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that new constraints and pressures have neutralised the benefits of increased
prosperity: we are now ‘work rich’ (and income rich) and ‘time poor’. Against
this background of increasing time-pressure there have been a variety of
claims and counter-claims about changes in paid working hours and the
amount of leisure time (Schor, 1991; Robinson and Godbey, 1997; Gershuny,
2000; Jacobs and Gerson, 2004).
Some of the strongest support for the idea that we are running out of time
comes from subjective indicators. International evidence points to a growth in
the proportion of people feeling rushed and stressed (Bittman, 2004a). This
growth in time-pressure is associated with mental and physical health
problems and deteriorating quality of life. From this evidence there seems to
be general support for Schor’s ‘Overworked American’, and her proposition
that leisure has declined. The book certainly had an enthusiastic reception in
the US.
But international evidence from time-use data suggests that free or
uncommitted time - the time available for leisure - has actually increased.
Robinson and Godbey for the US (1997) show an increase in free time, as do
Aguiar and Hurst (2007). Gershuny (2000), using the pooled multinational
time-use survey, which includes nineteen countries, confirms this. Between
the 1960s and the 1990s there has been an increase in weekly free time of 7
hours for women and 51∕2 hours for men across countries (Bittman, 2004a).
So why are people feeling busier? Why is there an inescapable feeling of
time-pressure? Linder, in his book The Harried Leisure Class as early as 1970
argues that as productivity increases so does growth in leisure consumption -
leading to an increase in the ‘intensity’ of leisure (Linder, 1970). So, far from
being relaxing or ‘time out’, leisure, and the pressure to consume it, becomes
a source of time-pressure itself.
Others have pointed to the increased dispersion of working hours. Bittman
(2004a) cites evidence that while the average working week in the US has
barely changed in the last decades, this is partly due to a growth in those
working longer hours and a growth in ‘zero hours’, unemployment. Jacobs and
Gerson (2004) argue, in a different vein, that the subjective impression of time
poverty in the US is based on changes in the distribution of household
employment and the spread of the dual-earner household. Households are now
supplying more labour to the market, and the feelings of time-pressure are
from dual-earner households struggling to manage the greater load of work,
paid and unpaid, than earlier generations of male breadwinner households. It
is the increase in proportion of dual-earner households, not any increase in the
workload of dual-earner households that has caused the increase. The increase
in free time at the aggregate level in the US is a result of higher levels of
unemployment, earlier retirement and ageing populations. So certain