Everybody’s Working On The Weekend

Looking at a new NBER study, Christopher Ingraham counts the ways Americans are overworked compared to our European peers. For one thing, we’re more likely to take that business call on a Saturday:

The U.S. has the highest incidence of people reporting any paid weekend work. 29 percent of Americans reported performing such work in the American Time Use Survey, more than three times the rate among Spanish workers. It’s important to note that this doesn’t necessarily mean that these workers are working 9 to 5 every weekend, only that they reported performing paid weekend work in a time use survey. This would include things like going into the office for a few hours to finish up a project.

The study showed that Americans are also more likely to work nights. Max Nisen notes the obvious origins of our weird work hours:

These strange work hours probably happen because Americans work so much and lack the enforced vacations and limitations on overtime that exist in some European countries. Nearly twice as many U.S. workers work 45+ hour weeks than in Germany, and more than twice as many do so than workers in France, the Netherlands, and Spain. As the work week grows longer, weekend and “strange” work becomes much more likely.This stands to reason: Someone moving from a comparatively standard week of 35 to 44 hours to a 55- to 64-hour week is almost twice as likely to let that work bleed into weekends and nights, according to the study. …

So what would happen to the U.S. if it adopted similar controls? According to the study, if the country adopted the French distribution of work hours, night and weekend work would drop substantially, but would still remain well above that of continental Europe.

Jordan Weissmann considers other explanations:

[T]he sheer time we spend working doesn’t explain why so many of us find ourselves staring into a glowing Outlook screen at 12:43 a.m. on a Wednesday. Even if Americans worked the same amount of time as the French, Dutch, or British, Hamermesh and Stancanelli find that we’d still be more likely to stay up late tooling around with Excel, reading memos, or doing whatever else it is that keeps us up at ungodly hours. It might be a cultural issue. It might be because we have fewer laws governing when people can and can’t be on the clock. Though it feels unlikely, there might even be a happy story here about enlightened American companies allowing their employees to use flexible schedules to accommodate their personal needs. Whatever the reasons, Americans structure their workweeks differently than Europeans. We’re night owls and weekend MS Office warriors—which, in the eyes of the rest of the world, probably looks pretty nuts.