>only 5 hrs/week more? maybe, but only by some pretty tendentious
>measures; if one redefined those measures such that they gauged
>not more-time-working but less-time-not-not-working, the results
>would be quite different. for example, someone who holds down 2
>jobs loses a lot of time to commuting. sole proprietors, entre-
>preneurs, partnerships, etc. have been a huge area of growth: do
>these people really work only 5 more hours than they would have
>a decade ago? and, in general, the demise of organized labor in
>the last decades has surely dealt a staggering blow to the idea
>of overtime pay--in which case, there's less incentive to report
>longer hours accurately.
Time use is pretty controversial. Juliet Schor quoted one set of stats in The Overworked American that showed lots more work effort, but other time use surveys show no such changes. Also, the change in work effort is heavily gendered, with women logging more hours for pay, and (some) men less.
Besides, 260 more workhours is 6.5 40-hour weeks, more than a month and a half. That's nothing to sneeze at.
Doug