies where X% of employees take more than Y days per year etc)
njharman 12y ago
People in tech industry (all I know) tend to call in sick to "recharge" or get things done (that are causing them stress) rather than take vacation. The interesting thing is that this tacitly known to not really be sick and accepted both by peers and management. Vacation == lazy. Sick days == we all pretend we work 60hr weeks non-stop. Cultural anecdote example from http://maebert.github.io/jrnl/installation.html#quickstart http://maebert.github.io/jrnl/installation.html#quickstart 2012-03-29 09:00 Called in sick. Used the time to clean the house and spent 4h on writing my book.
- walshemj 12y ago
  Ah gross misconduct as the lawyers and HR tend to call it :-)
- maebert 12y ago
  Uh. Hope my boss doesn't read this. ;-)
490371703 12y ago
Can someone explain to me why paid vacation is ok? If you don't work, in other words contribute to your job, why in the hell should you be paid? By the way that doesn't mean I don't believe in the workers' welfare, but just not in this way.
- walshemj 12y ago
  You do know that if your salaried like 99.9% of NH contributors are your not paid by the hour your paid to perform a job or function. Some weeks I get hardly anything done but I once saved my employer 1/2 million pounds in an afternoon. And British Telecom the company accountant and I once saved 3/4 million in around 2 days (fixing the AR system the FD brought) You salary is averaged out over the 52 weeks for ease of running the payroll and tax systems for one.
- VLM 12y ago
  My sister in law is a public school teacher and has the contractual option of 9 larger monthly paychecks or 12 smaller monthly paychecks. I would certainly consider a job with no vacation if it paid 52/49-ths more than a real job with vacation.
Shivetya 12y ago
You know it is very easy to be generous with another person's money. Yet mandating yourself rights to their money will likely lead to less jobs as many can be off shored. I know, what about those service jobs; automation. Guild tripping works to a point. However this is a two way street. Many companies voluntarily offer paid maternity leave, some offer time off and paid time off. Yet who is there to hold the workers accountable? Just the cost of doing business? We all know people at work or have know that so abuse the system it makes your head spin. In professional fields we have a choice who we work for, we can choose the good companies and if they continue to do well that will encourage their competitors to step up their game. However we should never assume we deserve something just because someone else has it or we convince ourselves its a good idea.
cognivore 12y ago
If you're in tech, the way to do avoid this is: - Develop mission critical systems. - Make sure no one else understands them. - When you're gone, break them so your employer suffers and realizes they can't be without you. - Act like you don't care and want your time off. Works for raises,too. Of course, if you have a good employer, none of that is necessary.
throwaway5752 12y ago
How does this stuff get so popular on YC? Is there a founder anywhere that didn't put in months of 100+ hour weeks? Or, to clarify, a successful founder?
- VLM 12y ago
  Thats kind of the point, there's an idealized platonic form of a startup with 100 hour workweeks and open plan offices and pooled time off and no vacations ever. Everything mentioned above has been researched and proven to be a dismal failure at actual financial productivity. Therefore in a disruptive startup-py manner there are, on average, enormous fat stacks of cash to be earned by going against the idealized platonic form. WRT successful, I think it unlikely there are many holders of BS degrees who didn't experimentally binge drink in college. I certainly did, till I outgrew that phase. That correlation does not imply successful earning of a degree, in fact the cause/effect relationship probably implies getting alcohol poisoning is anti-productive at the goal of successfully obtaining a credential. So the battle is between the cargo cult crew, who think success is the result of better following the platonic form of the ideal startup even if its a dumb idea, vs the rebels who know based on research they'll on average make more money if they disruptively toss the idealized platonic form.
rdtsc 12y ago
When you look for jobs find companies that will let you have adequate vacation time and actually make you take it. The older you get you'll start valuing your and your family's time more and more. Making loads of money and then waiting for that 1 week vacation to blow it off, or wait until you are old to travel is not optimal the way I see it. By that time you'll have so many ailments travel won't be an option for long.
kajumix 12y ago
The entire first world could get by with 100% time off on the back of the poor of this world. Why not just lose the pretense and admit that the rich americans and europeans can truly afford to spend all their days idle, consuming stuff imported and made elsewhere by people who work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, while you all spend your days debating 35 vs. 40 hours of invaluable pretend work. Such hubris.
VLM 12y ago
"keep the nose to the grindstone" LOL there's a classism component that a guy spending 60 hours in the office, 30 of them on facebook, twitter, amazon, or HN, is an office overtime hero, but a guy using a shovel 39 hours a week while being paid for 40 is a lazy slacker who should be fired. Aside from the class problem, another big problem is in a euro country with low income inequality, it means something to divide the total pie by the number of roughly equal people eating it. But if you have a pie where almost all the pie will be going to a couple fat guys and half the "eaters" are going to starve then dividing the pie by the number of "eaters" is utterly meaningless, or at least it is not comparable to the more equal country. It is a meaningless math problem. If I bring a pack of oreos to work and serve them at a meeting as a snack/bribe, then dividing the pack by the number of people means something. If I bring in a bag lunch and eat every single oreo by myself other than maybe giving one to my college buddy while everyone else in the dept looks on jealously, then the division result is meaningless, or at least not worth comparing. In a "let them eat cake" scenario if 12 people eat 12 equal-ish sized slices, the average slice size means something. In winner takes all USA, one fat dude eats the whole cake and 11 get nothin and the numerical average means nothing, nothing at all.
nate 12y ago
What I find interesting about mentioning the Cadillac ad and workaholism, is how Ford actually found workaholism decreased the efficiency of his workers: > On January 5, 1914, the Ford Motor Company took the radical step of doubling pay to $5 a day and cut shifts from nine hours to eight, moves that were not popular with rival companies, although seeing the increase in Ford's productivity, and a significant increase in profit margin (from $30 million to $60 million in two years), most soon followed suit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day
adventured 12y ago
Overall Americans are not suffering from workaholism. Americans are working less hours than they ever have as a whole. The BLS reports the average is down to 34.5 hours per week: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm The hours per year are comparable to Japan, Italy, Canada, New Zealand, and only 1.4% greater than the OECD average: http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS Meanwhile, a smaller percentage of Americans are working than at any other time than in the past 35 years: http://i.imgur.com/c5iStWB.jpg http://i.imgur.com/c5iStWB.jpg
thisiswei 12y ago
How do you define "workaholic" ? Please take a look at Foxconn workers.

235 points by stevekinney 12y ago

I feel this article is a little weak in one major sense: comparing the US to European countries based on non-working time is okay, but you also need to compare a metric like GDP. Using this, the US is #6 world-wide only behind two European countries. So yes, Euros may get more time off, but the US is a way more economically powerful and productive country economically. Hurting the economy, sure people get burned out, but it is hard to come to that conclusion based on the data given and the authors points.

lallysingh 12y ago
Well, normalized to working population, yes?
autokad 12y ago
it also tries to state that working hard leads to less productivity, when US productivity eclipses most european countries. i had a consultant complain that they hate working with europeans. the people always go on vacation and projects get held up, and they come back and have to get oriented with everything again. by the time they catch up they are on vacation again
- thejosh 12y ago
  That's the funniest excuse I've ever heard for Americans not having holiday leave.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- thegeomaster 12y ago
  How big a sample size of Europeans does your consultant have? Your claim that "Europeans go on vacation and projects get held up and they can never catch up again" is... dubious at best.
  - walshemj 12y ago
    Yes I know a CTO who worked in the valley (I think he reported to Vint at one point) and the UK. He commented that the USA workers didn't produce more even though they only had 2 weeks vs the 5+ the civil service T&C derived uk workers did. spent far more time goofing off and gossiping and taking sneaky long weekends to go skiing was his comment.
    - _delirium 12y ago
      Danes who work in the U.S. are often very surprised by the lack of organization in American workplaces. People work long hours but they seem somewhat haphazard hours, at least from a foreign perspective. Meetings are a particularly big cultural friction point: Danes expect a meeting to start exactly at a specific time, have an agenda distributed at least a day ahead of time, stick to the agenda, and end at exactly the agreed ending time. So you have a 10-11am meeting, you get going on the main topics of discussion at 10:00 (not 10:15 after 15 mins of small-talk and waiting for stragglers to come in), people have come prepared with what they're discussing, and it's guaranteed to be done by 11:00.
  - autokad 12y ago
    i made a statement, backed it up by mentioning productivity, and then made a reference to a real world example that I have observed, unlike the article that just mostly made platitudes. if you'd like further evidence, the EU area has an unemployment rate close to 12%. companies are not anxious to hire europeans for one reason or another.
    - _delirium 12y ago
      Almost all the EU unemployment is in the countries with long working hours and shorter vacations, oddly enough. Scandinavia, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands don't have high unemployment. People work reasonably short hours, take long vacations, and the many consulting companies here have no problem getting contracts, both within Europe and worldwide. The European countries with major economic problems are in the south and east, where they tend not to have as generous vacation and hour policies in the first place. If you work with a Greek or Spanish consulting company, they will be there any time you want, bringing everyone into the office at 3am on a Saturday their time, if you ask for it. Good luck getting a Danish company to do that! Yet the Danish companies are not having trouble getting work.
- Nursie 12y ago
  >> the people always go on vacation and projects get held up, and they come back and have to get oriented with everything again. by the time they catch up they are on vacation again It's almost as if work is something they do to support a life outside the office. Outrageous.
- Spooky23 12y ago
  All of the measurements are based on the workforce, which is a term of art that means something. When you get more efficient, lay off people and have everyone else do 1.5-3x more work, you get efficient. The problem is, many of the discarded people are ending up on disability, and are thus out of the workforce. I'd like to compare the productivity of various societies based on population.
- kps 12y ago
  > it also tries to state that working hard leads to less productivity No, it says that working longer leads to less productivity.
- autokad 12y ago
  i clearly set something off. I didnt mean to disrespect EU workers, but it does seem like their vacation time is on the extreme side where as our seemingly lack there of is weighted towards the over working side but not by a huge deal. IMO
Someone1234 12y ago
The US has had a GDP advantage since the second world war. But since then much of the EU has rolled out socialised medicine and more workers rights (maternity leave, mandatory vacation, even a higher minimum wage) and they haven't slipped down the rankings as a result. Understanding why the US's GDP is as positive as it is is a much bigger topic that takes us into areas like natural resources (e.g. oil, metals, etc) but also history (e.g. World War 1, world War 2, even the cold war). It is a pretty weak argument to dismiss all of the article's points just by repeating "but GDP!!!" over and over which is more or less what your post is.
- JackFr 12y ago
  To quote Bobbi Flekman, "Money talks. Bullshit walks."
lnanek2 12y ago
Yeah, all these Europe's way are better articles and books fall a little flat considering how terrible their economies are nowadays. It sounds like they are saying, "come be like us! Our nations can't even make their debt payments!"
- baq 12y ago
  as if the US didn't go through a debt-ceiling crisis every other year.
  - Karunamon 12y ago
    Which is a completely manufactured "problem" whereby the completely real problem the EU nations in question had was that the money simply wasn't there.
- mike_hearn 12y ago
  If you want to compare individual EU countries with something, compare them against individual US states, which also vary widely in terms of how well they do economically.
jcfrei 12y ago
I think an even better statistic would be the following (GPD per hours worked): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_hour_worked http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_... The differences are remarkable. However the comparison is not entirely fair with countries like Norway resting at the top. Norway derives a large part of its GDP from industries which are not very labor heavy but contribute heavily to GDP (Norway's economy is >50% based on petrochemicals).
pbh101 12y ago
Quick note: according to Wikipedia (citing IMF, World Bank, etc) the US is #1 in GDP at ~$16 trillion, almost double China in the number two spot. We are number 6 in PPP, but if we're talking economic output I would argue the former is more relevant.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
jbernier 12y ago
But how much of that GDP is going to the workers who're putting in the long hours? Great time to be an employer in the US.
rbehrends 12y ago
The problem with GDP per capita comparisons is that GDP is a bit of a weak measure of economic performance. It is a measure of raw, unadjusted economic throughput (cash flow, essentially), not necessarily a measure of economic performance. It is increased by an inefficient healthcare system (healthcare spending makes up 17.7% of the US GDP all on its own, while most of the affluent European countries are in the 9%-11% range), by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and by the United States' comparatively high energy usage per capita. See also RFK's famous quote one the GNP [1]. The reason why GDP is still used prominently as an economic indicator, while economists have been looking for better metrics, all those other metrics involve a fair amount of subjectivity. And GDP is still a pretty decent predictor of economic performance, despite its known weaknesses. But in the end, higher GDP does not necessarily translate into higher quality of life (of course, once the gap is large enough, it almost certainly does, at least for the average person, but we aren't talking orders of magnitude here). I don't think you'll see overall higher QoL in the US compared to Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, or France (the four OECD countries with the fewest hours worked per capita), regardless of where the GDP per capita is. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77IdKFqXbUY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77IdKFqXbUY
- brightsize 12y ago
  In the past two years, I've spent six months living in Germany. The quality-of-life difference between that country and the US is striking. In Germany, it appeared that ordinary people could both afford to, and were inclined to, partake often in small pleasures such as having a Bier and a bite at outdoor cafes in the summer. The streets were lined with these cafes and restaurants, most doing a brisk business. I never saw so many cut-flower shops in my life. The small pleasure of flowers was both affordable AND something that was on the minds of ordinary people, something that one would never encounter in the US. Here, such things are looked upon as frivolous luxuries, and financially they are that for the 99%. If you can afford such things as cut flowers, then, we're told by our betters, you can also work for less money or work more for what you're earning currently. Why do you deserve luxuries, peon? Despite what the pro-workaholic, GDP-flaunting people in the US would say, Germans on the whole seem to be quite materially prosperous. But with that, they are culturally prosperous in a quality-of-life sense too. They seem to expect it, whereas in the US a high QoL is reserved for the wealthy. Obviously I'm not saying that every German lives this way, necessarily. But I think that this cultural observation is accurate. I think if average people in the US would be brought to understand that they too could have a modest life containing a big helping of everyday pleasures and without life-sucking, excessive work expectations, there'd be a revolution.
Derbasti 12y ago
If you compare countries, a more productive economy is a good measure. If you compare people and lives, not so much.

rayiner 12y ago

The article focuses on professionals, but I don't know if that's the angle I'm concerned about. American professionals work more, but they are also paid more. They also have much better vacation and leave policies. More concerning is the plight of median workers, who aren't making a lot more these days than their European counterparts, but have much worse vacation policies to deal with.

dasil003 12y ago
Vacation policies are the least of it. How about the lack of a safety net? Take health care. Civilized people should agree that medical care in a rich country should be available to everyone. The thought of people dying in the streets from preventable disease and injury sounds pretty horrendous. But for the past 20 years we've been fed the same fabricated FUD about socialized medicine that has no basis in reality. People still genuinely believe that America has the best healthcare, which is arguably true for the 1%, but not for the average person. We have major structural problems the media completely ignores. Just one personal example, last December I needed to buy a 6-pill dose of medication while visiting family for the holidays in the US (I currently live in the UK). This cost me $600, $100 per pill. And it turns out that this medication is not as effective as the generic that would cost $2 per pill. But because there is no profitability this medication is not currently manufactured in the US. Had I been in the UK I could have walked into a pharmacy and bought this medication for £10. Incidentally, while I was in line, the woman in front of me was purchasing a perscription of antibiotics, which cost $200, but she only had $100, so they only sold her half the dosage! I was shocked a trained pharmacist would be allowed to do this considering the perils of antibiotic resistance, but it's also pretty inhumane to withhold medication. Frankly, the patriotic bullshit that Fox News and CNN feeds the populace about how much better we have it than Canada or the UK needs to stop. America needs to pull its head out of its ass and realize we are little better than a third-world country for anyone below median income who doesn't have a good group health insurance policy.
- maximumoverload 12y ago
  Obamacare argument was inevitable, wasn't it.

minikites 12y ago

It seems like study after study shows that longer working hours don't result in long term productivity increases, but managers aren't listening. Is this an example of market failure or is there more going on?

thenipper 12y ago
My guess is it is people trusting their 'gut' over a study. Working long hours looks impressive. If you stay late or come in early you look like a team player who is willing to put in the extra effort. Whether or not that effort is actually valuable is immaterial, the appearance is what matters. Call me cynical but I'd imagine that drives a lot of these overworked schedules.
Zaephyr 12y ago
My family had a manufacturing business employing ~100 people. When orders spiked, we found the performance gain from working overtime was consistently short term. Much beyond 3-4 weeks wasn't worth the effort and expense, and a decision to add additional people or extend delivery dates had to be made. That's not to say we couldn't get additional production out, it just did horrible things to the our cost structure. I think what you're getting at is the belief that working longer is equal to harder.

cmollis 12y ago

It's frowned upon to take any time off in the US. I've seen it viewed as a sign of a lack of commitment or even laziness. Consequently, we take less time off because we're scared we're going to lose our jobs. No one is congratulated for taking time off in the middle of a project for your 'sanity' or 'to re-charge'. Everyone is scared. There is no safety net. It's no way to live, but it's our reality.

Someone1234 12y ago
> There is no safety net. That's a wonderfully succinct way of describing the US. It seems like in a lot of EU countries if you fail there is something to catch you (higher, longer, easier to get unemployment pay for one example), whereas there really is no lower limit on how low the US will let you fall (e.g. healthcare is a privilege not a right in the US). They do say that the US has some of the highest anti-depressant medication usage in the whole world (or was it more than the rest of the world combined? I can never remember). That isn't a surprise when literally your health, shelter, food, etc is all riding on keeping a job. Thank god for Obama care and the new ban on pre-existing condition limits (i.e. that you could not get insurance if you were sick before). It kept people enslaved into a single job if they ever got sick since they could never afford to lose that health insurance or they'd die.
- switch007 12y ago
  >It seems like in a lot of EU countries if you fail there is something to catch you (higher, longer, easier to get unemployment pay for one example) For the avoidance of doubt, that does not include England (these days). People with cancer in the final stages are declared fit to work
  - sitkack 12y ago
    I know right, perfect for uncontrolled cancer drug studies.
  - mike_hearn 12y ago
    Can you show me a link for that? I'd be interested in reading about it. What I've read is that a lot of people on disability benefits (higher than jobseekers allowance) were in fact just fine and when properly re-examined magically stopped being disabled. However, that assumes the review assessment was more reliable than the old one. I'd be interested in data showing whether it is or isn't.

peter303 12y ago

According to the BLS only 146M people are working in US - 46% of total population or 59% of working-age adults. And 26M of these are parttime. Goes to show you working hours are not evenly distributed among people.

AndrewKemendo 12y ago

>The United States is the only advanced country that doesn't guarantee that its citizens will get paid vacation time and holidays I find the reasoning consistently maddening. What they should be saying is that there is no federal mandate for private employers to pay workers during vacation/convalescence/maternity leave. In point of fact, for government workers there is paid annual/maternity/paternity leave which ends up being "use or lose" and in effect becomes a mandatory leave - something universally omitted in these articles. I think this just comes back to the classic debate about how the American economy is organized. Our constitution and US Code is not organized such that the government can easily dictate laws to private employers, that is by design.

ghshephard 12y ago
Which, of course, makes it great for the private employers (the 1%), but not so great for the private employees (the 99% that was mentioned in the article)
- bradleysmith 12y ago
  over half of the 6mil firms in the US with payrolls in this country have between 1 and 9 employees. ('08 numbers[0]). "employer" != 1% "policies good for employers" != "policies only good for 1%" [0]-https://www.census.gov/econ/smallbus.html https://www.census.gov/econ/smallbus.html
  - VLM 12y ago
    A lot of them are "employee in name only" contractors. Doesn't mean much. I've done it myself. There are tax implications when you get 1099'd, as long as you go in eyes open it'll be OK. Don't forget to file your quarterly estimated payments, the IRS isn't amused if you skip one. There's a lot of talk on HN about the natural evolved tribal size of human orgs being only XYZ people so when we inevitably have a larger than XYZ group its epic fail. Well... it goes the other way too, and its quite possible that natural evolved civilization etc requires more than 2 guys on a "tribe" long term. It doesn't have to be the end of the world or apocalyptic, merely suggesting encouraging microfirms might not be a wise policy decision.

UweSchmidt 12y ago

Often, when articles highlight bad laws or customs, economical arguments are brought up. Workaholism -> backfires and is bad for the economy and in recent threads here on HN: Workplace surveillance -> backfires, people feel controlled and performance suffers Government espionage in USA -> backfires, people lose trust in US businesses I don't feel that this is the strongest argument. "Please treat us better, it is in your own interest!"? Germany's vacation was achieved through politics (labor laws) and unions (labor contracts). The economic argument probably won't work, since economic considerations (real or imagined/short-term/local maximum...) have led to the current situation in the first place.

sashrive 12y ago
Great point. One way to argue for more vacation time is that it's economically a better idea- but you're setting yourself up for a tough argument. Instead, it might be easier to argue it socially or through a simple declaration like, "this is what we want".
cryoshon 12y ago
It's the only argument here in the USA. It sucks that things are this way, but the only way to justify anything or argue for anything is an appeal to higher profits. Money is this country's highest value, and all other values such as decency or shared prosperity have been thrown into the garbage and decried as socialism or wishful thinking.
- PythonicAlpha 12y ago
  And that is (in my opinion) the biggest problem of all. Focusing on profit margins alone (without any respect to the people), leads to burn-out, social discrepancies to the extreme (go to South Africa/Kapstadt, if you want to see, where it will end) and at last will dehumanize the human race. I write that, because I see in my country, where it goes and we long where an isle inside the ocean of capitalism. Now, capitalism has conquered humanity and capitalism will kill humanity finally, it seems. Our capitalism of today exploits all the resources of this planet (oil, water, air, environment, humans, ...) in an increasing fashion and because this planet has only limited resources, soon all will break down. The question only is, what entity will break down first: capitalism, this planet, the human race. What use will you make of your five smartphones, three tablets and seven cars, when your children will have no future?

JackFr 12y ago

And yet compared to those European countries, the US experiences significantly higher GDP per capita. Doing work and getting paid for it hardly seems like it's hurting the economy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP%29_per_capita http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP... As to the studies cited in the article I would point to the OECD labor productivity statistics which, in the aggregate, seem to disagree. http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=LEVEL http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=LEVEL The fact that Americans seem to only be able to find identity and meaning in their work, so much so as that it causes a psychic crisis to leave even temporarily, is the real problem, if it need be called such, rather than some imagined hurt to the economy. But that problem is so ingrained in our culture it is never going away.

claybinion 12y ago
Can you explain what you mean by your last paragraph? The inability to find meaning and indentity in ones work causes people a psychic crisis to leave their jobs even temporarily? That problem is an imagined hurt to the economy?
- JackFr 12y ago
  What I mean to say is that Amercians are overworked because they like to be overworked. Typically an American's sole sense of identity comes from his or her job, and while we give lip service to 'happiness' as our life's goal unless happiness means ambition and success in one's work, you are an oddball. The problem isn't that Americans are hurting the economy with over work; the problem, if you want to call it one, is that because we have nothing else in our lives, we don't mind that we're overworked.
  - stedlev 12y ago
    I don't get how you come to the conclusion that no one minds it. I am very lucky and have built a business where I have lots of free time, and I have yet to find a person who says I am wasting my life by spending my free time learning new languages, teaching myself new things, backpacking the world, and developing new hobbies. People say they like their work and they "live" for their work because it's all they have, yet they aren't happy with it. If they were, they wouldn't be so compelled to go out and drink weekends away. Americans have no choice but to be overworked. I look at professional jobs where I could use my computer science degree, and I have no choice. I basically have to choose a job where I work more than 40 hours a week. And in the US, a lot of employers only pay you for when you work. So that hour lunch break doesn't count toward the time you're working. Neither does your commute. So there's a large swath of people in the US who work 10 hours a day, have an hour of two of commute each way, and an hour of idle time at work. meaning worst case scenarios, you're looking at 13+ hours a day spent at doing work related things. Something that people have to do that consumes their life will be perceived as something that that person likes, kind of like how Stockholm Syndrome works. No one ever speaks of how these long hours affect Americans to the point where they don't have time for constructive hobbies, time to learn about the world, etc, and that is going to hurt Americans far more than anything else. I realize that their is more distance for Americans to see the world than Europeans or Asians, however, you would think that if seeing the world was considered important, that Americans would have more time off and more paid vacation to make up for the fact that you need to travel so far to experience vastly different cultures. You've got to think about the fact that we have a generation of people raising children who only know how to work while the rest of the developed world is taking long vacations and living in the assumption that a worker should have access to health care, education, etc. I am terrified of how the next generation of Americans will turn out. They're going to grow up seeing both their parents work 50 hour work weeks, have no hobbies, never travel to anything inspiring and only travelling for escapism, and thinking that they have it better in the USA than anywhere else. I don't plan on having children in the USA. I don't think I could morally raise a child and fill their heads with delusions of grandeur and getting rich quick by working 65 hours a week, only to see them swallowed by student loans and debt, never escaping that mortgage until they die, while I look them in the eye and tell them the people in France work half as much yet make more money. Please, look at these numbers: http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=LEVEL# http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=LEVEL# I realize they are a bit dated (the new dataset doesn't include the metric I want to look at), but USA already works harder than the Japanese. USA works almost 30% more hours than Netherlands. That's massive. To put that into perspective, that means an 8 hour workday in the USA translates into a 5.6 hour work day in the Netherlands.

ghshephard 12y ago

Even worse is the new trend in technology companies to eliminate "Set Vacation". It used to be the case that you felt "obliged" somehow to take your 10 days of vacation a year, because you saw it piling up. Even better, if you were laid off, you could get the vacation in cash, and that helped when you were cut off without a job. But now, a lot of technology companies are saying, "No Set Vacation - you need to negotiate with your manager if you want some" - which, in my experience, has resulted in a lot of people over the last two years taking zero vacation. It's not good for them. It's not good for the company. About the only people who are happy about this are Finance who no longer have to carry that liability on their books.

vvvv 12y ago
Is there no legal requirement for minimum number of days off?
- tokenadult 12y ago
  Is there no legal requirement for minimum number of days off? It depends on the nature of the employment. A few occupations (notably in banking) have MANDATORY days off. (Forcing bankers in certain categories of jobs to take vacations is a good way to detect long-term embezzlement schemes.) But there are definitely programming jobs in the United States in which the company says, "You can take time off whenever you like," which in practice means "You can take time off whenever the company isn't in crunch time," which ends up meaning never. Freedom of contract and flexibility in working arrangements is the hallmark of the United States economy and indeed is one of the reasons that the United States is as wealthy as it is--people choose the trade-offs they like among many possibilities.
  - brown9-2 12y ago
    The banking example you cite are voluntary industry practices or self-regulation, not legally enforced.
- amalcon 12y ago
  No, there is not.

nuff 12y ago

Ninety-four percent of professional workers put in 50 or more hours, and nearly half work 65 or above. This sounds crazy exaggerated without any citation. According to wiki, "According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average non-farm private sector employee worked 34.5 hours per week as of June 2012." EDIT: reference.. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm

_archon_ 12y ago
Your quote includes Wal-mart greeters and burger flippers. I don't find it hard to believe that white collar professionals put in over 50 hours a week on average. My experience is in engineering for manufacturing.
PythonicAlpha 12y ago
If you cite government statistics you should also add, that government statistics have a long history of "white-washing" data. At least, that is what I experienced the last decades in my country and I don't live in a 3rd world country!

seventytwo 12y ago

One of the things the move towards a socialized healthcare system will do for this country is focus a debate on how to increase overall well-being within the country, and how to balance that with economic output. Something I think this article misses is the effect our work habits have on our health as a country. Studies have repeatedly shown that those last several hours per week are only marginally productive, but how detrimental might they be? I would imagine the health effects (stress, blood pressure, poor eating habits, lack of exercise, etc.) become amplified in those very hours in which productivity becomes nearly worthless. It's hard to quantify any of this, however, so it might be completely glossed over in the article on purpose. I'm sure that thinking like this will become more prevalent...

justintime2002 12y ago

> Professionals, managers, and executives with a smartphone spend 72 hours a week (including the weekend) checking work e-mail. No, they spend 72 hours a week "interacting with work" in any way. Though the thought of an executive sitting and refreshing an inbox for 10+ hours a day is quite amusing.

henrik_w 12y ago

Related: "Bring back the 40-hour work week" http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_week/ http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/bring_back_the_40_hour_work_...

njharman 12y ago
Fuck that. Computers, robots and the rest of automation / efficiency gains should (have been, and) be translated into 10-20 hour work week instead of increased consumption and consumerism.

crazy1van 12y ago

This seems too simplistic. The article focuses on one of the inputs to a nation's economic system -- labor and the price of that labor (wages). It seems to truly answer the question "What is it all for?" in an article whose title refers to "hurting the economy" it would make sense to at least discuss the output of that same system by citing GDP or some similar metric.

robg 12y ago

Even as a trained neuroscientist, I was amazed to learn that even mild stress impairs brain functions involved in memory formation and retrieval, attention, and decision making. If you are working long hours, you aren't really working. On less sleep, your brain has to work harder. With chronic stress, you start to impair your core competencies. Sleep is the body's way of mitigating the effects of daily stress.

tekalon 12y ago

While the lack of safety net and fear of being fired are all valid reasons for Americans not taking vacation, what about another reason- they don't know how to vacation. From personal experience, I get twitchy just from being sick/away from work for more than a day. I only take one day at a time of vacation (usually on Friday's to stretch out the weekend, and usually to get extra studying done or run some errands) only to feel like I wasted a day. It could be cultural, my family never took many family vacations (maybe 1 or 2). I'm lucky that my work encourages taking vacations, but the idea of doing so seems so weird for me.

medell 12y ago
I know what you mean! In my old office people would bank hours and rather get paid out then take their full vacation. Most of my friends in Europe tell me how their managers practically force them to take time off! (especially in the summer). It seems like it has become so ingrained in the culture that not taking vacation, working long hours and being "busy" has become a badge of honor. But with more and more articles like these I see a shift coming as the new generation seeks more balance and lifestyle.
- tekalon 12y ago
  I'm 50/50 on the 'badge of honor'. For some it's true. For me, I don't know what to do on vacation. People get bored/anxious when they have nothing to do. Even going on a trip can be hard (planning, financing, dealing with changes, having to rest after the trip).

frozenport 12y ago

What about Asian cultures?

tokenadult 12y ago

Alas, this is about the level of analysis I've come to expect from years of reading The New Republic on issues like this. Neither cultural nor legal conditions surrounding employment in the United States are ideal for workers who have the preferences of the author of this article,[1] but neither are they so horrific that the economy is "hurt" in a big way, especially compared to the economies of other countries. Other comments posted before mine have already pointed out that overall prosperity in the United States is quite high, and I might add that many of the newly industrialized countries of east Asia (which characteristically have high population densities and limited natural resources, and thus are a model of what policies it takes to be prosperous despite a lack of natural advantages) increase steadily in wealth and general prosperity[2] despite ignoring parts of the author's advice. For me, the crucial fact to keep in mind in any of these decry-America threads on Hacker News is that people vote with their feet. The United States continues to be a highly desired country to immigrate to,[3] so whatever trade-offs the United States economy offers, there are still a lot of people who think they are better trade-offs than the trade-offs in the familiar home country they were born in. [1] http://www.newrepublic.com/authors/bryce-covert http://www.newrepublic.com/authors/bryce-covert [2] http://edition.cnn.com/2012/08/17/business/world-rich-list-singapore/ http://edition.cnn.com/2012/08/17/business/world-rich-list-s... [3] http://www.gallup.com/poll/161435/100-million-worldwide-dream-life.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/161435/100-million-worldwide-drea... http://www.census.gov/topics/population/foreign-born.html http://www.census.gov/topics/population/foreign-born.html http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/immigrate/immigrant-process/petition/file.html http://travel.state.gov/content/visas/english/immigrate/immi... AFTER EDIT: I note the downvotes indicating disagreement, and I am curious about what you disagree with. Please let me know. And I am amused by this correction to the submitted article: "Correction: This piece originally stated that workers with smartphones spent 72 hours a week on their off time checking work e-mail. In fact, the 72 hours include working hours, and the workers are just professionals, managers, and executives. We regret the error." We are not talking about a strongly numerate analysis here.

Dewie 12y ago
> Other comments posted before mine have already pointed out that overall prosperity in the United States is quite high, I've seen more that people have pointed out that America is prosperous, not necessarily that America is overall prosperous. The US seems to have one of the highest gini coefficients out of the OECD countries. > For me, the crucial fact to keep in mind in any of these decry-America threads on Hacker News is that people vote with their feet. Which can't be easily decoupled from how well America has managed to market itself in the last 60 or so years, and marketing does not necessarily reflect reality. While the US hasn't been universally loved in all that time - see for example US foreign policy - it seems to have been able to market itself as a great place to live, also for people from developed countries. How long has there been a noticeable trend of "decry America" w.r.t. living standard on the Web?

jasonkester 12y ago

That Cadillac ad is awesome. I'd never seen it before. It watches like a parody, but at the end you're hit by the reality that yes, this guy is being completely serious. The message really is "sure, I traded away my quality of life, but look at all this stuff!" That's actually the notion that Cadillac is trying to sell. Amazing that they're doing such a good job of it. Fortunately, there's no real trick to getting back that quality of life. You just need to take more vacation time. You can negotiate this in to your package, but if you're in as hot a talent market as we are today, you might find more success with simply taking it. "Hey, as a heads up, I'll be taking 3 weeks off at the beginning of June" followed a few months later by "Hey, I'm off to Kalymnos for a couple weeks in October", followed by "I'll probably be out of contact between Xmas and New Years." Note the lack of "asking" above. The correct attitude to take is that it's them who are acting irrationally by suggesting that you shouldn't take a healthy amount of time off to live your life.

c_plus_minus 12y ago
I thought that ad was more "look at me, I'm a crazy hard working American AND I drive electric. They're not mutually exclusive!"
chimeracoder 12y ago
> "'cause we're the only ones going back up there [the moon]" If only that were true. In many ways, we're further away from being able to reach the moon (or deeper parts of space) than we were 20-30 years ago[0] [0]http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/why-not-space/ http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/why-not-space/
nickthemagicman 12y ago
That guy is the poster child for the Materialistic Self Entitled Baby Boomer Me Generation. Materialism and greed are literally everything that is wrong with the world. Spoilied Douchebags like he and his generation are a legacy hangover from post-WW2 America, a time of middle class economic excess greater than any the HUMAN RACE has ever seen. Americans aren't exceptional in any way. We just got lucky by being the only 1st world country not in the middle of World War 2 so we reaped ton's of resources and opportunities from that and we have been coasting on it ever since and attributing it to our 'exceptionalism'. Americans love to believe that the individual is greater than his situation. Such bullshit. You want hard workers look at China. I can't wait until Communist ass China is the next world power and assholes like the guy in the commercial don't understand why 'Mericans aren't exceptional any more. I'm so grateful that the new American generation's self awareness, global consciousness, hacker ethic, lack of racism, community values, and so many more positive qualities are replacing douchebags like this.

nickthemagicman 12y ago

It's actually really hard to find a job that pays a decent wage and gives a good amount of time off. The kind of job where you can 'work to live'. Our mentality of "Americans love to work hard" is misleading. I'd say Americans are just optimistic. We are sort of 'forced' to work hard so we're optimistic and try to make the best of it.

orky56 12y ago

Since such trends are definitely harmful, at what point does it become a human rights issue? If so, the UN or some other organization should put their foot down and set some guidelines for which a country's citizens can sustainably achieve value to their employers and the economy.

radikalus 12y ago

There is surely some freedom in being able to set whatever policies you like at your company without having a federal entity stipulate you give each employee X days of paid vacation. If you want to heavily incentivize a cultural shift towards more vacation time for US employees, I don't think a federal mandate is as attractive as just an economic incentive. (Tax break to companies where X% of employees take more than Y days per year etc)

njharman 12y ago

People in tech industry (all I know) tend to call in sick to "recharge" or get things done (that are causing them stress) rather than take vacation. The interesting thing is that this tacitly known to not really be sick and accepted both by peers and management. Vacation == lazy. Sick days == we all pretend we work 60hr weeks non-stop. Cultural anecdote example from http://maebert.github.io/jrnl/installation.html#quickstart http://maebert.github.io/jrnl/installation.html#quickstart 2012-03-29 09:00 Called in sick. Used the time to clean the house and spent 4h on writing my book.

walshemj 12y ago
Ah gross misconduct as the lawyers and HR tend to call it :-)
maebert 12y ago
Uh. Hope my boss doesn't read this. ;-)

490371703 12y ago

Can someone explain to me why paid vacation is ok? If you don't work, in other words contribute to your job, why in the hell should you be paid? By the way that doesn't mean I don't believe in the workers' welfare, but just not in this way.

walshemj 12y ago
You do know that if your salaried like 99.9% of NH contributors are your not paid by the hour your paid to perform a job or function. Some weeks I get hardly anything done but I once saved my employer 1/2 million pounds in an afternoon. And British Telecom the company accountant and I once saved 3/4 million in around 2 days (fixing the AR system the FD brought) You salary is averaged out over the 52 weeks for ease of running the payroll and tax systems for one.
VLM 12y ago
My sister in law is a public school teacher and has the contractual option of 9 larger monthly paychecks or 12 smaller monthly paychecks. I would certainly consider a job with no vacation if it paid 52/49-ths more than a real job with vacation.

Shivetya 12y ago

You know it is very easy to be generous with another person's money. Yet mandating yourself rights to their money will likely lead to less jobs as many can be off shored. I know, what about those service jobs; automation. Guild tripping works to a point. However this is a two way street. Many companies voluntarily offer paid maternity leave, some offer time off and paid time off. Yet who is there to hold the workers accountable? Just the cost of doing business? We all know people at work or have know that so abuse the system it makes your head spin. In professional fields we have a choice who we work for, we can choose the good companies and if they continue to do well that will encourage their competitors to step up their game. However we should never assume we deserve something just because someone else has it or we convince ourselves its a good idea.

cognivore 12y ago

If you're in tech, the way to do avoid this is: - Develop mission critical systems. - Make sure no one else understands them. - When you're gone, break them so your employer suffers and realizes they can't be without you. - Act like you don't care and want your time off. Works for raises,too. Of course, if you have a good employer, none of that is necessary.

throwaway5752 12y ago

How does this stuff get so popular on YC? Is there a founder anywhere that didn't put in months of 100+ hour weeks? Or, to clarify, a successful founder?

VLM 12y ago
Thats kind of the point, there's an idealized platonic form of a startup with 100 hour workweeks and open plan offices and pooled time off and no vacations ever. Everything mentioned above has been researched and proven to be a dismal failure at actual financial productivity. Therefore in a disruptive startup-py manner there are, on average, enormous fat stacks of cash to be earned by going against the idealized platonic form. WRT successful, I think it unlikely there are many holders of BS degrees who didn't experimentally binge drink in college. I certainly did, till I outgrew that phase. That correlation does not imply successful earning of a degree, in fact the cause/effect relationship probably implies getting alcohol poisoning is anti-productive at the goal of successfully obtaining a credential. So the battle is between the cargo cult crew, who think success is the result of better following the platonic form of the ideal startup even if its a dumb idea, vs the rebels who know based on research they'll on average make more money if they disruptively toss the idealized platonic form.

rdtsc 12y ago

When you look for jobs find companies that will let you have adequate vacation time and actually make you take it. The older you get you'll start valuing your and your family's time more and more. Making loads of money and then waiting for that 1 week vacation to blow it off, or wait until you are old to travel is not optimal the way I see it. By that time you'll have so many ailments travel won't be an option for long.

kajumix 12y ago

The entire first world could get by with 100% time off on the back of the poor of this world. Why not just lose the pretense and admit that the rich americans and europeans can truly afford to spend all their days idle, consuming stuff imported and made elsewhere by people who work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, while you all spend your days debating 35 vs. 40 hours of invaluable pretend work. Such hubris.

VLM 12y ago

"keep the nose to the grindstone" LOL there's a classism component that a guy spending 60 hours in the office, 30 of them on facebook, twitter, amazon, or HN, is an office overtime hero, but a guy using a shovel 39 hours a week while being paid for 40 is a lazy slacker who should be fired. Aside from the class problem, another big problem is in a euro country with low income inequality, it means something to divide the total pie by the number of roughly equal people eating it. But if you have a pie where almost all the pie will be going to a couple fat guys and half the "eaters" are going to starve then dividing the pie by the number of "eaters" is utterly meaningless, or at least it is not comparable to the more equal country. It is a meaningless math problem. If I bring a pack of oreos to work and serve them at a meeting as a snack/bribe, then dividing the pack by the number of people means something. If I bring in a bag lunch and eat every single oreo by myself other than maybe giving one to my college buddy while everyone else in the dept looks on jealously, then the division result is meaningless, or at least not worth comparing. In a "let them eat cake" scenario if 12 people eat 12 equal-ish sized slices, the average slice size means something. In winner takes all USA, one fat dude eats the whole cake and 11 get nothin and the numerical average means nothing, nothing at all.

nate 12y ago

What I find interesting about mentioning the Cadillac ad and workaholism, is how Ford actually found workaholism decreased the efficiency of his workers: > On January 5, 1914, the Ford Motor Company took the radical step of doubling pay to $5 a day and cut shifts from nine hours to eight, moves that were not popular with rival companies, although seeing the increase in Ford's productivity, and a significant increase in profit margin (from $30 million to $60 million in two years), most soon followed suit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day

adventured 12y ago

Overall Americans are not suffering from workaholism. Americans are working less hours than they ever have as a whole. The BLS reports the average is down to 34.5 hours per week: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t18.htm The hours per year are comparable to Japan, Italy, Canada, New Zealand, and only 1.4% greater than the OECD average: http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS Meanwhile, a smaller percentage of Americans are working than at any other time than in the past 35 years: http://i.imgur.com/c5iStWB.jpg http://i.imgur.com/c5iStWB.jpg

thisiswei 12y ago

How do you define "workaholic" ? Please take a look at Foxconn workers.