The Overspent American Quotes

“Businessmen warned that idleness breeds mischief and-even worse-radicalism.”
― Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline Of Leisure

“Work-and-spend has become a mutually reinforcing and powerful syndrome-a seamless web we somehow keep choosing, without even meaning to.”
― Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline Of Leisure

“According to our calculations, just to reach their 1973 standard of living, they must work 245 more hours, or 6plus extra weeks a year.'8”
― Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline Of Leisure

“Where I work at the auto plant, the workers are just dropping like flies. When there's a lot of work because of a new model coming out, they make people work 10 and 12 hours every day, 6 days a week. Lots of people, even the younger ones, are developing high blood pressure, having accidents on the job, or car accidents on the way to and from work, or other serious health problems. But they have to do it. If you don't like it, you can just quit.44”
― Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline Of Leisure

“countervailing pressures, the most important of which was the trade union movement, which waged a successful hundred-year struggle for shorter hours. But once this quest ended after the Second World War, reductions in hours virtually ceased. Not long after unions gave up the fight, the American worker's hours began to rise.”
― Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline Of Leisure

“The changing labor market of the 1970s and 1980s has had just the opposite effect on patterns of men's labor. Their market hours have fallen-by 79-and hours of domestic work have increased-by 151. But men's trends have been slightly more complicated. As I showed earlier, employed men are working more, not less. But for the whole population, men's market hours have fallen because there are far fewer of them in the labor force (see table 2.4). Each man who drops out of the labor force reduces his hours so substantially that this effect has outweighed the longer hours of men who are employed. Overall, a smaller proportion are working longer hours, and a larger proportion are without jobs.”
― Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline Of Leisure

“the market system handed down to human beings a sentence of "life at hard labor."18”
― Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline Of Leisure

“in the last twenty years the amount of time Americans have spent at their jobs has risen steadily. Each year the change is small, amounting to about nine hours, or slightly more than one additional day of work. In any given year, such a small increment has probably been imperceptible. But the accumulated increase over two decades is substantial. When surveyed, Americans report that they have only sixteen and a half hours of leisure a week, after the obligations of job and household are taken care of. Working hours are already longer than they were forty years ago. If present trends continue, by the end of the century Americans will be spending as much time at their jobs as they did back in the nineteen twenties.*t”
― Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline Of Leisure

“time has become a currency, which we "spend" instead of "pass." Many of us need to relax, to unwind, and, yes, to work less.2”
― Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline Of Leisure

“My book was not the first to recognize that Americans are feeling squeezed for time. What made it different was that it avoided the standard "how-to" approach to time management and timesaving. The "how-to" solution-of which I am generally critical-embodies a blame-the-victim approach. It assumes that the problem lies in personal shortcomings, and counsels that we "try to do too much" or do not organize our lives efficiently. Similarly, the corporate attempt to address "work-family" issues-providing, for example, child care, sick-child care, stress seminars, or a health club at the office-falls short when merely a way to make long hours more tolerable for employees. It does not address the basic problem: an economy and society that are demanding too much from people.”
― Juliet B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline Of Leisure