Work-Life Balance

The essential issue of work-life balance is the inability of many workers to achieve parity with regard to their responsibilities to a job and/or a profession, and their obligations and commitments to their private, family, nonwork lives. Work-life balance is not a new problem. It has long been a part of everyone's worklife experience. But in the latter part of the 20th century, the accelerated pace, stress, and complexity of our jobs and our careers has placed this phenomenon at the center of every conversation about our collective work lives. Work-life balance is not a gender or family rights issue. It is a problem that touches every member of the workforce and is closely related to two fundamental questions: (1) Do we live to work or work to live? (2) Do workers' rights include the right to not always have to be working?

At the end of the 19th century, the major goal of the American labor movement was simple and distinct: 8 hours for work, 8 hours for rest, and 8 hours for what we will. For brief periods in the 20th century, for some workers in specific industries, this goal was achieved. But the 40-hour standard week is either a memory or a still-sought-after dream for most Americans. Depending on whose statistics you want to accept, as a nation we are working more now than ever.

In 1989, Newsweek reported that 85% of the American workforce put in more than 45 hours a week on the job. Economist Juliet Schor estimates that annual hours on the job, across all industries and occupations, have been increasing over the past 20 years, so the average employee is now on the job an additional 163 hours, or the equivalent of an extra month per year. In her 1991 best seller The Overworked American, she claimed that one fourth of all full-time workers spent 49 or more hours on the job each week. Of these, almost half were at work 60 hours or more. In 1997, in her important analysis on work and the family, The Time Bind, Arlie Russell Hochschild reported that both men and women workers average slightly more than 47 hours per week. Finally, in a 1999 study, a Cornell University research project found that on average, Americans work 350 hours more per year than Europeans—and 70 hours more a year than even the Japanese, whose language contains the word karoshi that means “death from overwork.” If some of these figures and projections are accurate, by the year 2010, the average workweek could exceed 58 hours.

What has to be kept in mind is that these figures only reflect hours on the job and do not represent the other aspects of our workday such as getting to and from the job as well as household and family responsibilities. A 1999 survey conducted by the Families and Work Institute of New York concluded that both spouses, in a double-income household with kids, put in a minimum of 15 hours per day on work, commuting, chores, and children. These figures, based on a Monday through Friday schedule, mean that both spouses have already “logged-in” 75 hours before the weekend. Moreover, although Sundays in many households are still reserved for family outings and social events, Saturday is usually just another workday. “Honey-do-lists” are drawn-up, chores are assigned, projects attended to, and kids are schlepped to music lessons and the mall. According to a 2001 Harvard Health Letter, nonworking, no-chores, leisure time has eroded to 16.5 hours per week per person.

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