Dear Carol Hymowitz:
With all due respect, I think the agonies of what you term "on-call-all-the-time work schedules" call for sterner measures than the pathetic coping mechanisms practiced by your interviewees.
As a corporate communications writer for the past 25 years who has often been involved in company crises, restructurings, transactions, etc. -- I have long been familiar with demanding work hours, especially since I have been employed on a billable-hours basis for over a decade. However, while the sheer time demands of work have gotten worse over the course of my professional life, there is no question that in the past year or so this continuing quantitative change has become a qualitative one.
As far as I'm concerned, the very terms of working life have become debased and vile. What matters now isn't the quality of work one produces but the difficulty of the conditions under which one produces it -- e.g., staying up all night or investing an entire weekend in petty labors that often amount to no more than make-work. I term this "stunt work," and it seems to be characteristic of most workplaces nowadays.
All in all, I find the record prosperity we are now supposedly enjoying a puzzling notion of the good life. Americans in general have never seemed more crass and spiritually impoverished than they do today, lacking the time or inclination to cultivate their sensibilities. As for the comforts and security of material wealth, they show every sign of being illusory and evanescent. Today's rip-roaring stock market is quite obviously a Ponzi scheme. And the unprecedented accumulation of consumer goods that has occurred in recent years reflects only the most reckless sort of spendthrift behavior. We may *think* we deserve all these goodies because of the ridiculous hours we work, but in truth, all that effort doesn't generate much true value; America's spending boom has been fueled by the generosity of others, as evidenced by the greatest current-account deficit in history.
Long story short: Capitalism has got to go. In the very few years since the Berlin Wall came down and America emerged in earnest as *the* global superpower, the nation's business elite have gone out of their way to confirm the worst claims ever made about free enterprise as an inherently mindless, exploitative, alienating mechanism bent on crushing real human potential.
The interviewees cited in your article are preoccupied with making prudent use of the "personal choices" available to them. They should realize that those choices don't amount to a hill of beans. The system stinks and must be replaced. Absent some sort of socialist society, our prospects are bleak indeed.
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Carl ______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com