Americans: Overworked, Overstressed

May -- Recent studies have painted a grim picture of the American working world: Longer days, less vacation time, and later retirement, and — and that was all during the good years of the 1990s.

The last few months have done nothing to ease those conditions, adding job insecurity to the mix as an increasing number of companies lay off workers to "downsize" in the slumping economy.

Those lucky enough to still have a job can expect to be asked to do more, to make up for the "streamlined" workforce.

Not only are Americans working longer hours than at any time since statistics have been kept, but now they are also working longer than anyone else in the industrialized world. And while workers in other countries have been seeing their hours cut back by legislation focused on preventing work from infringing on private life, Americans have been going in the other direction.

A trio of recent books, The White-Collar Sweatshop by Jill Andresky Fraser, The Overworked American by Juliet Schor, and The Working Life by Joanne B. Ciulla, have been embraced by a public that apparently feels harassed by the pressures of the workplace.

Road rage, workplace shootings, the rising number of children placed in day care and the increasing demand on schools to provide after-school activities to occupy children whose parents are too busy have all been pointed to as evidence that Americans are overstressed and overworked.

Bureau of Labor statistics released last year confirmed what Fraser had been hearing in four years of interviews with white-collar workers. In 1999, more than 25 million Americans - 20.5 percent of the total workforce - reported that they worked at least 49 hours a week, and 11 million of those said they worked more than 59 hours a week.

Sweat Under the White Collar

Indications are that the bulk of those overworked people were white collar workers, who do not punch a clock and whose hours therefore are the most difficult to track.

Schor's 1997 book, which became a bestseller, stated that in 1990 Americans worked an average of nearly one month more per year than they had in 1970. Statistics indicate that the trend she described hasn't been reversed in the last decade.