Published by the Center for a New American Dream

A quarterly report on consumption, quality of life and the environment

No. 17, Fall 2001 ◆ $3

Page 3
Letter from
Re-Envisioning Work
Betsy Taylor Or Tips to Surviving the Second Industrial Revolution
Page 4 By Tim Munson
kee. My offer that they stay at our apartment rather
What’s Going on at than at the Hilton downtown was politely declined.

M
the Center y old friend Peter doesn’t have much
And a good portion of our weekend together was
patience for ruminating on Americans’
Page 8 spent ducking in and out of shops. Over dinner, I
tendency toward overwork and over-
found my conversational forays into the attractions
Growing Up Without consumption.
of scaling back and living lightly weren’t much in
in a Land of Excess Three months ago, Peter was among 7,000
line with Peter’s intent to add some shine to his CV
employees laid off by a major consulting firm in its
Page 10 with a stellar new entry and make up for lost time
efforts to weather the ongoing U.S. economic
Bad, Good and in supporting the lifestyle to which he and his fami-
downturn. Yet when he, his wife and two-year-old
Truly Ridiculous ly had grown accustomed
daughter visited Washington last month, I was sur-
I’ve known Peter for 15 years. Our friendship
Page 13 prised to see how terrific he looked. In fact the
has weathered vast distances and differences. And
Buying Green:A whole family seemed absolutely healthy, happy and
prior to his visit, I’d felt concerned and frustrated
Greener Shade of at peace. Peter had been doing some freelance con-
for him about his situation. Yet, as we said our
Shoe sulting, he’d been writing for the first time in years,
goodbyes, I was struck by the thought that, like so
he’d begun running again and had taken off twenty
Page 13 many of us Americans, my good friend was perhaps
pounds, and he’d become fast friends with his two-
Fun Box:The Gentle less a victim of the system as of his own choices.
year-old daughter. His wife, Mattie, had made the
Art of Forcing Bulbs
transition from freelance to a part-time position
Americans Running on Empty
Page 14 with a company that had made her an offer too
There is no question that, as a people,
Step by Step: good to pass up. She seemed content and
Americans’ most deeply engrained
Demanding a Better empowered. This was simply a different family
habits of working and con-
Energy Plan than the harried, disconnected peo-
suming are unique. And
ple my wife and I had visited
Page 15 the previous summer.
it’s a good thing for the
Orwell’s Corner environment that that’s
And yet, though my
the case. One scientific
Page 16 friend was well aware of
study reports that if
Please Help Us the remarkable changes
every person in the
Spread the Word in his family’s lives and
ILLUSTRATIONS BY ISABELLE DERVAUX

world were to produce

relationships, to his
and consume like the
mind, the transforma-
average American, we’d
tion had come at a great
need four more planets to
price. They owned a large
supply the raw materials and
home with a big mortgage to pay,
absorb the waste.
and they were still making pay-
ments on the Camry and Yet for many, Americans’
the Jeep Grand Chero- work and spend habits are a
continued on page 2
Re-Envisioning Work
continued from page 1
cause for pride and celebration. When the Commerce
Department reported recently that the productivity of
American workers rose 2.5 percent over the past five years,
the business headlines were self-congratulatory and Wall
Street cheered.
But what have these productivity gains done for the
average American? We’re producing more commodities
and wealth by Tuesday than we once produced after a full
week of work, and yet our leisure time is shrinking. Ameri-
can workers now produce our 1948 annual standard of liv-
ing by July, yet we’re still hard at it in August when our
European counterparts are taking their long summer holi-
days. Rather than using some of our treasured productivity
gains for personal fulfillment and family fun, we’re shuf-
fling off into the new millennium, weighed down by ever-
growing consumption and debt, to work something that’s
approaching a six-day workweek.
According to one report by the Families and Work
Institute, the average employed American now works over
47 hours per week. Those are longer hours than we
worked 50 years ago, despite a doubling in national pro-
ductivity. Add to that a half-hour commute (which would
be blessedly short for many Americans) and you have a
workweek that exceeds fifty-two hours. The Economic
Policy Institute reports that a typical husband-and-wife
household worked 500 more hours in 2000 than they did
in 1990. In more than four out of five marriages today,
both husband and wife work outside the home, putting an
especially heavy strain on working parents and their chil-
dren.
International comparisons perhaps most clearly reflect
that American productivity in the workplace may be reach-
ing the point of diminishing returns. Americans now work
more hours per year than the people of every other indus-
trialized nation. We now work over two weeks a year more
than the average Japanese, and two full months more than
the average German. These days the average European
gets about three times as many days of paid vacation as her
counterpart in the U.S. The average American takes 15
years to earn the vacation time that an Australian gets after
one year on the job.
Consider also that after passing the 35-hour workweek
into law a little over three years ago, France surpassed the
U.S. in terms of productivity per hour for fiscal year 1999-
2000. It seems a more awake worker is a more productive
worker. Add to this that the productivity rates of the
Netherlands grew faster than the U.S. throughout the
2 ◆ FALL 2001
1990s. And nations including Denmark, Sweden and Ger-
many are matching America’s pace of growth step for
step––despite the fact that they’re enjoying all that person-
al time to devote to their families, their communities and
themselves.
After our recent return from many years living in Asia,
my hard-working wife is still reeling from the sudden
absence of holidays to which she (and I) had grown accus-
tomed. Beyond this, unlike the situation in Japan, (as well
as France, Sweden, Italy and many other countries), my
wife and I have felt the sudden impact of being fully
dependent on a company for our health care needs.
Looking at the Big Picture
What’s wrong with this picture? Why on Earth are we
doing this to our selves, our families and the environ-
ment?
To be sure, there’s a slew of macroeconomic rationale
and explanation as to how we arrived at this state of affairs.
And many of these factors can be out of our easy control.
Competitive work environments, as well as fears surround-
ing corporate downsizing and financial insecurity, can pro-
vide powerful incentives to overwork.
At a more systemic level, many scholars suggest that
what we’re really experiencing here is a second Industrial
Revolution, every bit as powerful and disruptive as the
first. According to many experts, North Americans are
working more than ever in large part because of new infor-
mation and communications technologies that bring about
higher demand and expectations for more output, perfor-
mance and service. These technologies also have the effect
of reconfiguring traditional jobs, supplanting some forms
of labor, and realigning organizational and management
structures throughout entire industries.
A study released this past summer by the New York
Federal Reserve Board suggests that technology is indeed
fueling America’s recent productivity growth spurt. This
study found that those industry sectors that had most
aggressively adopted information technologies had been
those that had grown the fastest.
Accompanying this technological remapping of the
economy has been an ever-increasing polarization of the
American workforce and an expanding gap in income dis-
tribution. For the year 2000, BusinessWeek calculated that
cash compensation for CEOs at 365 top U.S. companies
jumped 18 percent during a time when shareholder values
were plummeting. At that time, annual compensation
awarded to the country’s leading business executives
continued on page 11
 Re-Envisioning Work
continued from page 2
already exceeded the salaries of their
lowest-ranking employees by a ratio
of 400 to 1. The Council on Interna-
tional and Public Affairs estimates
that we’d have to go back to 1929,
right before the Great Depression, to
find wage and wealth inequality of
the magnitude we’re seeing today.
That leaves a whole lot of Americans
scrambling for the remaining, ever-
more slender slice of the pie at the
dawn of the 21st Century.
Taken all together, that’s a whole
heap of instability and insecurity
tossed into the macroeconomic mix.
It doesn’t take
M o r e o f t e n t h a n tremendous clair-
voyance to per-
not, we choose ceive that
t o r e m a i n o n t h e Americans are
likely to clock
m e r r y - g o - r o u n d more hours when
we’re feeling both
of accelerating man and machine
breathing down
p r o d u c t i o n a n d our necks, offer-
ing to scoop up
consumption that job.
The Job of Owning Up
And then again, the problem some-
times lies in our own priorities.
The fact is that, more often than
not, we choose to remain on this
merry-go-round of accelerating pro-
duction and consumption, of doing
and getting more. In this vicious
cycle of bigger houses, more work,
bigger cars, more work, bigger debt,
more work, we too often sacrifice our
relationships, the subtle needs of the
soul, and the environment that sus-
tains us.
Yet when we look up from the
grindstone and beyond our cultural
biases, we can see that it simply does-
n’t have to be this way. In fact, back
in the 1930s, the Senate passed a bill
proposing a 30-hour workweek, only
to back down in the face of opposi-
tion from the business community.
Forty years later, President Nixon
again broached the subject of a four-
day workweek for Americans.
If you’re inclined to take your
own convictions into the political or
public arena, there are a great num-
ber of resources for getting educated
on the issues and joining with other
like-minded individuals at the local or
national level. Numerous groups help
individuals evaluate their work and
financial priorities. Others advocate
for new policies and employer pro-
grams offering part-time or flexible
work options. A few organizations
are even considering a national cam-
paign for a four-day workweek. For
more details, you can visit www.new-
dream.org/work or consider some of
the resources listed at right.
One personal option now being
exercised by a small but growing
number of Americans is to slow
down, scale back, pay down debt and
work a reduced schedule. Of course,
this may not be an immediate option
for everyone, especially those who
don’t have a safety net, who risk the
loss of health coverage and retire-
ment plans. But today’s American
workers would surely benefit by first
taking some time to re-assess our cul-
tural notions of work and success.
In the meantime, though we
haven’t spoken since that weekend, I
know Peter’s sorting through his
options. I imagine he’s still looking
for that killer job––when he’s not out
running, writing, or determinedly
teaching his little girl to play poker.
Who knows, perhaps he’ll dis-
cover that this life and these relation-
ships thrust upon him a few months
ago are somehow just enough, and
that that hunger for something more,
something bigger, someone else’s
American dream, will fade away if
you let it.
Ideas that Work
Tips from the Center’s More
Fun, Less Stuff Starter Kit
K eep a time diary for 4 or 5 days,
recording the time you spend on activ-
ities such as shopping, driving, working,
playing with kids, cooking, yard work and
family activities. When you’re finished, sit
down alone or with the important people
in your life and figure out whether your
current time allocation is in line with your
values and priorities. If it’s not, start
exploring possibilities for change.
Consider some alternatives to the
typical workweek: flextime lets you
rearrange your work schedule to accom-
modate childcare or other activities. Part-
time work is also a viable option in a
two-income household; savings on day-
care, a second car, domestic help and take-
out food may make up for that loss in
income. Job swapping with coworkers is an
excellent way to learn new skills, and job
sharing allows you to split responsibilities
with a colleague and cut your office time in
half. Or exploit some of the liberating
effects of the new communications tech-
nologies––try telecommuting, work in your
slippers from the comfort of your home,
and cut down on the expenses, hassle and
pollution of the daily commute.
Resources
• New Road Map Foundation, PO Box
15981, Seattle WA, 98115. (206) 527-
0437, www.newroadmap.org.
• Seeds of Simplicity, P.O. Box 9955,
Glendale, CA 91226. (818) 247-4332,
www.seedsofsimplicity.org.
• Northwest Earth Institute, 506 SW
Sixth Avenue, Suite 1100, Portland, Ore-
gon 97204. 503/227-2807, www.nwei.org.
• Simple Living Network, Post Office
Box 233, Trout Lake, WA 98650.
www.simpleliving.net.
• The Overworked American and The
Overspent American by Juliet Schor.
• The State of Working America, pub-
lished annually by the Economic Policy
Institute.
SUMMER 2001 ◆ 11