OVERWORKED MONKEYS

Last week, I went into a huge, high-rise office building for a job related meeting. I was not happy about this, as not having to interact with co-workers is one of the big selling points of my job. On the other hand, I am only required to attend a work related meeting about once every three years, so I didn’t whimper too much.

My partner used to work for a company which was bought by the company we both currently work for, so he ran into a lot of his old co-workers throughout the day. He became quite notorious when he left there – amidst severe and ongoing over-booking of his schedule, he just got up one day and walked out. The problem had been going on for years, and as many salaried employees know, The Man can and will work you to death if you let Him get away with it. Sure, he made a decent amount of money, but if you broke it down into the actual “hourly” rate for sixty or so hours per week, it wasn’t all that much.

While at the meeting, we got to meet some of our Corporate Overlords who we know only vaguely as names at the bottoms of memos we never read. I was struck by a dynamic several times that day… People seem to wear their overworked status as some sort of badge of honor. They nearly brag about how many hours a week that they stay in the office without pay. (When someone is hired for forty hours a week but actually works sixty, I consider the extra twenty to be without pay.) Yes, sometimes they send us more work to do than any normal or sane person would want to do in a week, but we can rest assured that they are working at least twice as long, and they’re on salary. (We, of course, are not. Thank heavens.)

This is what “we” as a corporate identity consider team work. Um…yeah. I consider it working really hard to line somebody else’s pockets with cash that I’ll never see. I was a salaried employee once. Once. There is some sort of implied prestige in being on salary, but in many cases, one trades that prestige in for many hours of their life. I was appalled at the hours my partner used to work – his work load had increased by nearly three hundred percent, and yet they would hire no one else to help him do it. As far as they were concerned, it was his “duty” to just stay there at all hours of the day and night, and come in on weekends if necessary, to get the job done.

We went out to lunch with his former boss, and she mentioned that, after more than twenty years with the company, she finally put her foot down about coming in on weekends. She still works twelve hours a day, though…

Why is this? Maybe I just have ridiculously rigid boundaries when it comes to employment, but I would never tolerate such a state. If I was hired for forty hours a week, my butt would be scooting out the door at forty on the dot. I can see, maybe, a few extra hours here and there, but you better believe that I’d be leaving a few hours early the next week.

But soooo many people do it. So many people sit at their desks, day after day, night after night, Saturday afternoon after Saturday afternoon, hoping that, maybe, someone “high up” might take notice of their meager efforts, their longing desire to sell their life / soul to their Corporate Masters, so that maybe, someday, they might be promoted to the higher echelons of the company where the employees seem to just walk around looking spiffy driving their expensive sports cars and leaving the office to play golf at three in the afternoon every day.

What IS the cheese at the end of this maze? Frankly, I don’t think there is any. The point is to get as many people as possible to buy into the idea of the corporate dream so that they are willing to give away their lives to grease its pyramid scheme cogs.

And have you noticed the discrepancy between what the typical corporate employee gets paid versus the amount noted as “billable hours” to the client? For every graphic designer making roughly fifteen dollars an hour (make that about ten once you factor in how many hours over forty they may be working), there is a client being billed more than a hundred and fifty dollars an hour for his or her time. What is that? I understand that a company has to make money to stay in business, but ninety percent? Is this really fair? This, of course, is just an example – many graphic designers don’t make fifteen dollars an hour (even at forty hours a week theoretically on paper) and many jobs are billed at an even higher rate. I once knew someone, making roughly ten bucks an hour after the real hours at work number was factored in, whose company billed the client more than three hundred dollars for every hour of work that he did.

Something else that I’ve heard reported from several of my white-collar friends is how often someone (or several someones) gets laid off, and rather than hiring someone to replace them, the employees who are left are expected to absorb their work. This often means that the most competent employees are left taking on more and more work, usually without any kind of financial recompense. And, if they can’t get the work done anymore in the forty hours a week allotted, well, then there are always evenings and weekends to make up for it.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 25 percent of all full-time workers spend 49 or more hours on the job each week. Of these, 11 percent are at work 60 hours or more. About forty percent of the American workforce receives a salary, and statistically speaking, they are far more likely than hourly paid workers to work more than forty hours per week. Those who fall into the “managerial and professional specialty” group, such as medical residents, investment bankers, corporate lawyers, and many other professionals often end up working more than 70 hours per week.

Certainly, the upper tiers of these professions have the potential to reap quite a few financial rewards, but often those near the bottom rungs of the corporate ladder do not. However, they are still expected to put in just as many hours if they want to achieve the ever desirable state of “upward mobility.”

Back in the 1950’s, it was predicted that by the year 2000 Americans would mostly be living lives of relaxed comfort. There were so many new products and services available to make life easier, more convenient, that surely we were moving to a culture filled with free time and leisure. Ironically, the opposite has actually been the case. Harvard Economist Juliet B. Schor, in her book The Overworked American, writes that "The average employed person is now on the job an additional 163 hours, or the equivalent of one month a year," compared to figures for 1969. The booming technological innovations from the middle of the twentieth century onward promised more and more free time to Americans, which it obviously has yet to deliver.

Americans work more and longer hours than any other industrialized country. And, despite an economy of recession, mandatory overtime is at near record levels. On average, Americans work nearly nine full weeks (350 hours) longer per year than people in Western Europe. We also average a little over two weeks of vacation per year, while Europeans average five to six weeks. In fact, Americans work more hours of the day and more days of the year than the typical Medieval peasant ever did. (Come see the violence inherent in the system…) Why is that?

I, for one, have no answer to this. I see it happening around me, often to people I love, but have yet to find some underlying explanation for these conditions. Perhaps it is a left-over inheritance from our Protestant forefathers and the belief that the financially well-off are inherently blessed by god. Maybe it is the left-over enthusiasm of the work force from W.W.II. Perhaps most of America really is being brain-washed by their televisions into believing that they MUST own all of this crap, and all of the crap has to be This Particular Name Brand or they just aren’t as cool as the Jones’s. Work. Come home. Relax by watching TV. Let the TV tell you what it wants you to buy. Go to work. Give the television what it wants…

I don’t know… But I know that it is epidemic.

For most people, it is just a matter of financially keeping their proverbial heads above water. They don't “want” to work the hours that they do, but they can see no way out. Certainly, they would rather be on vacation with their families two months out of the year, but as it is, they can barely afford (in either time or money) to take a weekend trip. Americans are in debt up to their ears, they work ridiculous hours, and one out of four (and I’m talking about the gainfully employed here) do not have any kind of health insurance coverage.

So how is it that Americans have a higher standard of living than anyone else in the world? In many other countries, everyone has health care, regardless of their income. They get more vacations. They get two hours for lunch. They are expected to spend time with their families and in their communities. It is assumed that they will pursue spiritual and intellectual growth throughout their lives. They are, in a word, expected to LIVE.

Perhaps someone needs to explain “higher” in that whole higher standard of living equation… “Americans buy more crap” is a more accurate statement in my opinion. And of course we do – someone has to buy all of the stuff that we work overtime to produce… Someone has to use all of the “useful” and “convenient” services that we provide… All we need is good marketing… Thank heavens the marketing folks are used to working overtime…

Speaking with a friend of mine earlier today, he mentioned that one of his co-workers (who has worked for his company for thirty years) is appalled by the work ethic of the younger generation. My friend explained that most of the people of this generation watched their fathers and mothers with their “do it for the company” work ethic work themselves to death, never being home or having the energy to interact with their children, only to be eventually screwed by the company in which they had invested so much of their lives. So, yes – the generation afterward does have a different ethic about work.

Maybe once upon a time in America, companies really did care about their employees, their families and their happiness, but that time is long past. Now what they care about is squeezing every last bit of available energy from each one of their employees for the least amount of money possible. The Almighty Bottom Line is the one and only important aspect of work – it is more important than human lives, happiness or the sustainability of the very planet upon which we all live.

You know, there is nothing wrong with money in and of itself – it is just a tool for trade, a means of bartering with others in a world bigger than the village communities of the past centuries. But come on – it seems to me that it is really getting out of hand. Profit is more important than life itself in the culture I’ve come from. To me, the bottom line is this – once there is no more clean water or air, The Almighty Dollar isn’t worth a cent. All of the money made destroying the environment is worth less than nothing once that environment is finally destroyed. And as much as folks don’t like to look at it, humans ARE the natural disaster causing the mass extinction taking place right now, the likes of which haven’t been seen on this planet in over sixty million years.

Money is just a construct – it isn’t even based upon anything real, other than general consensual reality. If tomorrow everyone decided that dollars were just pieces of paper (look at them real close – just paper), then that would be it for the economy. No gold standards here anymore… just consensual reality to keep us afloat and in which we invest so much of our time, energy and lives. Seems like pretty shaky ground to me…

When I’m a hundred and ten, looking back upon my life before heading into the great beyond, do I really want to face the fact that I spent most of the healthiest, robust years of my life strapped to a desk fretting about being promoted so that I could buy the newest, best, biggest SUV on the market? Put into perspective of the bigger picture, were these things really all that important? Could I have driven a Ford instead of a Jaguar? In the end, did any of that stuff really matter?

Friday October 24th, 2003 has been designated “Take Back Your Time Day.” According to their web site, this is “a nationwide initiative to challenge the epidemic of overwork, over-scheduling and time famine that now threatens our health, our families and relationships, our communities and our environment.” Though an event like this certainly will not fix the problem overnight, I think it’s great that at least folks seem to be noticing the ongoing trend in the American workforce.

For many people, they just keep doing what they’re doing because it’s what they’ve always done and it seems to be what everyone around them is doing, so it must be “just the way things are,” right? Awareness is the first part of any kind of change, so I am glad that at least a few people in the work force are ready to try to do something about it.

I, for one, am not overworked. There are times that I feel guilty about this, as though if I suffered too, then somehow it would ease the suffering of others. Of course, this is the very attitude which keeps people tied to their desks at all hours of the day and night (if Bob is working seventy hours a week, then I should be too), so I try to let go of it. I work the way I do because I don’t care what kind of crap the Jones’s have in their house (I guarantee they don’t live in my neighborhood anyway), nor do I have a television telling me how deficient I am for not having X, Y and Z brands of whatever on my body, in my refrigerator or in my closet. What I have wouldn’t make everyone happy, but I really don’t need a whole lot other than happiness, which as they saying goes, can’t be bought anyway.

I don’t know what dreams a lot of Americans are chasing, and frankly I’m quite grateful for this. I’m happy with my job – it pays my bills, which granted are pretty comparatively low, and I can buy whatever food I want at the grocery store. I’ve owned a house for more than ten years (it is SO much cheaper than renting), and I have the freedom to set my own schedule and do my own thing ninety-nine percent of the time. My partner and I take very fun and inexpensive vacations and probably have more fun cooking dinner than most couples do on a two week cruise.

No, I don’t own a luxury car and no, I don’t winter in the Bahamas. Maybe someday I will, but if so, it will be on MY terms and no one else’s. Though, to be honest, I wouldn’t want a luxury car (no fun to take off-road in the desert), nor would I want to winter someplace warm (I like snow).

Rather, my dreams are to winter someplace life Baffin Island and maybe drive a yak. I guarantee that the Arctic Circle in the off season is much less expensive than the Bahamas—and I’d be able to take off from work to do it.

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Statistics and information taken from:
Salary.com "Whatever Happened to Leisure Time?"
Salon.com "The Age of Overwork"
Take Back Your Time: Fighting Overwork and Time Poverty in America