The Time Use studies show that US leisure time is holiding up pretty well despite the pressures from work time and domestic labour.
Which is interesting (ok, maybe in a bit of a geekish way) because nobody believes that to be the case (i.e. their subjective experience is that they are very short of time). The disjuncture between subjective belief (we have no free time) and objective fact (you have) is something (maybe not the only thing) that has to be explained.
Wainwright's (in his book with Calman, Work Stress) point is that other social changes make people experience work pressure more intensely than before.
Doug asks does this mean that people are less willing to put up with what they did before?
Maybe. My answer would be to look at what has changed - principally the declining role of organised labour, which leaves people in an unmediated relationship with their employers. That makes them more vulnerable. And it makes them feel even more vulnerable.
I also think that the anarchist point about unions ought to be taken into account. Unions did not only defend workers, they also acted as 'labour lieutenants of capital', enforcing negotiated settlements upon the workforce. The wage-labour capital relationship was, ironically, more disciplined with organised labour's role.
Older generations of more organised workers felt loyalty and confidence. They also felt greater pride in their work, and a greater sense of duty towards work and family, and approached that duty with a degree of stoicism that is less widespread today. That is because they felt more ownership of the workprocess themselves, because, even if they did not own it, they felt that they had at least a stake in it, that people are less likely to today.
Not in the way that craft workers did, but as industrial workers, they identified with the work process because they had tentatively some identification with the organised labour side of the bargain, that translated into a degree of loyalty to the firm, the product, the work process, that today's more atomised workers are much less likely to feel.
That is the overall psychology of which the intensity of belief that we are more overworked than our parents persists, even though it is not true.