The Overworked American
by David Rowan
Subtitle for Juliet B. Schor’s fascinating book, “The Overworked American” is “The Unexpected Decline of Leisure,” and therein is the wake-up call for us in the business of catering to people with leisure time. In the ski industry we have been wringing our hands over the flat market we have had over the past decade, and we have self-prescribed all sorts of ambitious and costly marketing initiatives to jump-start the market and convert the potentials. It may be that Ms. Schor has fingered the most basic — not the only, of course — cause for our flatness.
“We have become a harried working, rather than leisure, class, as jobs take up an ever larger part of ever more Americans’ leisure.” That is the theme of this highly original book which challenges a lot of the comfortable assumptions and conventional wisdom we hold about our capitalist wonderland. Some of her wide-ranging challenges make a startling fit with our parochial little problems with skier growth.
When our capitalist market economy flowered most lavishly, accompanied by astonishingly upward rewards for its workers, both hourly and salaried/managerial, it coincided with the period of greatest growth for the ski industry as well. It was the 1950’s and 1960’s, when ski areas mushroomed across the country and people flocked to the hills to learn and partake. In real terms, people had time and the means to indulge.
Then some changes began to occur, and these appear to coincide with the flattening of our skier visit picture.
“My estimates,” writes Ms. Schor, “confirm not only that spanning the last two decades, more people are working, but they are working more … According to my estimates, the average employed person is now on the job an additional 163 hours, or the equivalent of an extra month a year … The extra month of work is attributable to both longer weekly schedules and more weeks of work.”
It is hardly surprising to find the match, then, with the ski industry data that show a decreasing number of skier visits per skier, or with the consistency with which skiers report time constraints as being the most daunting of barriers to increased participation.
This scholarly and argumentative book, which is also highly readable despite its serious subject matter, briefly traces the history of work and leisure concepts through the centuries, in the process deflating our comfortable assumptions about how much “quality time” we enjoy compared to what we assume were the overworked people of medieval times.
“One of capitalism’s most durable myths is that it has reduced human toil,” the author writes. “Before capitalism, most people did not work very long hours at all. The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed. Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure: When capitalism raised their incomes, it also took away their time.”
Perhaps the most chilling part of Ms. Schor’s book is when she lays open the “shop ’till you drop,” work-and-spend treadmill — “squirrel cage,” she calls it — into which middle class and upper middle class America has locked itself, as Smiths endlessly compete with Joneses in the acquisition of lifestyle toys, cars and other proof of their successes.
For the first time I recognized that this pathetic phenomenon of our times is the perfectly circular, self-generating trap that I have joked about, but not seen as the enemy of the recreational world I try to survive in.
As the author puts it, “Work-and-spend has become a mutually reinforcing and powerful syndrome — a seamless web we somehow keep choosing, without even meaning to.” Elsewhere she writes, “…progress has repeatedly translated into more goods and services, rather than more free time.”
It is good to remember that when she refers to the “unexpected” decline of leisure, the author refers to our almost universal assumption that capitalism was leading us to more and more leisure, complete with 30-hour weeks, four-day work weeks and 6-8 weeks of vacation. Our concerns 20 years ago were for how we would fill all that leisure time. Not only was it not to be, America marched smartly in quite the opposite direction.
It is ironic, as we enjoy a burgeoning market of Brit and European skiers on our slopes, that it is there, not here, that you find the leisure time. Paid vacations there typically run — in several countries legally mandated — from 4-5 weeks, with many company policies calling for 5-6 weeks. As Ms. Schor glumly remarks, “European workers have successfully articulated a vision of a more leisured society. That vision is still missing in America.”
Does the author see any chance for a change? Yes, she detects some slight stirrings, but hardly a movement — yet.
She feels, it will take more than public opinion; it will require organization and mobilization of women’s organizations, the children’s lobby and others. Government, too, she feels, “will need to play a major role.”
Maybe, if our industry has another go at national marketing, it might be to influence people to shape up their priorities. The theme might be, “Just Say No – To Work!”
Waiting for the Weekend
By Witold Rybczynski
260 pp. New York: Viking. $18.95
by Janet Nelson
Weekends started when the world was invented. That, or something similar, is how most people probably think western society’s two-day rest period came into being . . . if they give it any thought at all. Witold Rybczynski’s “Waiting for the Weekend” will soon disavow readers of such simplistic assumptions.
Rybczynski not only explores the history of the weekend, he sheds light on work, rest and recreation in the context of the seven-day period — an artificial interval. Calendars and holidays are explored in relationship to work and play and the influence of religion. All this is entertainingly presented and illustrated with examples from history as well as art. (An entire chapter is devoted to Georges Seurat’s painting, “Sunday Afternoon on the Island of la Grande Jatte.”)
What this has to do with skiing comes down to Rybczynski’s chapter on the problem of leisure. Personal freedom is still viewed as a dangerous concept, a holdover from the days when workers were considered too uneducated to manage unstructured time. Most significant, he documents how leisure hours have declined as modern society marches toward the next century. Americans are willing to give up free time in order to spend, which creates more work in the form of shopping, regulating products and administering schedules and accounts.
In the past, says Rybczynski, “The accent [of play] was less on technique than on having a good time. . . . Now the availability of free time every weekend has changed this casual attitude.” Furthermore, “Technology has removed craft from most occupations. . . . For many, weekend free time has become not a chance to escape work but a chance to create work that is meaningful — to work at recreation . . .”
There’s a message here about the taboo of free time and the guilt of pleasure. Maybe we need to take a deeper look at the meaning of our recreation and turn it back into the rewarding leisure experience it once was.
