Everyday, hundreds of social media users add the popular hashtag #nevernotworking to their posts, a kind of humblebrag meant to convey someone’s admirable work ethic. But it masks a darker reality. Americans have embraced work to such an extent that it’s having a detrimental impact on their health and family life, and paradoxically, on the economy too.
A new study, compiled by economic thinktank Washington Center for Equitable Growth, looks at why Americans are putting in such long hours, and the economic and health effects of overwork.
The study defines overwork as more than 40 hours a week. It found that those working in higher paid professions were more likely to clock in longer hours. Nearly 30% of management and legal workers reported working 45 hours or more per week, followed by 20% of those working in the farming, fishing and forestry industries. Architects and engineers, and those in business and finance, also indicated that long hours were the norm.
The authors used data from the Current Population Survey, a monthly survey of American households by the US Bureau of the Census. They analyzed survey results from 2011 to 2014, limiting their sample to working people between the ages of 16 and 64, and including both hourly and salaried employees.
The authors point to rising economic inequality as one possible reason for the culture of overwork. Feeling financially insecure can affect even those at the top of the income ladder, they argue, which leads to people working overtime to prove their worth to their employer. They also blame the country’s outdated overtime laws, which do little to protect white collar workers.
“So many workers put in long hours, especially salaried employees,” said Heather Boushey, executive director and chief economist at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth and a co-author of the study. “We’ve been thinking a lot about how we need to update our nation’s standards and to understand how the current standard affects families’ abilities to control their time.”
In the US, there is no clear law governing the number of hours worked, and employers can generally demand that employees work as many hours as the employer wants. In some cases, however, an employer has to pay an employee for working overtime. The Fair Labor Standards Act, which was signed into law in 1938, says that an employee who works more than 40 hours a week must be paid time and a half, which is understood as their regular hourly wage plus 50%.
But it’s not always straightforward who is and isn’t covered under the law, say the study’s authors. Employees paid on an hourly basis are generally covered, but the rules get more complex with salaried workers. Typically, a salaried employee that earns more than $23,660 a year isn’t covered by the law. But there are different overtime rules depending on profession and job duties. The regulations also only apply to employees, and not independent contractors, problematic considering that by 2020, 40% of the US workforce will be made up of these so-called “contingent workers”.
The issue is that too often, the law goes unenforced. Hourly workers don’t always receive the overtime wages due to them, and employers often misclassify salaried employees as exempt from the law, according to a recent study from the RAND Corporation. The salary threshold that exempts workers is also too low, and is below the poverty level for a family of four, according to the report.
The US government is working to change that by proposing to raise the overtime salary threshold to $50,400, which would put an additional 5 million workers in line for overtime pay. The threshold will also be updated every three years to keep in step with inflation.
A recent expose on Amazon’s punishing hours – employees said 80-plus-hour workweeks were the norm – is indicative of a larger trend of overwork that has seeped into the American psyche in recent decades. The research linking long hours with serious health problems like stroke and heart disease, as well as an increase in occupational injuries, should at least give companies some pause.
It wasn’t meant to be this way. In the early 20th century, shorter work hours were held up as the ideal, and more leisure time was viewed as a sign of success, said Benjamin Hunnicutt, a professor of leisure studies at the University of Iowa and the author of Free Time: the Forgotten American Dream. Back then, higher paid workers were more likely to work fewer hours than lower paid workers, and as technology advanced, the thinking went, work would become less important. But the opposite turned out to be true.
It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly caused the current obsession with work, said Hunnicutt, but companies shoulder a lot of the blame. In certain industries, particularly tech and finance, overwork has become embedded in the culture as competition grows to remain at the cutting edge of innovation. Silicon Valley giants like Facebook and Google splash out on lavish amenities for their employees like free all-you-can-eat buffets and nap pods, along with doctors’ and dentists’ offices onsite, a shiny ploy to ensure employees remain at work. And it’s generally cheaper to pay an employee overtime than it is to hire more people for the job.
According to the study, it’s also much harder for employers to measure output in the current knowledge-based economy. In the past, when factory work was so ubiquitous, it was easier to quantify how much work a person produced each day. Now, it’s not so simple, and companies are equating hours logged with a worker’s dedication.
John Pencavel, an economics professor at Stanford, stresses that one size doesn’t fit all, and what might work for one firm, might not work for another.
“The question should be, should employers want workers to work long hours?” Pencavel said. “I’d say there’s a case in encouraging firms to think about experimenting with shorter hours, just to see what would happen.”
Some companies are doing just that. A small but growing crop of startups are trying out four-day workweeks, and giving employees more autonomy in deciding their own schedules.
Compared to other countries, the US falls more or less in the middle when it comes to average hours worked per week, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). In a 2014 OECD survey, the US ranked 16 out 36 countries, putting in 34.4 hours of work each week. Mexican workers toiled the most, logging 42.85 hours, while Germany was last, with a typical workweek of just 26.37 hours. But figures differ, and according to a 2014 Gallup poll, half of all full time workers in the US said they generally work more than 40 hours a week, and nearly four in ten said they put in at least 50 hours.
Boushey said what’s lacking is choice . She suggests putting in place a so-called “right-to-request” law, which would allow workers to ask their boss for a flexible work schedule, without fear of retaliation.
“If you love your job, does that mean you don’t have the right to go home and see your family, or go on vacation?” she said. “There may be a period where you’re happy to work a lot, but people shouldn’t be forced to do it every day.”
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