Americans work a lot.  According to this chart, we work 400 hours more per year than workers in many European countries.  In fact, we work the equivalent of 10 workweeks per year more.  What would you say if your boss walked into your office and asked you whether you would like to have an additional 10 weeks of vacation per year?

According to Juliet Schor, author of the overworked American (1991), American productivity has more than doubled since 1948. We could thus produce our 1948 standard of living in less than half the time that it took in 1948.  The average worker could now be taking off every other year with pay. We do not use any of this increase in productivity to reduce our hours, however.  Instead, we have continued to work harder and harder (many of us work two jobs) in order to have or maintain higher material standard of living. 

Schor raises this question: “what if satisfaction depends, not on absolute levels of consumption, but on one’s level relative to others?”  She suggests that our “consumerist treadmill” and hour-long our jobs have combined to form in “insidious cycle of work and spend.”

We often work hard only after commuting long distances.  And we have to pay for those expensive cars and the fuel goes in them.  The net result is another decrease in leisure time.  According to Schor, between 1960 and 1986, the time parents actually had available to do with children fell at least 10 hours …