Work and Leisure

96 Chris Gratton and Peter TaylorInternational comparisonsIn this section we examine the UK’s allocation of time between paidwork and leisure with two countries known to be more orientated to worktime, the United States and Japan, and also with countries which have a lesserorientation to work time, in Europe.United StatesSchor (1991) found that in the period 1969 to 1987, against all expectations,the United States had chosen to take all the benefits of productivity gainsin more money rather than more leisure time. In fact, rather than workingtime being reduced over this period (as in the UK), it actually increasedsubstantially.Since 1969 American workers have experienced a substantial rise in hoursof work. The rise is very small for the population as a whole but if welook at people with jobs, it is quite substantial. The average employedperson in America, excluding people who are under-employed orunemployed, increased his or her market hours over the period 1969 to1987 by an average of about 160 hours a year, or by what I have referredto as the ‘extra month of work’. For women, the increase in market hourswas much larger, just over 300 hours a year. This has been brought aboutby a number of factors. Over the period there has been a substantialrise in the numbers of women in full-time jobs. Increasingly, these arecareer jobs which require both more hours of work per week and amore continuous labour force participation around the year than hasconventionally been associated with female employment.Men also experienced an increase in their hours of work over thisperiod by an average of about 100 hours. Around two thirds of the rise isaccounted for by a larger fraction of the year that people are working andabout a third of it is due to longer weekly hours. Increasingly, Americanscan be described as overworked in what I would say is the technical ratherthan the popular sense of overwork. That is, increasing numbers ofpeople say they are working more hours than they would like to and arewilling to trade-off income in order to work fewer hours. A variety ofpolls in the last five years indicate that between 15 per cent and just over50 per cent of workers feel this way, depending on the form of work timeand income reduction proposed and the wording of the question.(Schor 1996: 6–7)Schor’s evidence, like the later evidence of the UK, is in direct contradictionto expectations from the neoclassical income/leisure trade-off model outlinedearlier. One of the reasons Schor suggests is that rigidities in the labour