Government Executive - Authors - Rebecca J. Rosen

Why Americans Work So Much Despite Economist John Maynard Keynes' Prediction

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Thu, 07 Jan 2016 13:00:00 -0500

How will we all keep busy when we only have to work 15 hours a week? That was the question that worried the economist John Maynard Keynes when he wrote his short essay “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” in 1930. Over the next century, he predicted, the economy would become so productive that people would barely need to work at all.

For a while, it looked like Keynes was right: In 1930 the average workweek was 47 hours. By 1970 it had fallen to slightly less than 39.

But then something changed. Instead of continuing to decline, the duration of the workweek stayed put; it’s hovered just below 40 hours for nearly five decades.

So what happened? Why are people working just as much today as in 1970?

There would be no mystery in this if Keynes had been wrong about the economy’s increasing productivity, which he thought would lead to a standard of living “between four and eight times as high as it is today.” But Keynes got that right: Technology has made the economy massively more productive. According to Benjamin M. Friedman, an economist at Harvard, “the U.S. economy is right on track to reach Keynes’s eight-fold multiple” by 2029—100 years after the last data Keynes would have had. (Keynes did not specify what he meant by a “standard of life,” so Friedman uses per-capita output as a proxy.)

In a new paper, Friedman tries to figure out why that increased productivity has not translated into increased leisure time. Perhaps people just never feel materially satisfied, always wanting more money for the next new thing. “This argument is, at best, far from sufficient,” he writes. If that were the case, why did the duration of the workweek decline in the first place?

Another theory Friedman considers is that “in an era of ever fewer settings that provide effective opportunities for personal connections and relationships,” people may place more value on the socializing that happens at work. But the evidence for this “remains uneven at best,” and, once again, “its bearing on the abrupt change in trend in the U.S. workweek in the 1970s is far from established.”

A third possibility proves more convincing: American inequality means that the gains of increasing productivity are not widely shared. In other words, most Americans are too poor to work less. Unlike the other two explanations Friedman considers, this one fits chronologically: Inequality declined in America during the post-war period (along with the duration of the workweek), but since the early 1970s it’s risen dramatically.

Keynes’s prediction rests on the idea that “standard of life” would continue rising for everyone. But Friedman says that’s not what has happened: Although Keynes’s eight-fold figure holds up for the economy in aggregate, it’s not at all the case for the median American worker. For them, output by 2029 is likely to be around 3.5 times what it was when Keynes was writing—a bit below his four- to-eight-fold predicted range.

This can be seen in the median worker’s income over this time period, complete with a shift in 1973 that fits in precisely with when the workweek stopped shrinking. According to Friedman, “Between 1947 and 1973 the average hourly wage for nonsupervisory workers in private industries other than agriculture (restated in 2013 dollars) nearly doubled, from $12.27 to $21.23—an average growth rate of 2.1 percent per annum. But by 2013 the average hourly wage was only $20.13—a 5 percent fall from the 1973 level.” For most people, then, the magic of increasing productivity stopped working around 1973, and they had to keep working just as much in order to maintain their standard of living.

What Keynes foretold was a very optimistic version of what economists call technological unemployment—the idea that less labor will be necessary because machines can do so much. In Keynes’s vision, the resulting unemployment would be distributed more or less evenly across society in the form of increased leisure.

Friedman says that reality comports more with a darker version of technological unemployment: It’s not unemployment per se, but a soft labor market in which millions of people are “desperately seeking whatever low-wage work [they] can get.” This is corroborated by a recent poll by Marketplace that found that for half of hourly workers, their top concern isn’t that they work too much but that they work too little—not, presumably, because they like their jobs so much, but because they need the money.

This explanation leaves an important question: If the very rich—the workers who have reaped above-average gains from the increased productivity since Keynes’s time—can afford to work less, why don’t they? I asked Friedman about this and he theorized that for many top earners, work is a labor of love. They are doing work they care about and are interested in, and doing more of it isn’t such a burden—it may even be a pleasure. They derive meaning from their jobs, and it is an important part of how they think of themselves. And, of course, they are compensated for it at a level that makes it worth their while.

The prosperity Keynes predicted is here. After all, the economy as a whole has grown even more brilliantly than he expected. But for most Americans, that prosperity is nowhere to be seen—and, as a result, neither are those shorter workweeks.

(Image via YanLev/Shutterstock.com)

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The Hidden Cost of a Flexible Job

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Wed, 11 Feb 2015 09:00:00 -0500

It's freezing and snowy. It's a million degrees and humid. Your kids are sick. The repairman is coming. You have a doctor's appointment.

Whatever the reason, many workers are lucky enough to be able to take advantage of workplaces that offer a bit of flexibility as to when and where they work.

But such affordances come with strings attached: Employees with this perk often wind up working extra hours at nights or on weekends. Why? Not to make up for lost productivity ( studies show that workers are just as diligent if not more so when working from home ) but in an effort to demonstrate their commitment to and passion for their jobs.

Researchers call the phenomenon "the flexibility stigma."

"In high-level, professional jobs, [the stigma] stems from what one sociologist called 'the norm of work devotion,' where you have to prove yourself worthy of your job by making it the central focus of your life—the uncontested central focus of your life," says Joan C. Williams, director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California Hastings College of the Law. For employees who occasionally would like to work from home, that means working ever harder and ever crazier hours, lest anyone think their jobs were anything but their top priority.

Women with children may be the most likely to take advantage of an employer's flexibility, and thus may experience the stigma most often, but Williams says that it hurts everybody—"everybody who is not a breadwinner married to a homemaker," because those lucky few are the only people who can realistically comply with "the norm of work devotion." Men, women, those with kids, those without—everyone who deviates from the "ideal-worker norm" will need to demonstrate their devotion in other ways. "It's equal-opportunity misery," says Williams.

Over the past two decades, increasingly sophisticated technology has meant that fewer and fewer people need to be in the office to get their work done. Between 1997 and 2010, the number of Americans who work from home at least one day per week rose by 4.2 million. As a percent of the total workforce, this is a jump of a bit more than two percentage points, from 7 to 9.4 percent.

Number of Americans Who Worked From Home at Least One Day per Week (in Millions)

Data: Survey of Income and Program Participation

Most of those workers—9.4 million—are people who work from home entirely. But a good chunk—4 million people—are what the Census Bureau terms "mixed": They have an office job, but they also work from home on occasion. These mixed workers are a special bunch. They are highly educated: Of "flexible workers," 63.3 percent have a bachelor's degree or higher, compared with 50.5 percent of those who work solely at home and 29.7 percent of those who work solely on site. They are better compensated, bringing home an average earnings of $52,800 a year, compared with $25,500 for those who work at home and $30,000 for those who work on site. And they work harder, putting in more than the 40 hours that's standard for other workers.

Why does this high bar persist? It's not because it makes business sense: Overworked workers are less productive . It's because, Williams says, those who have succeeded in this system don't want to see it any other way.

"One of the reasons that this [culture] has proved so unbelievably difficult to change is that the winners of the system are the breadwinners who saw very little of their children," she explains. "It's an identity-threat situation; they have an incredible amount invested in proving that's the only way to be a professional. Because, if it isn't, why did they do it? How come they don't know their children?"

It wasn't always this way. Once upon a time, the limitations of technology set a firmer boundary between work and home: If you weren't at the office, you often couldn't do your job. But that's no longer the case.

"Technology now sets no work boundaries," Williams says. "So we have to set these work boundaries through social norms."

The only problem, she says, is that we aren't doing that.

"I've been working on this problem for 25 years, and I actually have come to the conclusion that these organizations just aren't going to change."

( Image via Photographee.eu / Shutterstock.com )

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Actually, Some Material Goods Can Make You Happy

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Fri, 01 Aug 2014 13:00:00 -0400

It's been the refrain of behavioral economists and, in my case at least, my wise husband for years: Spend your money on experiences, not things. A vacation or a meal with friends will enrich your life; new shoes will quickly lose their charm.

That's true, but it's not the whole story, argue psychologists Darwin A. Guevarra and Ryan T. Howell in a new paper in the Journal of Consumer Psychology. Not all goods, they say, should be lumped together.

Here's the problem, as Guevarra and Howell see it: In many studies, participants are asked to think about material items as purchases made "in order to have," in contrast with experiences—purchases made "in order to do." This, they say, neglects a category of goods: those made in order to have experiences, such as electronics, musical instruments, and sports and outdoors gear. Do such "experiential goods," as Guevarra and Howell call them, leave our well-being unimproved, as is the case with most goods, or do they contribute positively to our happiness?

In a series of experiments, Guevarra and Howell find that the latter is the case: experiential goods made people happier, just like the experiences themselves.

This might seem like a pedantic distinction, just a breaking down of two categories of purchases (goods and experiences) into three (pure goods, experiences, and the goods that enable you to have those experiences). But there is more to it: Understanding why some things make people happy and others don't reveals a little bit about the mechanics of human happiness and how to cultivate it.

Begin by examining why experiences provide more happiness than material consumption. What is it about experiences? It's not the fact of having an experience per se but that experiences can "satisf[y] the psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness." Talking to friends, mastering a skill, expressing oneself through art or writing—all of these provide a measure of fulfillment that merely owning a thing cannot.

Experiential goods fit in under this framework because they likewise can satisfy those same psychological needs. A musical instrument, for example, makes possible a sort of human happiness hat trick: Finely tune your skills, get the happiness of mastery (competence); play your heart out, get the happiness of self-expression (autonomy); jam with friends, get the happiness of connecting with others (relatedness).

"Spend your money on experiences, not things" remains a good basic rule. But it's possible to tweak it slightly to better reflect the drivers of human happiness: "Spend your money on competence, autonomy, and relatedness." That doesn't quite have the same ring to it, but it'll guide you wisely.

(Image via Mihai Simonia/Shutterstock.com)

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How to Swindle Soldiers

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Mon, 28 Jul 2014 14:00:00 -0400

Well, here is a clever new business strategy: Offer service members around the country and around the world financing for their appliances, furniture, and electronics, and then, when they fall behind on their loans, sue them in courts they can't get to to represent themselves.

Turns out: effective! Also: legal.

These are the conclusions of a new report jointly published by ProPublicaand The Washington Post that looks at the financial "innovation" of USA Discounters and two other companies, Freedom Furniture and Electronics and Military Credit Services, that sell goods to service members on credit and then, if they fall behind, go after them in Virginia courts, regardless of where the service members are based. Together the three companies have filed 35,000 lawsuits in a little under a decade.

As Paul Kiel of ProPublica explains:

The federal Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, or SCRA, was designed to give active-duty members of the armed forces every opportunity to defend themselves against lawsuits. But the law has a loophole; it doesn't address where plaintiffs can sue. That's allowed USA Discounters to sue out-of-state borrowers in Virginia, where companies can file suit as long as some aspect of the business was transacted in the state.

For service members who don't appear in Virginia, a lawyer is appointed on their behalf. "But," Kiel writes, "the law does not specify what that lawyer must do." ProPublica found that in each of the 11 cases it examined, the same lawyer was selected as the defendant's representative, and he seems to have made minimal efforts on his clients' behalf. USA Discounters denied any "business relationship" with the attorney.

That USA Discounters' strategy lines up so perfectly with the SCRA loophole is, presumably, no accident. As John Odom, whom Kiel identifies as an expert on the SCRA, observes, "This looks like somebody who has really, really researched the best way to get around the entire intent of the SCRA."

When USA Discounters wins a judgment, which ProPublica says has been the case in 89 percent of the lawsuits, "the company can begin the process of garnishing the service member's pay."

"USA Discounters seizes the pay of more active-duty military than any company in the country," Kiel adds. In January of this year, "230 service members were involuntarily paying USA Discounters a portion of their pay," the total of which ran over $1.4 million.

Part of the reason for the extremely high total is the expensive nature of USA Discounters' credit. To begin with, ProPublica reports, despite its branding, USA Discounters often charges far more than typical retail prices for its goods. "An iPad Mini, for example, last year sold at USA Discounters for $699 when Apple's retail price was $329." One soldier, Army Pvt. Jeramie Mays, bought a $650 laptop for $1,799, plus "$458 in add-ons." By the time he would have paid off his two-year contract, that $650 laptop would have cost him nearly $3,000.

Then, while he was in Iraq, the computer broke (of course). He stopped making his payments. And then this is what happened:

USA Discounters brought suit against him while he was in Germany. After winning a judgment, he said, the company sought to seize both his pay and funds in his credit union account. The action froze his account for several weeks, Mays said.

Mays, currently based at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington state, said that for most of last January, he could not withdraw funds. "Trying to take care of two kids and my mother and myself on nothing doesn't help," he said. Around the same time, he finally filed for bankruptcy. His debt with USA Discounters was discharged last March, protecting any assets from seizure.

As with any sort of credit, if you don't pay your bills, you're going to find yourself in a mess. What's troubling about USA Discounters' model is the absence of meaningful legal recourse available to these service members. As Carolyn Carter of the National Consumer Law Center tells Kiel, it's "designed to obtain default judgments against consumers without giving them any real opportunity to defend themselves."

(Image via Flickr user Mike Kalasnik)

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A Map of Maternity Leave Policies Around the World

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Tue, 24 Jun 2014 13:00:00 -0400

If you're a woman working in the United States and your employer provides paid maternity leave, consider yourself lucky: Just 11 percent of Americans employed by private industry have access to some sort of paid family leave . For state and government employees, 16 percent can take paid family leave . The U.S. federal government provides no paid family leave to its employees , though they can use their sick days or vacation days that they've saved up.

World Policy Forum

This state of affairs places America in a very small group: countries that neither provide new parents with some sort of Social Security-esque benefit nor require that businesses pay their employees even a portion of their normal salaries. According to the map above, the U.S. is joined by Suriname and Papua New Guinea. It is the lone developed nation with this status.

Why? As Tanya Basu wrote in The Atlantic earlier this week , a bill that would provide 12 weeks of paid maternity leave is stalled in the House, where it has received "broad support from Democrats" but not a single Republican backer, despite polls that find such a policy to be hugely popular with voters across partisan lines.

And that means that, as far as the map above is concerned, America's color won't be changing any time soon.

( Image via RTimages / Shutterstock.com )

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Our Cubicles, Ourselves: How the Modern Office Shapes American Life

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Tue, 15 Apr 2014 12:44:04 -0400

Each year, the average American spends nearly 2,000 hours working. For many, that time passes inside the three little walls of a modern cubicle.

Writer Nikil Saval explores these odd spaces—how they came to be, how they make us feel—in his new book Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace. I spoke to Saval about the modern office, and a lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

Your book is, as I see it, about twin themes: the spaces we work in, and the quality or character of the work itself. Can you talk, just briefly, about the relationship between those two ideas?

I’ve found that space in an office often reflects the way power operates in a workplace: design expresses (though not in a simple way) relationships of hierarchy, control, and authority.

The idea that they were related at all came to me when I was first doing the research for this book, which coalesced into an article for n+1 (where I’m an editor), called “Birth of the Office” (winter 2007). I was working in my second cubicle, much smaller than my first, and looking into the history of it: Where did it come from? Was it always a symbol of the worst of office life? Maybe predictably—though to me it was a surprise—it wasn’t.

The original designs for the cubicle came out of a very 1960s-moment; the intention was to free office workers from uninspired, even domineering workplace settings. The designer, Robert Propst, was a kind of manically inventive figure—really brilliant in many ways—with no particular training in design, but an intense interest in how people work. His original concept was called the Action Office, and it was meant to be a flexible three-walled structure that could accommodate a variety of ways of working—his idea was that people were increasingly performing “knowledge work” (a new term in the 1960s), and that they needed autonomy and independence in order to perform it.

In other words, the original cubicle was about liberation. His concept proved enormously successful, and resulted in several copies—chiefly because businesses found it incredibly useful for cramming people into smaller spaces, while upper-level management still enjoyed windowed offices on the perimeter of the building. In that sense, the design was intended to increase the power of ordinary workers; in practice it came to do something quite different, or at least that's how it felt to many people.

You see this relationship between power and design throughout the history of the office: in the early clerical offices (think Bartleby, the Scrivener or Scrooge’s office in A Christmas Carol), the spaces were small, intimate; even though a vast distance in power separated a partner in a firm from his bookkeeper, the fact that they worked close together made both feel like they were in a father-son sort of relationship (the offices were all male at the time), and there was every expectation that a junior clerk would eventually rise and take over the firm.

Later, an increased division of labor and enormously expanded hierarchy led to the offices that we more or less recognize today: large floors, filled with desks, where lower level employees work; offices along the side of the building for middle management (each of these with slight gradations to indicate status or privilege: a nicer desk; carpet on the floor, etc.); and corner offices for executives, or even different floors with different bathrooms. In places like these, space almost directly reflects hierarchy.

As we approach the present, people began to recognize this: things like the open-plan office, invented in Germany in the 1950s (and called the Bürolandschaft, or “office landscape”), attempted to level hierarchies by making everyone work out on the open floor. But even in the earliest versions of the open-plan, small markers of status began to assert themselves: Managers would apportion more plants to themselves, or set up informal private spaces through creative use of more desks and partitions. So design at work often seems to say something about relations of power at work.

In the interwar period, you write, a visitor to Berlin was “astonished by how much the city seemed to be characterized by an ‘employee culture’." Today, cubicles are so commonplace—accounting for some 60 percent of office workers—they hardly merit notice. But the sad news is, given their ubiquity, how unhappy they seem to be making us: One 1997 survey found that 93 percent of cubicle workers would prefer an alternative, and a 2013 study found that they had "the highest rates of unhappiness with their work setup."

What is the role of the cubicle in our culture today? And, also, how much of our hostility toward the cubicle is misdirected, and really is a deep frustration/unhappiness with modern work?

The cubicle’s place today is weirdly equivocal. On the one hand, few words so quickly express contemporary workplace frustration and anomie; one hardly goes a week without reading or hearing about someone working in a “faceless cubicle,” or a “cube farm,” or a “cubicle inferno.” These elicit practically universal understanding, even for people who haven’t worked in an office.

Partly this is the success of things like Dilbert—which is so inextricable a part of office work that Scott Adams actually sells Dilbert-themed cubicle decor—orOffice Space, where the cubicle is viewed as a kind of excrescence against human nature: As the main character Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingstone) says, “Human beings weren’t meant to sit in little cubicles, staring at computer screens all day.”

But now, with the contemporary rush to tear down the cubicle walls and put people in low- or no-partitioned offices (“open-plan”), it suddenly seems ridiculous that people have identified the cubicle as the source of the workplace’s ills, rather than a shifting symbol of it. As is becoming increasingly clear (from books like Susan Cain’s Quiet, or Maria Konnikova’s piece for the New Yorker website, “The Open Office Trap,” but also just from our own experience as office workers), open-plan offices diminish very few of the problems associated with cubicle-ridden offices, and in some cases they augment them. Noise, visual and aural, makes concentration difficult, such that headphones become the new walls. And hierarchies don’t disappear when you place everyone at a communal table or “superdesk”; they persist in more subtle modes of workplace interaction.

I suspect that people thrown into open plans might even miss their cubicles. And there are features of cubicles—such as the need to partition wide spaces—that I suspect will continue to be useful and never go away; these needs precede the invention of the cubicle itself. If people weren’t meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens, maybe they weren’t meant to have new open plans foisted on them in the guise of their encouraging “serendipitous encounters,” or whatever new buzzword justifies these often poorly thought-out designs.

The cubicle became a symbol of an oppressive workplace because the years that the cubicle rose to dominance were also years that the workplace, in many ways, became more oppressive. It really took off in the 1980s and 90s, when mergers and buyouts took over the headlines, and layoffs became commonplace (the original meaning of the word “layoff” was just time off from work -- not mass, somewhat indiscriminate firing). These were the years when the cubicle began to seem less like a space for exerting autonomy and independence, and more like a flimsy, fabric-wrapped symbol of workplace insecurity. People sometimes experience the buzzy chaos of an open-plan in a similar way.

One thing I’ve been thinking about is that, beyond the notion of the cubicle, it is very difficult to picture, in any visual sense, modern work. George Packer put it really powerfully in a recent essay:

When I wrote about Amazon—which is as emblematic of the American corporation in 2014 as U.S. Steel was in 1914 and Walmart in 1994—for a story in The New Yorker, earlier this month, I began to wonder what a company worker looked like. I found it hard to come up with an image. Amazon’s workforce is made up mainly of computer engineers and warehouse workers, but when you think of Amazon you don’t picture either one (and there aren’t many photographs to help your imagination). What you see, instead, is a Web site with a button that says “ADD TO CART” and a cardboard box with a smile printed on the side. Between clicking “BUY” and answering the door when U.P.S. arrives lies a mystery—a chain of events that only comes to mind if you make a conscious effort. The work is done by people you don’t see and don’t have to think about, which is partly what makes Amazon’s unmatched efficiency seem nearly miraculous.

He contrasted that with 19th century industry, which was physical labor, and visually very apparent. Similarly, Quinn Norton has saidthat “Right now my field must tackle describing a world where falling in love, going to war and filling out tax forms looks the same; it looks like typing.”

How does this inability to see work stymie our efforts to understand it and think about it? What are we missing?

I’d say industry was always hard to comprehend in the way Packer describes; 19th century thinkers (Marx, especially) made a lot out of the fact that industrial objects appeared in stores or arrived in your hands without a trace of the impressive labor (or the hands of the laborers) that went into them.

But at least on the surface office work is seems to be even more “alienated,” if that’s the right term; it’s not clear what office workers actually “make.” For years, office workers just produced paper, and the paper they produced was often abstractly related to some kind of manual labor taking place elsewhere.

For this reason early American commentators, for whom office work was not a natural or dominant kind of work (the country was much more agrarian, and nascently industrial), viewed office work as “not real work”—not least because it seemed to require no physical effort. “A slender and round-shouldered generation, of minute leg, chalky face, and hollow chest,” Walt Whitman called clerks, and he derided their tendency to dress fancily as a kind of compensation: “What wretched, spindling, ‘forked radishes’ would they be, and how ridiculously would their natty demeanor appear if suddenly they could all be stript naked!”

I think this unheroic aspect of office work is one reason why it’s so rarely written about. In movies and novels and TV, the work itself gets treated almost invariably as drudgery, from early films like The Crowd through to Richard Yates’sRevolutionary Road, and through to The Office. In fact, in a lot of these books and films and shows, you rarely learn what it is people are actually doing, or it becomes impossible to show them doing it—you can only show it as them socializing: Their socializing becomes the way to show them working (or avoiding work). Even the title of a show like The Office suggests that, even when a place has people doing so many different kinds of tasks, ultimately what they do is in the same setting, and is, therefore, basically homogeneous.

But another feature that office work’s relative invisibility, or opacity, helps obscure is the question of class. Since the rise of the ranks of clerical workers in the 19th century, it became a virtually unquestioned assumption that office work was middle class work. Office work was clean, and you didn’t come home smelling of your job; you wore (pretty much) the same clothes to work that you wore on the street; and you got a steady salary as opposed to an hourly wage. And there was the assumption, as I’ve mentioned, that you could rise from the bottom of the ladder to the corner office—something few people assumed about factory work. There was always a high level of prestige to office work that never accrued to industrial labor. In fact, I think that the prestige of office work was pretty much predicated on the denial of the salience of class at all; that, if you worked hard, you were basically always on your way up, and so weren’t really constrained by class.

Still, there were a few times when this correlation between office work and being middle class came to be questioned, and this was when the work itself began to seem less enjoyable, or its connection to steady upward mobility less apparent: in other words, when office workers began to see themselves less as “employees” or “junior businessmen,” and more as, well, workers. By the 1930s, office work really did resemble factory work: if you think of old films, even through the 1960s likeThe Apartment, you have these cavernous accounting or steno pools, where people clock in and out and have daily, repetitive tasks that form part of this enormous, labyrinthine operation that nobody understands, just like in factories. And the Great Depression put a dent in people’s expectations of a steady career; as a result, office worker unions really began to coalesce in those years.

In the 1970s, organizations like the group 9 to 5 (later the name of a great movie—and even greater Dolly Parton song—based on their work) began to challenge office gender hierarchies. I think that there were probably a high number of white collar workers in the Occupy movement who were doing something similar in our own period of downward mobility and depression. In all this protest, I think you see a recognition that office work doesn’t necessarily promise a steady rise up the ranks; there’s also a high quotient of manipulation, and domination, and if you want equality in the office, you need to fight this in an organized fashion.

I suppose part of the reason I wrote the book was to make this stuff visible, to make this sphere of work that so many people do have some kind of history, and to show how power and class were operating in settings where they seemed to be hidden. It’s hard to do it without homogenizing a very varied and difficult field—without creating and relying on some abstraction called “office work”—but in that sense I was actually responding to the voices and sources that I found, where people did tend to speak of office work in a very abstract, universal way. The title of the show The Office sums up this collective understanding in an instant.

I sometimes wonder if the abstracted nature of our understanding of “office work” leads us to overestimate the banality of other people’s lives—we see a drab, monotonous, corporate environment and just project it onto the individuals who work in those spaces—and perhaps underestimate the meaning they may find in their work or in their lives out of work, through family, friends, religion, whatever. Is there a way, in a sense, that the office environment obscures the individual? I’m not asking whether it snuffs out the individual, but whether it makes it harder for us to see the people in these spaces?

Absolutely. It’s very easy, as an observer, to imagine that the superficial dullness of office work reflects the emptiness of the work and lives of the people who perform it (and it’s just as easy to imagine that a bright, airy, contemporary open-plan space or colorful dot-com playground reflects unbridled creative brilliance). In fact, I think something like this temptation overcame one of the first, and still the only comprehensive, books about white-collar life and work, C. Wright Mills’s White Collar, from 1951. It’s in so many ways a work of genius, even prophecy, and it was a powerful diagnosis of how white collar work had been rationalized and degraded over the course of the early 20th century, many aspects of which still hold true. But it also took a very “objective” viewpoint that took the structural features of white-collar work, and showed how they naturally revealed the vacuousness and bankruptcy of work. Though Mills apparently interviewed lots of actual workers, we pretty much never hear their voices in the book; he hits the note of “massive bureaucracy overtaking everything” relentlessly. He was right in many ways about the larger forces at work, but it can be hard to imagine from his picture how anyone working in an office could possibly endure such a soul-crushing existence.

If you take a different, longer view, and try to look at what it was like to work in offices, you find so many attempts to make work better. Whether Helen Gurley Brown’s peppy advice on how the office offers sexual freedom, or even Propst’s attempt at giving workers autonomy—all of which come out of the hope that work might one day be better, that somehow a realm of freedom might be wrested from a regime of necessity. So you might also see the office as a weirdly utopian space.

While it would be dishonest to discount the genuine expressions of frustration that one finds in the history of office life, it would be equally dishonest to discount the pleasure that many have found, even if only fleetingly or on occasion. How to show this comes down to a question of historical sympathy. For years, historians sought to give voice to faceless and often unnamed factory workers, and they revealed not only the essential humanity of those workers, but often the kind of work that they enjoyed, or wanted to do—or at least control more effectively. I tried in my book to do something similar with office workers, to show not just how people are managed but how they manage themselves, and maybe disclose in the process how we might find a more satisfying, a more humane way of working.

(Image via Media Bakery13/Shutterstock.com)

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America's Workers: Stressed Out, Overwhelmed, Totally Exhausted

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Tue, 25 Mar 2014 13:00:00 -0400

Perhaps the most poignant detail from Anne-Marie Slaughter's Atlantic cover story, "Why Women Still Can't Have It All," was also one of the smallest: an overworked mother of three who "organized her time so ruthlessly that she always keyed in 1:11 or 2:22 or 3:33 on the microwave rather than 1:00, 2:00, or 3:00, because hitting the same number three times took less time."

That may be extreme, but it illustrated a familiar feeling, one the writer Brigid Schulte calls "the overwhelm." In her new book, Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, Schulte scrutinizes this state of affairs: Why do we all feel so overworked? How is that feeling different for men than for women? Is a better, less harried life possible? I spoke with Schulte about her research, and a lightly edited transcript of the conversation follows.

Can you start by telling us about what "the overwhelm" is, how you see it now after years of research and writing on the topic, and how you think that your understanding differs from the conventional one?

This whole book started when a time-use researcher told me I had 30 hours of leisure a week. And when I told him he was out of his flipping mind, he challenged me to keep a time diary and he would show me where my leisure was.

The whole premise of his challenge was that there was something wrong with me. That I should have this time, and if I didn’t feel that I did, it was my fault. I already felt totally inadequate—felt that I never did enough work, or that it was good enough, that I wasn’t spending enough time with my kids, or that I was so exhausted I was yelling at them, and I stomped around seething that my “egalitarian” marriage left me up late folding laundry or wrapping Christmas presents or doing the dishes while my husband slept soundly.

Before I began working on this book, I thought that’s just how life had to be—fast, crazy, busy, breathless—particularly for working mothers in the 21st century. I didn’t think it could change. I had no role models. And didn’t really stop and think about why. Most everyone I knew was busy, with schedules going every which way. I remember talking to another working mother on my cell phone in the car weeping after going back to work after my maternity leave about how burned out I felt and how I missed the companionship and understanding of the mother’s group I’d joined after maternity leave. “This is it,” she’d said. “This phone call is the only kind of mother’s group you’re going to get now.”

There was also no real national discussion on what I was experiencing. If women were feeling overwhelmed, I had the feeling that the culture just thought, "Tough. You made this choice to work, now deal with it." That view was always reinforced after I would write a piece for the Washington Post about juggling work and life. I would always get comments about how working mothers were just selfish. I would get into big back and forths with readers who thought working mothers just wanted big houses and were abandoning their kids. They didn’t deserve free time. Anything approaching discussion about feeling overwhelmed was dismissed as a “Mommy issues,” and [the upshot seemed to be] that middle-class women just needed to to get to the spa for an afternoon or take an anti-anxiety med and chill out.

But I discovered soon enough that these are hardly “Mommy” issues—these are human issues, how we work and live, the pressures to spend so much time at work, or living up to crazy ideals, is affecting all of us. And you’re beginning to see the conversation change—even conservatives now are looking at birth-rate declines and work like Stewart D. Friedman’s Baby Bust showing that more young people don’t see a way to combine work and family in a rational way, so are choosing not to have families. That’s huge. That’s when work-life issues become the problem of society, especially one that purports to value families and that wants to survive into the future.

What I discovered in researching the book has been infuriating, enlightening and ultimately liberating. It is so clear now how on the bleeding edge we are of changing gender roles, how so much has changed in our lives and yet how so much remains stuck in amber, in the nostalgia of another era. I’m not just talking about workplace laws which were written in 1938 when the world was a different place and tax policies that favor breadwinner-homemaker family models, but our cultural attitudes, our unconscious biases.

I had one of those “aha” moments when I found the General Social Survey question about whether mothers of preschoolers should work. As late as 2002, the last time the question was asked (at least at the time of my reporting) majorities of both men and women said no, she shouldn’t, or she should only work part-time. What that showed me was such a deep and pervasive ambivalence about working mothers—no wonder we don’t have national policies and workplace cultures to help women better juggle work and home, if we’re deeply conflicted about whether she should be at work at all.

I was struck, too, that the GSS doesn’t ask that same question about fathers. Even the way we pose our questions is stuck in the 1950s. Our family lives, family structures and the workforce has changed utterly in the last half century, and yet our workplaces, the policies everyone knows look nice on the books but are the kiss of death to take, our laws, and our attitudes have yet to catch up with our reality. That’s where the swirl of "the overwhelm" begins.

But it doesn’t stop there. I soon discovered that men are beginning to feel as much or more overwhelm than women, now that so many no longer just want to be the distant provider father, or just the fun Dad or helper parent, but truly involved at home. They’re doing now what women did 30 years ago—giving up time for sleep and personal care and spending almost all their “leisure” timewith their kids. And I discovered how much longer and extreme work hours—which have been climbing since the 1980s—the constant dings and pings of technology and a new cultural value of busyness is now ramping the feeling of overwhelm for everyone.

Like any reporter, I started down a path and just followed where the trail led. I began looking for these 30 hours of leisure. But I soon discovered you couldn’t look at leisure without looking at work, and you couldn’t understand what was happening at work without looking at home and our relationships. That’s where the subtitle comes from: Work, Love, and Play—what I was to discover philosophers and psychologists said are the three great arenas of life, and that you need time in all three for the Good Life.

How much of the overwhelm would you say can be chalked up to a sort of shared mental state—in which we are all constantly in a frenzy and talking about that frenzy, and that elevates our feeling of being overwhelmed? And how much of this feeling is justified by reality—Americans, particularly women, doing more, having such high standards for themselves, the endless chores it takes just to maintain a household, etc. etc. etc.? Also, how much of this is due to our choices—I’m thinking of this recent Onion article “Unambitious Loser With Happy, Fulfilling Life Still Lives In Hometown.” Is it just that we are all striving too hard to achieve too much?

It’s really all of the above. We do talk about how busy and overwhelmed we are all the time—think about how we talk to each other. “How are you?” “Fried. You?” “Same.” When was the last time someone said, “I’ve been doing absolutely nothing.” We usually launch into an exhausting laundry list of stuff.

But we are also, truly, doing more. We’re working more hours—more extreme hours at one job at the upper end of the socio-economic spectrum and cobbling together several jobs to try to make ends meet at the lower end. Our standards for what it takes to be a good parent, particularly a good mother, are insanely high and out of proportion to all reality. Working mothers today now spend as much or more time with their kids as stay-at-home mothers in the 1960s and '70s. I found that fascinating.

We all feel like we’re not doing enough for our children, so in our guilt, we do, do, do, and overdo: more lessons, more teams, more sports, bigger birthday parties, more educational outings. And we all feed off each other—particularly as we look to the future, see a changing global economy and so much uncertainty about what “success” will look like. There’s so much fear and we’re so worried that our kids will somehow be left out, or left behind. That’s part of what fuels the craziness of the parenting merry go round.

And as for chores—man, all you have to do is open up any magazine and you’ll see that, for women, you can never be enough. Debora Spar, president of Barnard, called it the “triple whammy” in her recent book Wonder Women: Sex, Power and the Quest for Perfection. You have to keep house like Martha Stewart, parent like Donna Reed, work like Sheryl Sandberg, and look like Jennifer Anniston. That’s nuts. We all know it’s nuts, and yet it’s hard to break away from those cultural expectations.

I asked Peter Senge about that. How to try to live and work in a sane way when you’re in the middle of insanity: a voracious workplace that will eat you alive, friends and neighbors who raise eyebrows if you pull your kids out of some competitive activity. He gave some important advice: Create your own community, a network of like-minded people. Humans are wired to conform—that’s why these cultural pressures, however silly they may seem, wield such power over us. So find a group that fits your values that would make you happier to conform to.

To tack back for a moment to one thing you mentioned earlier ... on the griping ritual we all take part in: Do you think that sort of reciprocated venting can contribute to our stress, rather than have the, I suppose, "normal" effect of venting—that is, to let off steam?

YES! I can’t tell you how many years I bitched and moaned about how much I did at home and how unfair that felt. I always had so many people willing to chime in about how they felt the same. Then we all went back to our lives, bitching and moaning, and picking up the dirty socks and mumbling under our breaths and seething. It never changed. Maybe I felt a little better because I wasn’t alone, but all it did was reinforce this notion that men were getting away with murder and my life sucked and I was justified in being so pissed off all the time.

But it wasn’t until I met Jessica DeGroot and got to know her work with the ThirdPath Institute—she’s been working with couples for nearly 20 years to get them to a point where the division of labor feels fair—that I began to see how poisonous that bitching and moaning is. I had to see what part I was playing in how out of whack things had become. I had to learn to see things from my husband’s perspective—why he’d felt stuck at work and I felt like I had to be the default parent as the mother. And it wasn’t until we began hammering out common goals and standards, dividing things up, making all the invisible work I did visible and talking, that things really began to change. Jessica is a big proponent of what she calls “active listening”—where you get to bitch, cry, worry, fret, get angry, but all in the service of figuring out where you really want to go and how you can try little experiments to get there. The other person listens, doesn’t judge or chime in, but is there to support you as you figure it out.

In talking about busyness what I found fascinating was spending time in Fargo, North Dakota, of all places, where the researcher Ann Burnett has spent her career tracking the rise of busyness and living a fast-paced life as signs of importance and status. When one woman at the focus group I was observing burst in, and explained she was late by spilling off a lengthy list of all the stuff she “had” to do, how she was double booked for another meeting and then got stuck in traffic (and I looked out the window and saw only a handful of cars on the street), I first thought, wow, she sounds like I do, rushing in late all the time, and spilling off a list of all sorts of stuff I’d done. And then I thought, wow, what traffic? That’s when it hit me—how we sometimes create busyness in order to conform to this social ideal, that to be worthy is to be busy. I don’t say this to blame people. I do it, too. But the only way to change it, if we don’t like it, is to first be aware of it, be aware of our that urge to conform, to be worthy, to be enough, drives us sometimes unconsciously.

Yes! I notice this a lot—from men too—often framed around “I get XYZ million emails per day.” Beneath the superficial complaint, the subtext frequently seems to be an assertion of that person's importance. It drives me nuts.

Ha! So true. I notice it all the time, particularly in workplaces where face time, extreme hours, and 24/7 total work devotion are prized (did I say media?). I worked through the night on a killer breaking story a few months ago, and I came into the office really grumpy the next day. When someone asked why, I snapped that I’d been up all night. “Oh yeah,” the person said, “Well I’ve been up for two nights!” It’s funny. I truly was complaining—after all the research I’ve done for the book about peak human performance science, how to get the best, most creative work out of motivated workers—I knew that staying up all night may be necessary sometimes, but as a general rule, is nuts. And the other person was still very much in the grips of the one upmanship busy-petition. At that point, I stopped, and thought: Okay, you win. But I’m going home at a decent hour tonight.

So I want to talk a bit more about this work culture we have— “where face time, extreme hours, and 24/7 total work devotion are prized,” as you put it. And you note that that is characteristic of media but it’s certainly not limited to media. Is this sort of cut-throat, competitive worklife a new phenomenon? Do you see it as being driven at least in part by inequality, as Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffrey have written in Mother Jones? And, regardless of what’s causing it, what can be done?

Their piece was right on in so many ways. It’s not just media companies; overwork has really become pervasive. I’m not talking about hard work. I’m all for hard work that we find meaning in. But overwork leaves us burned out and disengaged butts in chairs at work and fried at home without the energy to do much more than flop down in front of the boob tube—not quite the leisure the ancient Greek philosophers had in mind when they said pure leisure was that place where we both refreshed the soul and become most fully human.

Economists have noted how work hours for white collar, college-educated workers began to become extreme in about the 1980s, and at the same time, social surveys were picking up a heightened sense of economic insecurity in this same group. Some people say we’re working more because we want more stuff (like that stupid Cadillac commercial that made me so angry I wrote a piece about it). While it’s true that household debt and spending on “luxury” items have gone up at the same time, it’s also true that wages have been stagnating and the costs of basic things like health care, housing, and education have gone through the roof—the cost of college has blown up nearly 900 percent in recent decades. When was the last time anyone outside hedge fund managers and the 1 percent got a 900 percent raise?

Against that backdrop comes technology and the ability to be connected 24/7 - which leads to a feeling of constantly being “on call,” that you can never quite get away from work, that the boundaries that used to keep work more contained have bled and spilled over into the hours of the day that used to be for family, for self, for leisure, for sleep.

All you have to do is look at some fascinating work done by consulting companies, when they ask CEOs and top managers at companies around the world who they think the best employees are, more than three-fourths have said: the worker without any family or caregiving responsibilities. In other words, the distant father provider of the 1950s. I say father because social science has found that married men with kids actually earn more money—what they call a “fatherhood bonus”—because the workplace culture assumes this man will now work harder because he has a family to support. Never mind that for some 40 percent of households with kids under 18, the single or primary breadwinner is mom. That same social science finds a motherhood penalty—a pay gap that can’t be explained by anything other than the fact that the woman has children, another sign of the consequences of our society’s ambivalence about working mothers. I was so struck by how this “ideal worker” norm is still so powerful and still so gendered in our workplaces and often, largely unconscious.

So what’s driving the overwork and what can be done? To really get at the heart of it, we’d have to look at our economy, our tax policy, and our workplace laws. The 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act protected only hourly workers from working overtime, instituting overtime pay once a worker hit 40 hours. Salaried workers can be worked, by law, to death, without once hitting that mark. And the 40-hour workweek is an artifact of the manufacturing age; it was the amount of time Henry Ford discovered he could push his manual laborers on his assembly lines before they’d get so tired they’d make costly mistakes.

But in a knowledge economy, how long can you really push a worker before they become little more than a butt in the chair answering email? No one really knows. One researcher figures it may be about six hours a day.

What will change the overwork culture? There are several factors at play that I’m hoping will have an effect:

Bright spots. I went looking for innovative "bright spots" at work, love, and play and found a host of really hopeful and cool things happening in companies large and small. For example, I have a profile of an innovative software company in Ann Arbor, Menlo Innovations, LLC, that was founded based on one principle: joy. Workers do intense, creative work, and are expected NOT to answer work phone and emails after hours or on weekends. If you come back refreshed—and maybe you’ve met someone, had a new experience, expanded your horizons—you’ll bring that freshness to work, perhaps make new connections, figure out how to solve an old problem in new ways.The more we shine a spotlight on how work can be done differently and well, the more companies and the middle managers who are the ones who implement policy changes, can follow new role models of success.
Millennials. They may have been raised as precious and entitled, but many are coming into workplaces assuming that they can have it all—work and life—and are showing that they can do excellent work in their own way and in their own time. Creaky, rigid, old-fashioned cultures are beginning to adapt.
Baby Boomers. They’re living longer and are healthier and aren’t ready or can’t afford to sail off into the sunset at 62. But neither do they want to work 90 hours a week anymore. There’s pressure from the top end to change as well.
Technology. Technology is a double-edged sword right now. It’s freeing us up to work differently, but it’s also showing that it’s extending our work hours. I’m hoping that the more we use it, the smarter we’ll get about how to adapt to it. And all this recent extreme weather is showing managers how much good work can be done on snow days, etc. even when you’re not sitting at your desk under their nose.
Human performance science and the creative class. In a knowledge economy, what do we value? Innovation, new ideas, creativity. How do we foster that? The brain is wired for the “A Ha” moment to come, not when our noses are pressed firmly into the grindstone, but in a break in the action. When we let our mind wander. In the shower. On a walk. When we are idle, neuroscience is showing that our brains are most active.
Changes on the state level. While our national politics has been frozen for so long on issues of work and life, I was heartened to find states stepping in and looking for common sense policies and solutions to help people better manage the now conflicting demands and work and life. California, New Jersey, and Rhode Island have state paid parental leave policies—paid for by employees a few cents out of every paycheck that is pooled into a Temporary Disability Insurance fund. Cities are passing tax incentives to companies that promote telework and flexible work, as well as exploring their own “right to request” flexible work laws.
Health. NIH is in the middle of a giant, multi-year study of how our high-stress, long hours work cultures are making us sick—and that costs employers a lot of money. And the Yale Stress Center is finding in their functional MRI studies that stress—the WHO has rated us the most anxious country on the planet—is actually shrinking our brains. Sick and stupid and overworked and overtired does not make for the most creative and productive workforce.

Other countries limit work hours by law (the European Union’s Working Time Directive, for instance) to both keep workers from being exploited, burned out or, in the case of Germany in particular, to keep unemployment low by spreading out work hours among more workers. Other countries also value refreshed workers and family and leisure time, and have paid leave policies when children are born, fostered, or adopted, in addition to sick time. They have paid vacation policies of as much as 30 days. In Denmark, every parent gets two “nurture days” per child until the child is eight, in order to make it to parent-teacher conferences, the school play, etc.—things that in this country, many white collar workers guiltily slink out under the radar to rush to, and working class people risk getting fired to do. In the UK, within the first year that they implemented a “Right to Request” flexible work hours (which give employees the right to put together a plan for how to get their work done in a flexible way and employers could only turn them down if they could show it would hurt the business bottom line) more than one million families requested such schedules and business kept humming right along.

In the United States, we have no such policies. We value work. We work among the most extreme hours, behind only Japan and South Korea. Our divided political system has yet to figure out what the proper role of government should even be, and we hate taxes. Ironically, the OECD has done studies that have found that the U.S. spends about as much as Sweden on health and welfare—it’s just that they pool their money to pay for everyone, and in the U.S., it all comes out of private pockets.

One of the most astounding studies I came across was another OECD look at productivity. I heard so often, well, this overwork culture is just the price we have to pay for being such an enormously wealthy and productive economy. But then the OECD sliced GDP per hours worked to get an hourly productivity rate, and for several of the years studied, the U.S. falls several rungs below other countries with more rational work-life policies, such as France. So we’re putting in the most hours, but we’re not actually working intense, short, productive hours. We’re just putting in a lot of meaningless face time because that’s what our workplace cultures value—at the expense of our health, our families, and our souls.

(Image via Phatic-Photography/Shutterstock.com)

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Beware: Mistakes and Workplace Injuries Spike After Switch to Daylight Savings Time

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Tue, 11 Mar 2014 10:58:38 -0400

Are you feeling a bit sleepy at work today?

If so, you're far from the only one. In fact, the Monday following the switch to Daylight Saving Time ranks among the days when Americans are the most under-rested: On average, Americans sleep for 40 minutes less the Sunday night following "springing forward."

And that has serious consequences for workplace safety: A 2009 study in the Journal of Applied Psychology examined 576,292 mining injuries that were sustained in the years from 1983 to 2006. On the average Monday, Christopher M. Barnes and David T. Wagner of Michigan State found, coal miners reported an average of about 63 on-the-job injuries. But on the Monday following the switch to DST, the number increased by 3.6 injuries, or 5.7 percent. To make matters worse, Barnes and Wagner also found that the severity of the injuries increased: The number of days missed due to an injury on the post-DST Monday rose by 67.6 percent compared with average workplace injuries.

Previous research has shown that fatigue can lead to inattentiveness and, ultimately, mistakes. A 2004 study of 400 U.S. Army motor-vehicle collisions found a correlation "between insufficient sleep and driver-at-fault accident." A 2008 National Transportation and Safety Board report "noted that train crew fatigue resulted in the failure of the engineer and conductor to appropriately respond to wayside signals governing the movement of their train, resulting in three deaths and $5.85 million in damages."

Interestingly, Barnes and Wagner found no compensatory phenomenon in the autumn, when we set time ahead and gain an hour. Unlike in the instance of spring, the autumn change had a relatively small effect on how much sleep people got: just 12 extra minutes—not enough to make any noticeable difference in workplace safety.

The reason for this, the authors say, has to do with how our internal clocks interact with our technological ones. It's harder, they explain, to force yourself to fall asleep earlier than usual than it is to force yourself to stay up for a bit longer. So in the springtime, when the clocks move ahead, people don't fall asleep at their normal bedtimes (say, 11pm)—they aren't tired yet. So they stay up until their bodies are ready for bed, sometime a bit before midnight, and then when the alarm goes off at, say, 7, they've gotten less sleep. In the fall, in contrast, they'll get tired around 10, push themselves to stay awake until their normal bedtime (11), and then wake up at 7, leaving their number of hours slept more or less the same.

Other studies have shown that the Monday after the switch to Daylight Saving Time is also a rough time on the roads, with an increased risk of car accidents. However, it is unclear whether this change comes from fatigue or from the changes in lighting that result from everyone commuting an hour later. Because their study focuses on coal mining, where natural lighting conditions are less relevant, the authors believe that they've isolated the effect of fatigue and are not mistakenly measuring sunlight.

And why were the injuries they tracked not only more common, but also more serious? That's a bit unclear. Barnes and Wagner theorize that it might have something to do with how workplaces attempt to protect workers from the most devastating sorts of injuries—and the ineffectiveness of those measure in the face of fatigue. The authors explain:

Workplace hazards that are highly dangerous are more likely to be protected by multiple safeguards (e.g. multiple keys and switches that must be initiated to start a large and potentially dangerous piece of machinery), whereas smaller hazards might be protected by fewer safeguards (e.g. yellow paint on a doorway with low clearance). Therefore employees must miss multiple cues to be harmed by highly dangerous workplace hazards, whereas less dangerous hazards, related to less severe injuries, might be encountered by missing only one cue.

In a nutshell: All types of injuries may be more likely when you're tired, but the worst ones are very hard to do unless you're quite zonked.

The authors say that sleep deprivation tends to be studied in the extreme—clinical experiments in which subjects are prevented from sleeping for hours and hours on end. "The extremity of these studies belies the power that even small restrictions of sleep can have on employees," they write. Looking at the effects of changing the clocks—which results in a subtle but surely more common degree of sleep loss—can help managers and researchers understand the consequences of even mild fatigue.

To combat the risks, Barnes and Wagner have a few suggestions: For workplaces with hazardous work, perhaps it'd be best to schedule the worst of it for later in the week, once workers have had a chance to adjust. Alternatively, work schedules could be adjusted gradually—so, for example, workers could start 45 minutes later the first two days, then shift their hours back until they are once again aligned with the clocks.

But even those measures won't help what are surely the implications of the researchers' findings: Fatigue on any day means greater risk for workers. It just happens that it's on the day when everyone is tired together that we can see, statistically, the consequences.

(Image via ndoeljindoel/Shutterstock.com)

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Finally, Prisoners and Their Families Won't Have to Pay Crazy Phone Rates

Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic — Tue, 13 Aug 2013 10:55:00 -0400

Every year, 700,000 people walk through the doors of a correctional facility, back into a society that they left months or years ago. Who is waiting for them on the other side? When was the last time they spoke?

Fans of the Netflix series Orange Is the New Black know how important the prison's bank of phones is to the inmates. But what the show doesn't capture are the exorbitant costs that prisoners and their families must bear to maintain their connections -- much, much greater than what an average phone call costs. New rules approved by the FCC on Friday aim to bring down those rates.

The decision marks the end of a decade-long effort to get the FCC to regulate such calls, the costs of which are many times what an average citizen pays, though they vary greatly by state. In extreme cases, the FCC says, families and lawyers have paid more than $17 for a 15-minute phone call. There is no market in which competition could draw down rates -- prisoners are literally a captive market, with no choice but to use the phones the prison provides. Many states collect a commission on the calls, effectively adding a tax to the inmates' calls through which the inmates pay for the costs of their own incarceration.

Click here to read the full story at The Atlantic.

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