Hard work and healthy democracies

Chamber of Commerce types remind us frequently that “hard work made the U.S. great.” If politics must be reduced to slogans, I am tempted to reply with another favorite: “All work and no play make Jack and Jill unhappy – and unproductive – boys and girls.” No subject needs more careful consideration than work, Not merely an activity in which we spend most of our lives, work in America is a cultural icon. Only in the midst of the Great Depression were reformers able to limit such regular business practices as sweatshop hours and child labor.

The quality of American life, measured in family and leisure experience as well as real wages, improved for three decades thereafter. In the last quarter century, however, many of those gains have been undone. Now the Bush administration wants to complete the corporate assault on leisure and family time by rewriting New Deal era rules on overtime.

New Deal regulations made most blue and white-collar workers beneficiaries of the required time and half pay for work beyond the forty-hour standard. The exceptions are workers whose primary duty is defined as managerial. Many U.S. corporations have increasingly resented the time and a half overtime requirement. Overtime pay is a contentious issue because many corporations respond to upturns in the business cycle not by hiring new workers but by asking or even forcing current employees to work longer hours. Even with the overtime premium, businesses already find it cheaper to add overtime rather than new workers.

The proposed regulations would make strategies that burden workers and families even more lucrative. Current regulations stipulate that employees must have substantial status and extensive discretionary authority to be classified as management. The proposed regulations would eliminate this requirement. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) has shown that hundreds of thousands of editors, reporters, health technicians, and others currently entitled to overtime pay will lose eligibility and income.

In addition, under the new regulations, education levels formerly required for professional or administrative exemption are diluted. EPI points out as a consequence employers would then be able to deny overtime pay to “paralegals, emergency medical technicians, licensed practical nurses, draftsmen, surveyors and others.”

These changes should be seen against a larger backdrop. The United States is already the hardest working industrial democracy in the world. EPI reports that “Not only does the U.S. economy employ a larger share of its working age people, the average worker worked 1,877 hours in 2000 – more than in any other rich, industrialized country. At the same time, Americans reap fewer benefits for these extra hours, whether in the form of more vacation … or paid leave…” In much of Western Europe, a month or more of mandatory paid vacation is the norm.

Furthermore, this hard work hasn’t even translated into steady wage gains. When businesses are able to expand by forcing overtime on current workers, other potential employees are denied work. Slack labor markets in turn lead to sluggish or falling wages. It is not an accident that the U.S. economy has experienced relative stagnation in real hourly working class wages for more than two decades, a period marked by declining union power and growing assaults on free time.

Is compulsory hard work a price the United States must pay to be competitive? Employers made similar arguments about child labor laws in the early 20th century. But just as in the case of child labor, family time is not some optional extra that business can strip away. Child labor and diminished family time have long-term consequences even for business. They deprive families of the opportunity for the intellectual and emotional development on which productive and healthy work forces depend. The New York Times reports that many business and educational leaders in Japan, another notoriously workaholic society, now recognize that long hours of work and schoolwork may have made their workers technically proficient but often deficient in the creativity and enthusiasm that foster long term economic growth.

In the long term, the most competitive economies nurture and utilize the full talents of their workers. A sustainable democracy also gives adults the time and resources to participate in political life. It is not surprising that the decline not only in voting but also in those membership organizations that were once staples of our democracy have accompanied the loss of free time over the last quarter century.

The House of Representative has already approved these changes, but the Senate has not yet acted. Since Maine’s Senators once again may be pivotal, they should hear from Maine workers. If we are to have a vibrant economy and politics, we must spend some of our scarcest resource, time, on efforts not only to reverse Bush’s attack on family time, but also outlaw forced overtime, the child labor issue of this century.

John Buell is a political economist who lives in Southwest Harbor. Readers wishing to contact him may e-mail messages to jbuell@acadia.net.