US News & World Report - December 20, 1999
World-class Workaholics Are crazy hours and takeout dinners the elixir of America's success?
By James Lardner
Chris Strahorn's parents haven't seen much of him lately. They're usually asleep by the time he gets home, anywhere between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. And he's often asleep when they leave for work. If his car is in the driveway, they know he made it back. (Sometimes his father says hi to the car.) If not, it's a safe bet that Strahorn, a 24-year-old computer programmer at an Internet start-up called the Tomorrow Factory, has pulled another overnighter, grabbing a few hours of sleep on his futon. Most of his colleagues prefer the sofa that the company has thoughtfully provided. Strahorn likes the relative calm and quiet of his cubicle. He sleeps under his desk, for the darkness, and close to his computer, for the warmth.
Wherever he has slept, he tends to have breakfast at the Morning Brew Coffee Co. in the same small South San Francisco building as the Tomorrow Factory. The Morning Brew was there first. When the Tomorrow Factory moved in over the summer, the founders installed a door between the two places. Thanks to that piece of foresight, the Tomorrow Factory's thermoses are kept steadily filled with freshly ground Sumatra. Some of the employees, says Strahorn, think it may be time to add a "direct line-an intravenous tube."
Young computer whizzes with stock options may not be broadly representative of the contemporary work force. But in one respect-crazy hours-the Silicon Valley ethos speaks for America these days. Between 1977 and 1997, the average workweek (among salaried Americans working 20 hours or more) lengthened from 43 to 47 hours. Over the same years, according to James T. Bond, vice president of the Families and Work Institute, the number of workers putting in 50 or more hours a week jumped from 24 percent to 37 percent. Scarcely a decade ago, Americans viewed the work habits of the Japanese with half-horrified awe. Now, according to a recent report of the International Labor Organization, the United States has slipped past Japan to become the longest-working nation in the advanced industrial world.
The trans-Atlantic gap has become a chasm, with the average American working the equivalent of an astonishing eight weeks a year longer than the average Western European. In Norway and Sweden, ordinary workers get four to six weeks of vacation and up to a year of paid parental leave. In France, a 35-hour maximum workweek, promoted by the socialist government of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin partly as a way to cut unemployment, is becoming the law of the land.
Reality check. No doubt, many Americans would like a piece of that inaction. But any jealousy on the part of U.S. workers might be checked by a peek at the recent economic record. Roughly 10 percent unemployment is the norm across much of Western Europe, with its already-successful efforts to reduce working hours.
By contrast, work-happy America is enjoying unparalleled prosperity. Unemployment is at a three-decade low of 4.2 percent. Inflation remains tame, despite an annual growth rate that hit 5.5 percent last summer. By the end of January, the economic expansion will be more than 106 months old, the longest in U.S. history.
In France itself, sneering opponents of the 35-hour week tell tales of government inspectors lying in wait for executives who exceed the current 39-hour limit. Even with some allowance for artful exaggeration, it seems hard to figure how Silicon Valley could ever have existed under such an arrangement. Innovation and demonic commitment tend to go hand in hand, after all.
And we are talking about consenting adults, with the kind of ambitions that Americans have always lauded. They dream of technological breakthroughs, money, and, in the words of Robert Tsai, a 25-year-old computer programmer: "someday living comfortably with my loved ones off the fruits of my labor now, and being just as productive in a leisurely 35-hour workweek as the next generation of young-punk whiz kids working 60-hour workweeks."
Paying the bills. Many Americans, of course, work long hours for less intoxicating reasons. Mary Fowler, who is 53 and lives with her two grandchildren in Baltimore, works as a school custodian. A year ago, an ambulance took her to the hospital after she passed out while cleaning up in a portable school annex. ("It was hot," she says.) Although she left the next morning with a clean bill of health, the tab came to $3,000. Fowler had no medical insurance. To pay for her hospitalization, she took a weekend job as a caterer. To free up the time, she cut down on her volunteering at a local church.
Or consider Raymond White, who catches chickens-thousands a day, in huge and smelly chicken houses up and down the Delmarva Peninsula for the Frank Perdue processing plant in Accomac, Va. A typical shift runs about 12 hours, with travel time included. White, who nets about $400 a week, doesn't receive overtime, having been classified as a farm worker rather than a food-processing worker-a company claim that he and his fellow catchers are challenging in court. But his grievance is basically about the pay, not the hours.
Most days, in fact, White works an additional five hours or more in the produce department at a Wal-Mart near his home in Pocomoke City, Md. While he is lucky to squeeze in four hours of sleep, he hopes the extra money will help send his two children to college. The Wal-Mart job also provides health insurance-something he lost in 1991, when, in another contested move, White and his fellow catchers were "fired," and immediately rehired, but as employees of their crew foreman acting as Perdue contractors. Perdue, White also notes, has been experimenting with a vacuum-powered chicken-catching machine, so he figures it's good to have a backup job.
In the legal business as in the chicken business, firms have grown bigger and competition more intense. Today's high-powered law firms are pyramids in which armies of young associates vie for a comparative handful of lucrative partnerships, competing in the coin of "billable" hours. In the old days, says a wistful escapee from the Washington, D.C., office of one large firm, adversaries in a lawsuit cooperated to "keep costs and blood pressures down." Nowadays, he says, if you're writing a motion knowing that your opponents will have 10 days to reply, you deliberately file it on a Friday, compelling your opposing lawyers to work two straight weekends. "It's just the way the game is played," he explains.
Information age blues. The longer-hours trend first surfaced in the late '70s. Many Americans began working longer, says economist Frank Levy, to get ahead, or avoid falling behind, in a period of stagnant or declining wages for all but the highest earners. But it is managers and professionals who, broadly speaking, work the longest. Indeed, hours have increased as much as they have in part because far more Americans (34 percent of the work force, compared with 27 percent in 1977) hold such jobs. But, of course, hours give an incomplete picture of the transition from the industrial to the information age.
Over the past century as a whole, physical work has become easier, and work has become less physical. White-collar workers, however long they work, have more control over their time than factory workers. (Jobs with rigid schedules cause much more stress, studies have shown.) Increasing numbers of Americans can make phone calls to friends from the office, or drive over to the mall during their lunch breaks.
Working hours, too, have come down over the long term. In 1900, men in America worked 10-hour days and six-day weeks in factories, and even longer on farms; shorter hours were mostly the lot of desperate people who couldn't find work. Housewives, like domestic servants, probably put in 72-hour weeks. Vacations were an exotic concept enjoyed by less than 2 percent of the population.
America was built on a foundation of hard work as well as natural bounty. As an immigrant nation, the United States benefited from a large pool of workers self-selected for their long-term horizons and their readiness to endure hardship in the here and now. "Everyone is running to and fro, pressed by the stomachache of business," one observer, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, sculptor of the Statue of Liberty, commented in 1871.
After World War II, the workday shrank to eight hours and most Americans got weekends off. At the height of union power in the 1960s, workers commonly expected to retire at age 55. No more. With the erosion of big-company pension plans and doubts about the long-term viability of Social Security, many Americans feel pressed to work harder in order to pump up their savings-even as they steel themselves to work until they are 70 or older.
No place like work. Of course, the 60-hour weeks of many modern managers and professionals include lunches, travel, and perhaps a certain amount of macho exaggeration of hours. In some of the longest-working professions, the amenities have reached a level that is almost comical. In Pittsburgh, Deloitte Consulting has created a sleeping room. In San Francisco, employees of Charles Schwab can call on a concierge service to make their dinner reservations or do their gift buying.
Even so, longer hours are taking their toll, especially on working parents. Three years ago, Nancy Outenreath, a regional manager for a large health care chain, consulted Fehrunnisa Moore, one of a growing number of "coaches" who advise the work-crazed inhabitants of Northern California. As a result of their sessions, Outenreath asked her boss for Wednesday afternoons off, allowing her to take her 12-year-old son to violin lessons. She began getting up at 5:30 a.m. herself in order to get to a local health club for exercise. And in the most dramatic of her innovations, she sold her son and husband, a psychiatrist, on the idea of sitting down to a home-cooked dinner every night without the TV on.
For Outenreath and others up and down the income ladder, the goal these days is work-life "balance," and it doesn't come easy. Requests may be denied. Or they may be granted at an unknown price. "This couldn't have come at a worse time," Juliana Rice was told when a partner at her Boston law firm heard she was pregnant. Rather than run the risk of being perceived as undercommitted, many employees don't ask for favors. But, as sociologist Arlie Hochschild observed in her book The Time Bind, the dynamic is more complicated than that.
In nostalgic (and mostly male) visions of postwar America, dinner was virtually on the table by the time Dad came home, though he always had time to throw off his shoes, sit back in his easy chair, and be fussed over by his wife and kids. Now men and women alike will come home after 7 p.m. to face cacophony and disorder-and a series of uncommenced tasks that somehow have to be compressed into a couple of hours before everybody collapses. Small wonder, says Hochschild, that some parents prefer to linger at their far calmer and more supportive workplaces.
On the road again. Certainly, different people define "balance" differently, and many are grateful for seemingly small concessions. Cynthia Towell's job as a management consultant often takes her far from her home and three children in suburban Dallas. Her husband, Dwin, a technical director of televised sports events, travels almost as much as she does. Still, Towell counts herself lucky. While many of her peers are stationed at client-companies five days a week, her employer, Ernst & Young, lets consultants fly back on Thursday and spend Friday in the home office. Because her husband's traveling is concentrated on the weekends, one parent or the other can usually be home with the kids at night. Finding time to spend with each other is trickier-"We're working on that," she says.
Bruce Angus searched his soul when Camdens.com, an E-commerce start-up in White Plains, N.Y., dangled the prospect of a vice presidency before him last spring. With fatherhood looming, Angus worried about the demands of such a job, though it came as a shock to him recently when his wife, whom he considers a "straight shooter," told him he was working 100-hour weeks.
Both finally agreed, however, that the chance to help build the first "premium high-end luxury retailer online" was too good to pass up. He considers it an achievement that he generally manages to get home in time to catch a glimpse of his 9-month- old daughter, Sophie. And when she's older, Angus points out, she won't remember how little she is seeing of him now. "If you've got to sacrifice time with your children," he concludes, "it might be better that it happens real early in life."
After his daughter goes to sleep, Angus goes back to work making phone calls for about two hours on a typical evening. The opportunity to work at home is another blessing for his family, he says. But while it is often presented in that light, working at home doesn't turn out that way for everyone.
"I'd get up at like 7 in the morning, grab a cup of coffee, and get in on the E-mail," says Joe Cortale, an Internet executive, recalling a telecommuting arrangement that became one of the worst jobs of his life until "my wife had a sit-down with me." Because he was on the East Coast dealing with West Coast people, Cortale would break briefly for dinner, and then " it was back upstairs in the home office."
At what price? Indeed, some analysts think that telecommuting may have made a significant contribution to America's recent productivity gains. It's a "win-win" situation for companies and workers, according to a recent assessment by the outplacement firm of Challenger, Gray & Christmas. In fact, while management gurus talk about "working smarter," the data lead some economists to suggest a slightly less high-minded explanation of our current prosperity. Longer hours alone, says Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute, go a long way toward explaining the roughly $300 annual income gain the average American registered between 1989 and 1996.
The economy has certainly been growing-in the conventional sense, but also in a new one, as the world of work and money come to occupy more space in the whole of American life. The gains seem fairly clearer to many economists, and to many workers. The costs on the family and community end are only beginning to be sorted out.
But while Americans aren't necessarily boasting about their newfound status as the foremost workaholics of the Western world, they aren't clamoring for a 35-hour workweek either. And in the nation's cutting-edge experiments with the new realities of both longer and fuzzier hours, many workers are fumbling their way toward better ways of managing time at work as well as home.
Sharon Chiu's worst trial was a six-week period without a day off several years ago. As the comptroller of a company now known as ClickAction, she was going in to work at 5 a.m. and coming home at 10 p.m. while preparing for an initial public offering. On her arrival, she would wash dishes and make the next night's dinner, having vowed to cook for her family even if she couldn't eat with them.
Mommy dearest. One night at the end of the third week, she agreed to come home early-at 9 p.m.-in response to her daughter's urgent plea for help with a homework problem. After they had worked it out, Chiu's daughter broke into a torrent of tears. "Now that I don't have a homework problem, I won't see you again," she said.
Although Chiu never consulted a coach, she got some unexpected support two years ago, when Gregory Slayton became ClickAction's chief executive officer. Slayton had strong feelings about overwork, left over from a domestically calamitous period of his own life when, while commuting to Buenos Aires for McKinsey & Co., he missed his wife's birthday and their anniversary in the same year.
At ClickAction, employees are actively discouraged from lingering too late in the evening or coming in on weekends. The typical hours-55 to 65 a week-are not exactly slack by any but Silicon Valley standards, but they have been a useful recruitment and retention tool, according to Slayton, and generally beneficial to the bottom line. (ClickAction's stock is currently trading at 10 times its price when he arrived.)
Extreme hours cause costly mistakes, he argues, and people interrupt each other frivolously, on the assumption that the real work will be done at night. "The one thing you can't do in this company is waste somebody else's time," he says. "That's dismissable." Slayton takes a particularly dim view of unnecessary or undisciplined meetings-"the biggest single sink-time" in corporate life, to hear him tell it.
At ClickAction, getting out the door at a reasonable hour has become a minor goal unto itself. "Nobody wants to be at work at 10 p.m.," Slayton says. "The whole company kind of rises to the challenge."
With Trena Johnson