By
Kathy G.
The results of the time use study I wrote about in the last post might seem to confirm the conservatives’ argument that Americans don’t want or need mandated time off. The logic would be that economic growth has enabled us to purchase more leisure, in the form of labor-saving devices and outsourced domestic work. So it could be argued that we’ve chosen to take our productivity gains in the form of higher wages rather than more vacation time. There may be something to this, especially for workers with families. Given the choice of a) few or no vacation days, but higher wages, which can be used to outsource domestic work, which in turn provides more leisure time to be with their kids on a daily basis, b) lower wages, more domestic work, and less time with the kids on a daily basis, but more extended time with them (in the form of a long vacation), I suspect most people who have kids would choose a). But ultimately I'm not buying this argument. The fact is that no one really knows what employees’ preferences are, because no one has asked us. Few workers have the power to negotiate this kind of thing directly with their employer. And even those who do may be reluctant to take time off, because of the collective action problem Ezra described in his piece. There's a wonderful book called Time Bind by the sociologist Arlie Hochschild that documents this phenomenon. It’s a case study of a company that had great work-family policies, but few workers who were taking advantage of them. It turned out that, although corporate policy said one thing, the corporate culture was to work long hours, and most employees who wanted to get ahead put in lots of overtime and took very little time off.
