Quick Study: The Future of Work

Say goodbye to the classic 40-hour workweek. The sputtering economy, the decline of manufacturing, and the ubiquitous BlackBerry are remaking 9 to 5 into something with unpredictable hours and fuzzier borders.

By Mattathias Schwartz

From Reader's Digest

• Shorter weeks … for some
  National statistics show a shrinking workweek, dropping from 38.5 hours in the mid 1960s to around 34 hours today. Thanks to the recession, the average is dipping some more, as employers trim hours to reduce costs and adjust to falling demand. But while hours are being cut at most auto plants, they're rising at many office parks. "In recessions, there will be fewer people working, but the workers who remain have to work longer hours to retain their jobs," says Juliet Schor, author of The Overworked American.



• What vacation?
  Americans not only spend more time on the job than their peers in nearly every other developed country, they take a lot less time off: 15 days, on average, although one in four workers gets no vacation. The French, by comparison, get 31 days off; the Portuguese, a whopping 35. But having vacation on the books and actually getting to the beach can be two different things. The median U.S. worker took just one week off last year. Why all the nay-cations? "There's a lot of fear," says Steve Zaffron, CEO of the Vanto Group, a global consulting firm. "Workers who still have a job are worried about when the other shoe is going to drop."



• E-mailing overtime
  The hours lost to evening and weekend texting/e-mailing/BlackBerrying don't show up in workweek statistics or necessarily earn anyone more pay. Half of the workforce checks business e-mail on weekends, 46 percent on sick days, and 34 percent while on vacation. "When you have all of these devices that allow you to deliver something immediately, people begin to demand it," says John de Graaf, the head of Take Back Your Time, a nonprofit devoted to ending "overwork" and "time famine." Timothy Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, is part of the "crackberry" backlash. He reads his work e-mail once a week and advises others to check theirs just twice daily.

34.6 hours average workweek in U.S.A.

26.0 average workweek in Germany

43.6 average workweek in south Korea

850,000 dollars - Amount that unscheduled sick and personal days cost a typical large U.S. company annually

4 in 10 - Number of employees who do not typically take a lunch break (55 percent take a half hour or less)

8.5 percent - Official U.S. unemployment rate for March 2009

15.6 - Actual rate if you count unemployed temp workers, part-timers who want more work, and job seekers who have given up

56% of Americans who fail to take all their vacation days

28% of U.S. workers are on the job at 7 a.m.

15% of U.S. workers are on the job at 7 p.m.

The Back-and-Forth
"Businesses that use contractors tend to be more profitable because they can use contractors on an ad hoc basis [and] don't need to pay for downtime."
--Michael Alter, president, SurePayroll

"If a company lays you off, you can collect unemployment. But if you're a freelancer and you lose all your clients, good luck. That's not healthy for workers and their families—and it's not healthy for our economy."
--Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York City

"We're a workaholic society. The world is much more competitive now than it used to be. These days, you have to run faster and harder just to stay in the same place."
--Hank Cox, spokesman, National Association of Manufacturers

"Since we have eight hours to fill, we fill eight hours. If we had 15, we would fill 15. If we have an emergency and need to suddenly leave work in two hours … we miraculously complete assignments in two hours."
--Timothy Ferriss, author, The 4-Hour Workweek
Forward Thinking

• Get "flexible"
  Providing a rare economic bright spot, the firm SurePayroll reports a slight increase in hiring among small businesses in 2009. The catch? They're paying lower salaries and hiring contractors, who, not incidentally, pay their own payroll taxes, don't draw benefits, and can be fired in a nano-second. Similarly, FedEx now classifies about 13,000 drivers as independent contractors and pays them per delivery, yielding 30 percent less in labor costs than UPS's unionized workforce. Some see our workforce splitting, as Japan's did after its decade-long recession, into two tiers: coddled salarymen and hustling freelancers.



• The four-day week
  After laying off 5.1 million workers since December 2007, companies such as Winnebago and Gannett are experimenting with furloughs, trimming hours to save more jobs. They join states like Utah and Washington, which have switched some or all of their workers to four-day weeks. "Furloughs are cheaper for busi­nesses that are optimistic about the future," says Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. "It's expensive to fire an employee if you will need to rehire and train a replacement in a year."



• Time: the new money
  Dean Baker, cofounder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, has a bold idea: He wants the feds to issue tax credits to companies that would then shorten workers' hours without cutting their pay. In essence, the government would be creating room for future hires, thus lowering unemployment and increasing the spending power of the newly employed. Take Back Your Time's de Graaf says we should adopt policies like those established in Europe that allow employees to voluntarily cut back their hours (for less pay) while retaining most of their benefits.

The Time Line