> The hours data comes (or, if I were the Fed, come) from the payroll
> survey. Their focus is the job, not the worker, so there's no way to
> link the payroll data to the household side. And confidentiality
> requirements would probably make it impossible to link individual
> datapoints that way anyway.
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Thanks for this and the other information, Doug.
Would it be fair to conclude from the discussion that the official statistics, which register a historical decline in hours of work, are still misleading in that they don't capture the huge volume of unrecorded and unpaid hours of work that many workers, predominantly those at the higher education and income levels, perform at home or elsewhere outside their workplace and their regularly scheduled working hours? I think I'm persuaded that part-timers, multiple job holders, and "dependent contractors" don't have much effect on the averages one way or the other.
If the above is correct, it would explain why people feel they are working longer even though the stats tell them they are working less than previous generations.
The other factor, of course, as others have noted, is the greater number of women in the workforce, which has resulted in increased conflict and stress in relation to both the scheduling and distribution of household responsibilities in single parent and dual income families.