Americans are materialists, Europeans civilized; Americans hardworking, Europeans lazy. Old stereotypes die hard on both sides of the Atlantic, and now they have taken on a new dimension: work time. Last week the International Monetary Fund made headlines by calling on Europeans to work more as a way to combat high unemployment, low job growth and comparatively low income levels. The recent attempt by the German company Siemens to roll back the 35-hour week was met by a chorus of "I told you so."
Meanwhile, a recent report in this newspaper showed that Europeans continue to pride themselves on being less materialistic and more focused on family and community than their American counterparts ("Continent guards its right to leisure," July 19).
There is, of course, an element of truth in these stereotypes, but as descriptions of two supposedly different cultures, they are far too simplistic.
Take the percentage of the workforce employed, for example. Widely cited by American commentators as evidence for the excesses of the welfare state, the data are in fact much more ambiguous. An important reason a higher percentage of Americans seem to be in the labor force is that so many are not counted - they are in prison or have disappeared from the statistics, which seem increasingly designed to minimize unemployment rates. Nor are all Americans workaholics; 18 percent work part-time, most of them voluntarily.
Some Americans, particularly highly educated, highly paid professionals, do work extraordinarily long hours. But there isn't much evidence that these long hours are a matter of individual choice or of different cultural values. On the contrary, most Americans complain about their stressful daily schedules and their inability to balance work with other activities. Our research shows that most Americans say they would like to work less.
Why, then, the long hours? Americans are compelled to work as long as they do in part because of the pervasive insecurity of American life. In the absence of the generous pensions, government-subsidized college education, universal health care and other benefits that Europeans take for granted, Americans see long hours of work as the only way to obtain needed benefits and generate savings for college and retirement. The real threat of job loss, even for professional employees, forces workers to maximize their earnings in the present. In the absence of strong labor organizations and laws that protect workers, employees are in no position to protest long hours.
In addition, employers have both the motivation and the ability to encourage or require long hours of their employees. It is cheaper to pay overtime than to hire a new employee and underwrite their benefits. It is even easier to demand long hours from managers and professionals who have no legal protection and whose own insecurity has grown enormously in recent years. The "culture of overtime" quickly takes root in this soil.
Fearing that their jobs are in jeopardy, and believing - often correctly - that the only way to achieve economic security is to move up the ladder as fast as possible, Americans find themselves competing with one another to work as much as they can. The American case, then, illustrates not a superior work ethic but a kind of forced overtime unwanted by most.
Fortunately, there are some signs that things may be changing. As we reported in our recent book on technical professionals, "Putting Work in its Place," the entry of large numbers of women into the American labor force has begun to call into question the inevitability of inflexible, "greedy" work schedules. We met a significant number of people who had chosen to work part-time. We say part-time, but in many cases these were people simply seeking to work schedules that Europeans have increasingly come to see as the norm. They still wanted to work but weren't interested in the treadmill of long work hours. Many had begun to see their part-time schedules not as temporary solutions to a short-term problem - such as caring for a newborn child or an ailing parent - but as an alternative, "normal," desirable way of working.
In the American context, it is largely middle-class married women who have been able to challenge the culture of long hours. They are economically able to reduce their incomes and benefits because of their spouses' employment. Women also have a generally accepted reason for working less: Americans still view motherhood as a legitimate "excuse" for limiting paid work. The danger, then, is real that challenges to long hours of work will be seen as "proof" that women are different, less committed, inferior workers
There are also reasons to believe that this trap may be avoided, however. Big institutional forces with significant corporate support, such as The Sloan Foundation and the Families and Work Institute, have been actively promoting workplace flexibility. And emerging social movements like Take Back Your Time Day have begun to challenge the inevitability of the long working day.
American society is changing too. Increasing numbers of men say they would like to spend more time with their children. As the workforce ages, more people are seeking jobs that allow them partially to retire. And, perhaps most important, increased job and career mobility is decreasing the rewards available to those who work long hours, like promotions, and increasing the number of occasions on which one is forced to rethink one's attitude toward employment. It is thus quite possible that the "overworked American" may yield to a more complex, variable pattern of work schedules.
The lesson to be learned from comparing work cultures is not that Europeans should become more like Americans, nor that Americans inhabit a different, more materialistic culture. It is that Europeans have gained politically and socially what many Americans say they want individually but have been unable to achieve politically. Americans, too, would like to have employment security, more flexibility, more leisure, fewer worries about health care and pensions, but the United States still has a long way to go.
Peter Meiksins <http://www.csuohio.edu/sociology/peter.htm> and Peter Whalley <http://www.luc.edu/depts/sociology/gradpgm.htm>, authors of "Putting Work In Its Place: A Quiet Revolution" <http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_catalog.taf?_function=detail&Title_ID=3787&_UserReference=36E01935FA7CD5AA41AF6FB7>, are professors of sociology at Cleveland State University and Loyola University, Chicago.
Cf. Peter Meiksins, "Confronting the Time Bind: Work, Family, and Capitalism," Monthly Review 49,9, February 1998, <http://www.monthlyreview.org/298meik.htm>