Broadcast December 21, 2000
You may remember old Scrooge wasn't happy he had to give his clerk in the counting house time off for Christmas. "A poor excuse for picking a man s pocket every twenty-fifth of December! But I suppose you must have the whole day," he said. "Be here all the earlier next morning."
Well, we've progressed a bit since those days, maybe. Most working Americans have a three-day weekend coming up. About 1 in 4 will have four days. And a fortunate few will take all of next week.
On the other hand, if you happen to work for one of those 24/7 call centers, you may have to work on Christmas Day. Security guards will be at their stations. Many convenience store operators, too. Also hospital staffs, caterers, hotel personnel, emergency repairers of all kinds, fire fighters, police officers, even the staff at Marketplace.
Even you, with your long holiday weekend coming up, may be tempted at some point to turn on the home computer and get some work done. The dirty little secret of the new economy is that almost all of us are fitting in work outside normal working hours. A quarter of all people who use the Internet are working weekends and evening at home, on top of a full day's work at the office.
In fact, if you add up all the extra hours, the average middle-income married couple with children will have worked the equivalent of eight weeks more this year than they did in 1980. And despite the recent economic boom, that couple isn't earning much more than it used to, when you adjust for inflation.
Scrooge doesn't demand we work so hard. He doesn't have to. We know if we don't, the work just piles up. Or we won't get the commissions we're counting on, or accumulate enough billable hours, or get the overtime pay, or the year-end Christmas bonus. And speaking of that bonus, notice they won't say in advance how much it's gonna be. No, that might allow us to ease up a bit.
The message, conveyed in all sorts of ways, is just keep working. Bah humbug. It turns out that Mr. Scrooge is alive and well, and living in America.
