The Work Ethic Lives!

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

After putting in a standard 40-hour week, a growing number of workers in -- let's say, Country X -- labor at second and even third jobs. Those who cannot find regular full-time employment take whatever part-time or temporary jobs they can get. Minor illnesses or family troubles are not allowed to interfere with work; absenteeism has dropped to the lowest levels since the early 1970s. Employees regularly say they would prefer still longer hours and higher incomes to more leisure and less pay. This is not just idle talk; money-losing companies sometimes persuade their workers to sacrifice days off in order to cut costs.

What is this Stakhanovite society? No, not Japan, for all its renown as the exemplar of dedicated labor. South Korea? Taiwan? West Germany? No, again. Every one of the trends cited is occurring in the U.S. -- the very country Richard Nixon once said was being overtaken by a "new welfare ethic that could cause the American character to weaken." Nixon need not have worried: 15 years after he voiced his forebodings, and as Labor Day approaches, every indication is that 112.7 million Americans by and large are working as hard as ever, and sometimes harder, even where the vaunted computer revolution has lightened their jobs. The main reason, unfortunately, is often necessity: for all the U.S. economy's performance, hourly pay has never quite caught up with past inflation.

Take Kathy Davis, 26. She works a 37 1/2-hour week, from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday through Friday, as a clerk for Oral B Laboratories, a toothbrush maker in Redwood City, Calif. Then, on Sunday afternoons and Monday and Tuesday evenings, she clocks an additional 13 hours selling sheets and towels at a branch of Macy's department store. "It takes a toll," says Davis of her 50 1/2-hour work week. Nonetheless, she expects to continue moonlighting for at least a year to pay off debts she ran up before losing a previous job in San Diego.

On the other hand, consider Armajene Clark, 60. Unemployed after a move from New Jersey, he applied to every company in the Atlanta area that he could think of, seeking to be hired as a production or light-industrial worker. Says he: "When they read the age on my application, I wouldn't get the job." Unwilling to settle into retirement, Clark registered with an Atlanta agency that found enough temporary jobs to keep him steadily employed. Last year, while working on the production line at a tea-packing company, he asked a well-dressed stranger who wandered by how he could get a permanent job. The stranger, who turned out to be the president of the company, hired him full time.

Neither story is that unusual. Moonlighting was once thought to be a temporary phenomenon made necessary by the ravages of inflation. But as inflation has abated in the '80s, the practice has only increased. At last count, in May 1985, the Labor Department found that 5.7 million workers, or 5.4% of all those employed, held more than one job. That was up from 4.9% in 1980, the double-digit-inflati on year, and the highest proportion in more than two decades. The number of moonlighting women in the labor force jumped 40% between 1980 and 1985, to 2.2 million, three times as many as those holding multiple jobs in 1970.

Temporary work, by some estimates, is growing faster than employment in any conventionally measured industry except computers. For employers, especially in service industries, it cuts the fringe-benefit costs of maintaining a large permanent work force; from the employee standpoint, it offers work and income to people who cannot find steady jobs. Some are young people like Jeanne Sagmeister, 23, who graduated from the University of Illinois last December with a degree in interior design. Unable to find work in her chosen field, she is now recruiting and training people to conduct telephone surveys. Says she: "It's not something I've been looking for, but it has given me some business experience." The biggest category of "temps," says Mitchell Fromstein, president of Milwaukee-based Manpower Inc., is composed of "college-educated baby-boom women who left the labor force temporarily to have children. They choose us as a first step back to the working world."

And what of the 107 million Americans who hold a single, steady job? They too seem to be working harder -- hard enough, indeed, to make employers in many other countries envy American bosses their labor force. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, absenteeism in U.S. factories and offices dropped 20% between 1980 and 1985, to the lowest level since the BLS began compiling such figures in 1973. During any given week, 4.7% of American workers took some unscheduled time off. That was less than half the rate in England (11.8%) and Canada (11.6%), and well below figures for Denmark (7.7%), France (5.9%) and the Netherlands (5.4%), though higher than in West Germany (3.0%), Sweden (3.0%) or, of course, Japan (2.5%). And in most other countries, the average worker gets longer vacations and more holidays than the average American. In France, for example, the law guarantees every employee five weeks off a year.

When IBM recently added up figures for its employees in ten industrial countries, it found that Americans average 1,873 hours of work each year. That total is exceeded only in -- where else? -- Japan, where workers clocked 1,964 hours.

All this raises a question: Wasn't an automated and computerized society expected to reward citizens with ever increasing leisure? Maybe not. Pollster Louis Harris in October 1985 asked a nationwide sample of adults how many hours a week they devoted to "work," including household tasks, studying and commuting as well as labor for pay. Harris concluded that leisure time had dropped 8 1/2 hours a week in the previous dozen years, from a median of 26.2 hours in 1973 to 17.7 in 1985.

The big reason for the decline in leisure is the continuing flood of women, including mothers of small children, into the labor force. But it is not only / the women who are running themselves ragged. Terry Boswell, assistant professor of sociology at Emory University in Atlanta, cites studies indicating that among childless working couples, the husband spends an hour a day on household chores. When a working wife is also the mother of a child age two or younger, a husband's labor around the house climbs to three hours a day, still only a third of the "free" work his wife performs.

Strangely enough, Americans seem to like their strenuous schedules, at least more than the alternative. The 40-hour week has been the norm in U.S. industry since 1940, when the Fair Labor Standards Act set that benchmark, and Labor Department polls show that more than two-thirds of all workers who follow that regimen are satisfied with it. Fewer than one worker in ten would choose to have more leisure and less income; about one in every four would prefer longer hours and more pay.

Some financially strapped companies have put this attitude to an acid test by forcing their employees to choose between longer hours or lower wage rates. AFL-CIO Economist John Zalusky ticks off the outcome: workers in the rubber industry have agreed to lengthen their work week by 2 1/2 hours; autoworkers have sacrificed 13 days of personal leave each year; senior steelworkers have forgone the 13-week paid sabbaticals they once enjoyed. Says Zalusky: "When faced with decreased health-care coverage or a cut in their wages, most workers would rather give up a paid holiday."

His observation points up an important consideration about Americans' work styles: very few of those habits reflect an excess of Calvinistic virtue. To be sure, immigrants continue in their traditional American role as the greatest Stakhanovites of all. And among the native born, true believers in the work ethic, defined by former President Nixon as a belief "that a man or woman . . . becomes a better person by virtue of the act of working," can indeed be found.

John Hardison, 54, universally known on Washington high-rise construction sites as "Johnny Crane," is one of those worthies. He arrives at a building site at 5:15 a.m. (in the past nine years he has been late only once, by ten minutes) to check over the tower crane that he operates. Then he ascends to a 3-ft. by 4-ft. cage 210 ft. in the air and spends up to 16 hours a day moving concrete and shifting heavy equipment. Hardison does not take a lunch break, or even leave his cage to go to the bathroom. He earns $22 an hour but insists that his main job satisfaction is that "I can drive around Washington and point to the buildings I've built."

Whatever the satisfactions involved, for the great majority of Americans, hard work is an economic must, real or perceived. It is no coincidence that moonlighting has increased since the early 1970s; that is precisely when the typical worker's real hourly income -- pay discounted for price increases -- began to slide. In fact, at $4.82 in constant dollars, it currently remains below the 1972 figure of $5.22. The ravages of the Great Inflation on paychecks still have not been entirely repaired; in addition, foreign competition and deep changes in the economy have wiped out many high-paying factory jobs.

The drive for harder work was greatly intensified by the harrowing recession of 1981-82. Almost five years after that experience ended, its effects linger on. Corporate cost-cutting programs begun during the recession have been continued and even intensified since, under the lash of foreign competition and the fear of hostile takeovers. Companies long known for keeping workers on the payroll through thick and thin have changed their policy: AT&T, for instance, has laid off 36,600 workers since January 1984. The result, says Alan Draper, coordinator of the Work in Society program at St. Lawrence University in Canton, N.Y.: "American workers are on the defensive. They are working as hard as they can because of the insecurity."

Some labor specialists think these trends may soon begin to reverse as work-force demographics change. A shortage of workers owing to the low birthrates of the '60s and early '70s is already being felt by employers who try to hire youths for entry-level jobs. Columbia University Professor David Lewin predicts that as the birth dearth works through the ranks of the labor force, "employees are going to have the upper hand in bargaining power." Job insecurity will subside, he thinks, and workers will win higher wages, lowering the pressure to put in more hours.

But there are probably enough Kathy Davises and Armajene Clarks left to keep the work ethic alive, if in something less than pristine form. Admittedly, the current high level of labor activity is not entirely a happy trend. A long-term decline in real incomes is nothing to celebrate, and leisure undoubtedly has its rewards. Even so, it is not disheartening that John Hardison and millions of others evidently feel something similar to fondness for hard work.

With reporting by Nancy Traver/Washington, with other bureaus