[Flash Walken]

Originally Posted by Nehkara

John Boehner, GOP leader in congress and House Speaker:

Boner.

EASTHAM, Mass — Americans are a bunch of lazy layabouts who don't want to work and would rather live off the taxes generated by the toil of their countrymen. I hear some version of this rant repeatedly from people who believe that the American work ethic disappeared at some point in the past generation.

Here on gorgeous Cape Cod, where I vacation, I've been thinking about the state of American work and workers. So let's clear up a few matters.



First, American worker productivity is high and continues to rise.

In fact, according to a cross-national study released earlier this year by the International Labor Organization, American workers are the most productive in the world. Based on the most recent data available for each country, workers in the United States on average produce $63,885 of wealth annually; compared to other industrialized countries of Europe, only Norway's workers produce more wealth per hour ($37.99 in U.S. dollars) than do American workers ($35.63.)

Second, Americans work a lot.

Although workers in third-world countries put in roughly 2,200 hours per year, compared with other industrialized nations U.S. workers rank first, averaging about 1,800 hours annually. That's 400 more hours than the Norwegians and 330 more hours than the French.

So we work plenty and produce a lot. How else could a nation with only 4.5 percent of the world's population produce more than a fifth of the world's wealth?

Obviously, technology has boosted productivity. But technological advances also make work more pervasive and inescapable: Saleswomen today can call clients from the car or email them while in midair; middle managers can do paperwork on their laptops at night and on weekends. All of which means Americans today often work in places and at times that their parents and grandparents simply could not.

Although earlier generations of American workers surely would have done the same had cellphones and the Internet existed then, it doesn't change the fact that today's workers can work longer hours and perhaps never fully "leave" the office. (One benefit of technology is that it permits telecommuting and greater job flexibility, which is invaluable to working parents and many adults with physical limitations.)

So if Americans are working hard, they must be playing hard, too, right?

Sorry, it's just the opposite: The same country that ranks first among industrialized nations in total wealth productivity per year and second in wealth productivity per hour ranks dead last in terms of vacation time taken, especially paid vacation.

http://articles.baltimoresun.com/201...ys-u-s-workers

American leisure? Don’t let the averages fool you, he could say. While it looks like leisure time has gone up, time diaries show that leisure and sleep time have gone up steeply since 1985 for those with less than a high school degree. Why? They’re becoming unemployed or underemployed. And leisure and sleep time for the college educated, the ones working those crazy extreme hours, has fallen steeply.

Americans don’t have two “nurture days” per child until age 8, as Denmark does. No year-long paid parental leaves for mothers and fathers, as in Iceland. Nor a national three-month sabbatical policy, which Belgium has.

Instead of taking the entire month of August off, the most employers voluntarily grant us American workers tends to be two weeks. One in four workers gets no paid vacation or holidays at all, one study found. And, in a telling annual report called the “Vacation Deprivation” study, travel company Expedia figures that Americans didn’t even USE 577 million of those measly vacation days at all last year.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...king-too-hard/

Women are the primary breadwinners in 40 percent of U.S. households today. But in most of those families, women are the primary earner because they are the only earner. One if four houses are now led by a single mom, who earn an average income of just $23,000.

Balancing work and leisure without a partner isn't easy no matter where you live, but single working mothers feel a particular pinch in the U.S., for two reasons. First, the U.S. has the fourth-highest share of single mothers in the OED. Second, they work the longest hours and have more children than most rich countries, according to a study of family time. "Lone mothers in the US have less available time than lone mothers in any of the other countries" the researchers studied.

Single mothers are more likely to work than the average adult -- after all, the vast majority of them simply must -- but they're also more likely to work less. In the U.S., where single mothers work the most, only 4 percent punch in more than 50 hours a week.

So when you hear that American work-life balance ranks poorly, remember that there really isn't any such thing as "American work-life balance." Instead there are intersecting trends -- only a handful of which I've touched on here -- showing that, although the workweek has fallen, the changing composition of families has put tremendous time-stresses on more mothers. Overall, research shows that lower-income men have never had more downtime, while working single mothers have never been more common. The first part is a problem. The second is a crisis.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/...-awful/276336/