Why so many Americans hate their work hours

Publish date: 2024-07-30
2023-04-05T10:30:00Z

Businesses have said for more than a year that people don't want to work. To the contrary, they do.

In fact, nearly a quarter of low-income workers making less than $47,000 a year want to work more hours. On the flipside, almost a third of middle- and high-income workers say they work too many hours, according to a Pew Research Center report released Thursday.

At a time of low unemployment and persistent labor shortages, where does this mismatch of too few and too many hours come from? Blame companies "gaming the system" to save on employment costs, automation, and middle-class insecurity, two Yale professors told Insider. Workers are left either wanting to work more but can't get the hours, or they want to work less but feel they shouldn't. 

Daniel Markovits, a Yale Law professor who wrote "The Meritocracy Trap" about inequality harming rich and poor alike, said, "In that sense, humanly, the system is wasteful."

Low-income workers want more hours, but companies aren't offering them

Among workers bringing in less than $47,000 a year, Pew found 23% don't work as much as they'd like. 

This isn't up to them, Markovits told Insider. When surveyed, lower-income workers would likely jump at the opportunity to work more hours to earn more. "People just want to earn more because they need to," Markovits said. 

If they could earn more money, it would go right back into meeting their necessities. The bottom 40% of households spend 100% of their income on housing, food, transportation, and healthcare, according to a 2018 report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. 

Part of the reason workers can't get the hours they need is because employers won't offer them, Markovits said. 

Employing workers for fewer than 40 hours a week means they can be classified as independent contractors instead of employees entitled to benefits, Jennifer Klein, a Yale labor historian, explained. Employers can then minimize their contributions to state unemployment-insurance funds and dodge workers' compensation for workplace injuries. Employers are "gaming the system," and workers are stuck cobbling together part-time jobs, she said. 

But most of this underemployment "is driven by the labor market and what is available," Markovits explained. 

"Robots and algorithms are taking away a bunch of that work" as middle-skill jobs like assembly-line workers, travel agents, and office assistants are being automated, he said. This means that for some jobs, there might be fewer hours to go around.

Economic anxiety keeps higher-income people from working less 

Among middle-income workers earning roughly between $47,000 to $142,000, 26% said they want to work fewer hours, Pew reported. For higher-income workers making even more, 30% want to cut their hours.

This comes after the highest-earning workers dialed back their hours during the Great Resignation and quiet-quitting eras, though they still work the most hours, according to a January paper by researchers from Washington University in St. Louis.

These workers, in the broad middle and upper-middle class, are financially comfortable, but not in the top 1% of the income-distribution ladder, Markovits said. Nonetheless, they must work in an economy that enriches the top 1%.

While technology has replaced a number of middle-skill jobs, it rewards the highest-skilled jobs it can't replace with higher and higher incomes, turning work for the highest earners into a compulsion, he said. 

In the past 40 years, wage inequality has increased as wages have redistributed toward the top 10% and even more to the top 1%, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

In this technological age, top earners increasingly accrue income by selling skilled labor, even if by founding and managing companies, rather than owning land or factories, Markovits said. That means to earn more, they have to work more. In 1983, the lowest-paid 20% of workers were more likely to put in 50 or more hours a week compared to the highest-paid 20%; by 2002, 29% of the highest-paid workers were working those long hours compared to 14% of the lowest-paid workers.

Economic elites swapped the aristocratic ideal of leisure for the middle-class value of hard work, creating an "economy of esteem, which compels some to work for more than is good for them," Markovits said. In their minds, "if they're not busy and not as in demand, they are not as elite," he added.

However, while the chase for status drives elite workaholism, economic anxiety drives the excessive hours of the middle class.

Middle-class workers want "to afford the things, in particular housing and school, that they think their children need in order to have access to the elite in the next generation," Markovits said. "And those things are expensive."

Prices have risen dramatically for the goods and services that middle-class workers believe they need "to keep their children from downward social mobility," he explained. Notably, the inflation-adjusted cost of annual college tuition has nearly quadrupled for public four-year institutions since the 1970s, and college continues to deliver a sizable earnings premium for graduates. 

"If there wasn't so much inequality, those goods wouldn't be so important or valuable," he said. "There's no question that the high-skill premium drives up the cost of housing in super-desirable school districts" as parents want their kids to be accepted into "fancy colleges" whose "graduates dominate the elite." 

As a result, the elite's workaholic values have trickled down to the middle class. 

"For people to get ahead and in particular stay ahead, they have to internalize and live by these values," Markovits said. According to Pew's Thursday report, the more education or income a person has, the more central work is to their identity. Forty-seven percent of upper-income workers say work is very or extremely central to who they are, compared to 36% of lower-income workers.

It's not surprising then that 39% of upper-income workers often check their email and do work outside of normal hours — nearly twice the rate of lower-income workers, according to the Pew report.

"We have a labor market which condemns many people to insufficient opportunities for work, and insufficient in the sense they don't get the income they need, and they don't have the social dignity," Markovits said. "The system condemns another set of people to excessive work, which means they are working hours that leave them humanly depleted."

Do you want to work more but struggle to find full-time employment? Do you feel compelled to work long hours? Share your story with edodd@businessinsider.com.

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