James A. Rising

In the spirit of Labor Day, I did a little research into Labor issues. I wanted to explore how much time people spent either at or in transit to work. Ever since the recession, it seems like we are asked to work longer and harder than ever before. I’m thinking particularly of my software colleagues who put in 60 hour weeks as a matter of course, and I wanted to know if it’s true across sectors. Has the relentless drive for efficiency in the US economy taken us back to the limit of work-life balance?

I headed to the IPUMS USA database and collected everything I could find on the real cost of work.

When you look at average family working hours (that is, including averaged with spouses for couples), there’s been a huge shift, from an average of 20-25 hours/week to 35-40. If those numbers seem low, note that this is divided across the entire year, including vacation days, and includes many people who are underemployed.

The graph below shows the shift, and that it’s not driven by specifically employees or the self-employed. The grey bands show one standard deviation, with a huge range that is even larger for the self-employed.

So who has been caught up in this shift? Everyone, but some industries and occupations have seen their relative quality of life-balance shift quite a bit. The graph below shows a point for every occupation-and-industry combination that represents more than .1% of my sample.

In 1960, you were best off as a manager in mining or construction; and worst as a laborer in the financial sector. While that laborer position has gotten much worse, it has been superseded in hours by at least two jobs: working in the military, and the manager position in mining that once looked so good. My friends in software are under the star symbols, putting in a few more hours than the average. Some of the laboring classes are doing relatively well, but still have 5 more hours of work a week than they did 40 years ago.

We are, all of us, more laborers now than we were 60 years ago. We struggle in our few remaining hours to maintain our lives, our relationships, and our humanity. The Capital class is living large, because the rest of us have little left to live.