Based on formal measures like GDP growth and unemployment, the U.S. economy is humming along. The American worker? Not so much. Consumers are still smarting from the legacy of historic inflation as they try to cover essential needs, whether groceries, housing or child care. Labor strikes, protesting the long-term erosion of wages and benefits, have hit industries from Hollywood to shipping. On top of that, the return-to-office debate, raging since the pandemic, has divided upper management from the rank-and-file.

“Work has not been working for far too many people for far too long,” declares Brigid Schulte at the start of “Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life.” It’s an ambitious treatise, tying these developments into a grand unifying theory to explain why so many Americans are exhausted and stressed. More than a cultural critique, it calls for a bold rethink that can be roughly summarized by three premises.

Review

Henry Holt

“Over Work: Transforming the Daily Grind in the Quest for a Better Life”

By Brigid Schulte

Henry Holt. 420 pages

$31.99

First, she wants us to stop assuming formal work is worthy of pay while the informal labor that manages family life is not. That division inflicts a massive, inequitable tax on those Americans (still mostly women) who handle the bulk of caretaking duties, and the costs wind their way to the macroeconomy. For example, some argue the U.S. underinvestment in child care and lack of a federal paid-leave guarantee saves tax dollars. But these policy choices also depress U.S. women’s labor force participation – keeping millions of potential workers from earning wages, growing the economy and paying those tax dollars back.

Second, she faults companies for fixating on rigid metrics like hours worked or office time instead of productivity and worker happiness. Jumping off the principle of diminishing returns – the longer you work after a certain point, the less efficient you are – she points to real-life experiments like the shorter workweek that suggest we can work smarter while living better.

Third, she argues the pandemic shook up our thinking in radical ways – not just about where people really need to be for their jobs, but how the government can help people in dire circumstances – in this case, the downturn in spring 2020. It wasn’t just hybrid and remote work that gave millions of caregivers precious flexibility; the surge in public dollars – from Medicaid to child-care subsidies to food aid – showed how robust policy tools can tackle long-standing ills like child poverty and bring more people to the workforce.

Schulte, a former Washington Post reporter who now runs the Better Life Lab at the New America think tank, makes no bones about her progressive leanings. But she also insists she’s no utopian dreamer gazing toward Scandinavia. In a chapter on Iceland’s experiment with a shorter workweek, you can almost hear a sigh: “Iceland isn’t perfect,” she writes. “And the United States is not and will never be Iceland. I know that.” The point, she says, is to see what lessons about change it offers.

To that end, she tells stories of real people – some trapped in the overwork doom loop, others trying to make a difference – with a generous helping of data to bolster her case. (In addition to roughly 100 pages of footnotes, she serves up two appendixes on solutions.) We can balance life and work better, she contends, because it has been done.

Lessons at home and abroad

Schulte has plenty to say about well-known challenges, like the crisis of skyrocketing child-care costs. But she also highlights U.S. workplace pathologies driving inequality and burnout that get less attention. One example is the widespread deployment of unpredictable shift work – a result of companies using an algorithm to decide which employees will work when, on short notice – leaving many low-paid workers unable to plan child care, sort commuting, or even get regular sleep, let alone learn new skills and move up.

While many companies see this as a labor-saving innovation, they force the true cost on an exhausted and perpetually under-skilled workforce that’s constantly in churn, argues Schulte. The one bright spot: In the last few years, some cities have started to crack down, including Los Angeles, San Francisco and Philadelphia, as part of a broader movement to improve pay and conditions for workers.

She also eviscerates the corporate fixation on a “lean” low-wage workforce, which ignores the de facto public subsidies that help workers stay afloat when the paycheck isn’t enough. The companies may save money, she points out, but the taxpayer picks up the tab; one U.S. government estimate, issued in 2020, reported that 70 percent of food stamp and Medicaid recipients work full time.

Schulte also shares stories from abroad, not all of which are encouraging. In Japan, a culture of extreme overwork manifests itself through the nation’s high suicide rates, or karoshi (“death by overwork”). While families who lost loved ones have pushed the government and companies to reform lax labor regulations to protect workers, the country’s laws still make it easy for employers to pile on hours without oversight or extra pay.

More optimistic is her chapter on Iceland, which describes how the city of Reykjavik made one simple change – shaving off four hours from its employees’ workweek and giving them freedom to choose when to use them – with outsize positive effects. Many fathers channeled that extra time into caregiving and other informal work, which in turn let mothers benefit from a more equitable division of labor, which in turn brought more women back into full-time work. Families had more time together, while workers were happier and more productive on the job.

There’s still the very American paradox that hangs over Schulte’s call for action: Many voters who would benefit from these reforms – especially the white working-class – now reject the party touting them. She stays clear of this question but does point out how President Biden’s ambitious Build Back Better legislation – which would have ramped up public investment in child care, boosted caregiver wages, and provided paid family leave for the first time – was killed in 2022 by solid Republican opposition and an assist from Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a centrist Democrat turned independent from one of the country’s poorest states.

This puzzle lies beyond Schulte’s practical, user-friendly guide and may best be left to the legions of political scientists who’ve been debating this for years. But it’s still there this November, and in elections ahead, as Americans try to get unstuck from overwork.