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Elon Musk claims to work up to 120 hours a week and expects the same dedication from his staff (he once called remote work “morally wrong”). Musk’s supporters see such Stakhanovism as proof that determination and grit pay off, including billions of dollars. Detractors see it as counterproductive sexism.
Brigid Schulte, director of New America, a progressive think tank, is in the latter group. About workFormer Washington Post reporter explores how long working hours have taken over America to the point where overwork has “become a fact of life.”
We are at a turning point. Employees have greater flexibility, including over location and asynchronous work, following lockdowns. Campaigns for a four-day workweek are gaining momentum as experiments with shorter hours are being conducted in companies around the world, albeit typically in those with small workforces. However, there has also been a desire to restore the pre-pandemic order, notably in orders to return to the office, including by Goldman Sachs and Boots. Recently, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy demanded that staff return to working five days a week: “Before the pandemic, it was not a given that people would be able to work remotely two days a week, and that will be the case in the future as well.”
Schulte wants to radically change working patterns. “Our limits are only the horizon of our imagination and the stories we tell ourselves about how things should be, because work has not worked for too many people for too long.”
Some argue that “workism”—devotion to our jobs—fills the void left by religion. Or that it confers status, with long hours being an important badge. Schulte is more pragmatic, arguing that in an era of layoffs in the media and technology sectors and the spread of artificial intelligence and robotics, it is more likely to be a “fear of surviving in what has become an unforgiving world of paid work.” That will sound familiar to many service and hospitality workers who are at the mercy of algorithmic management that cares nothing for their lives outside of work. Schulte notes that “when last-minute schedule changes and surprise shifts [are] “There was less work and more stable schedules reduced work-family conflict and stress.”
When reporting on results is so vague in white-collar jobs, overwork is tied to output rather than productivity. Schulte writes that much of it is waste. “There’s ‘real’ work: the tasks and outcomes that create value for the organization and give employees a sense of meaning and pride. There’s ‘work around work’: all the emails and meetings — some necessary, many not — that can consume entire days. And then there’s ‘work performance’: sending late-night emails or Slack messages … giving the appearance of super-productive activity when you’re actually wrapped up in low-value tasks or focused on email.”
Schulte meets a variety of people who have struggled with their schedules: the lawyer whose stress levels had brought her dangerously close to a heart attack; shift workers whose erratic schedules make organizing their personal lives nearly impossible. Schulte travels to Japan to meet the mother of Mina Mori, a tragic emblem of the Caroshi —the Japanese term for death by overwork. There he meets a young worker who made blank photocopies at 11pm to look busy while waiting for his boss to go home. The juxtaposition of these stories reinforces the wastefulness of such work regimes.
It also forces the author to examine her own habit of overworking, putting off family events to write stories of little value. When she signs up for Workaholics Anonymous and answers a 20-question questionnaire, she is told that three points would indicate a problem. She scores 13.
This combination of personal research and interviews with business leaders, workers, and experts is the approach he took in his excellent first book, OverwhelmedI found this book more novel than the latter, which covers similar territory to that of management thinker Jeffrey Pfeffer and economist Claudia Goldin, who have written about greedy jobs.
However, About work is an excellent introduction to the complex problems of work and the policies to address them. These include “change agents,” experiments with shift scheduling, eliminating unpredictability for low-wage workers, and encouraging vacations. It highlights the work of Peter Cappelli, a Wharton business professor who wants to change the financial accounting system so that people are seen as assets rather than liabilities, adding value rather than subtracting from it.
Ultimately, he acknowledges: “It is easier for policymakers to look the other way and avoid confronting powerful corporations and business leaders… And it is easier for exhausted, often isolated workers, worried about paying their bills and proving their worth, to resign themselves to the idea that this is the way things are and go back to work.”
Overwork: Transforming the daily routine in search of a better life By Brigid Schulte Henry Holt, $31.99, 384 pages
Emma Jacobs is the FT’s jobs and careers editor