Page 27 - 30 Minute Meals Recipes Includes Easy Dinner Recipes, Healthy Dinner Ideas and Simple Recipes That Can Be Made in 30 Minutes or Less for Busy Moms, Dads \& Other Professionals! - PDFDrive.com

Are you working longer and harder now than you used to?
You said “yes,” right? Most people do—especially
those who buy books on time management.
Juliet Schor agrees with you.
In her 1991 bestseller The Overworked American, Schor notes
that the shrinking American work week bottomed out at 39 hours
in 1970 before it started to rise. She says we now work an extra 164
hours—one full month—each year. She also notes the rise in the
two-income household in the last twenty-five years. While we’re
putting in those longer hours on the job, there’s no one at home to
clean and cook and plan a social life.

The average American works two months a year more than
most Europeans, she adds. Four weeks of time-off a year are man-
dated by law in Switzerland and Greece, for example, and workers
in France and Spain must have five weeks. Actual vacation time is
often a lot longer (five to eight weeks a year in Sweden).

A recent study by the National Sleep Foundation shows that 38
percent of all full-time workers spend fifty or more hours on the
job each week. Investment bankers, medical residents, corporate
lawyers, and many other professionals are subject to elastic hours,
working more than seventy per week, not including the paperwork
they bring home.

How We’re Really Spending Our Time

Our government agrees that we’re working more. A report pub-
lished in 2004 by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and

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