Work-and-Spend Cycle

The work-and-spend cycle is a phenomenon in which people in affluent nations remain trapped in a pattern of long hours of work and increasing consumption spending that fails to generate lasting improvements in well-being and plays a major role [Page 1533]in ecological degradation. For the originator of the concept, economist and sociologist Juliet Schor, it is not only a matter of the tightening grip of consumerism on culture and consciousness. But also work-and-spend is rooted in a bias in capitalist labor markets toward long hours of work, which results in labor productivity gains being channeled into rising incomes rather than more free time. Employees get accustomed to the higher income and the consumption it enables, until the next round of productivity and income increases.

In her influential book The Overworked American, Schor sought to explain why, despite vast increases in output per hour of labor, work-time reduction ground to a halt in the United States after World War II, and, by the 1970s, hours of work began to rise significantly. Neoclassical economics explains the outcome as a product of workers' preferences for income over leisure. Schor rejects this explanation and the idea that a functioning market in work hours exists. She argues that employers, not workers, have the dominant say over work hours, which come tied to a given job. Full-time jobs with benefits in the United States typically require at least a 40-hour week, often more. Available shorter-hours jobs usually come with disproportionate penalties, including lower hourly pay, no health care or other benefits, and diminished career prospects.

Schor identifies a number of reasons why capitalist employers prefer long hours of work. With salaried employees, extending the workday—a time-tested strategy for surplus-value extraction—is a seemingly costless source of additional profit. Yet even when workers are paid by the hour, and even at premium overtime rates, employer incentives for long hours persist. Fixed costs per worker—such as employer-paid benefits, training, and hiring costs—lead employers to concentrate work hours among a limited number of people. Schor argues that a longer-hours/higher-income combination increases the economic cost of job loss (the employment rent), which facilitates employer control of the workforce and increases labor productivity. Highly capital-intensive industries also seek maximum operating hours and, given the difficulty of finding additional workers of comparable quality and experience, employers prefer to keep the machines running with fewer people working long shifts.

As a result, employers would rather pass on hourly productivity gains to workers through wage increases than shorter hours. (This assumes that workers are able to stake a claim to their share in some form—a safe assumption during postwar Fordism but less so as neoliberal globalization took hold.) Although U.S. workers repeatedly say in surveys that they would give up some future wage gains for shorter hours, Schor notes that as time passes, in most cases they do not get the extra time. In fact, once they receive a higher income, they generally resist reducing it to gain free time. This asymmetry is, in part, a product of habituation to higher consumption as the new norm. It is also driven by relative consumption comparisons, or “keeping up with the Joneses;” as social standards of consumption rise, people feel pressure to keep up or risk a fall in relative status, making it difficult to go against the current. Turning neoclassical economic theory on its head, Schor thus argues that workers do not “get what they want” but come to “want what they get.”

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