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Compared to workers in most other high-income countries, Americans tend to work more hours per year. Here’s a figure from the OECD, which is based on taking the total number of hours worked in an economy and dividing it by the number of workers for the most recent year available. Because different countries will measure categories like “hours” and “workers” somewhat differently, the results should not be taken as precise.

But look at the size of the gaps! An American worker is at 1,811 hours/year, while a German worker is at 1,340 hours/year. If one thinks in terms of 40-hour work weeks, the German worker is working about 12 weeks per year less.

Juliet Schor offers a rumination on this issue in “Americans Are Overworked. Could AI Change That?” (Behavioral Scientist, August 2, 2-025). She writes:

[F]or many decades, the United States was a place where people worked less. Before 1900, American hours were lower than in a number of European countries, such as Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Italy. The U.S. was first to go to the five-day week. In 1950, Germany, France, the U.K., Italy, and Spain all had longer hours. Even through the 1960s, work schedules in Europe exceeded those in the U.S. Then the two regions took different paths. U.S. hours stagnated and rose. Europeans continued a century-long trajectory of reducing work time.

This divergence seemed to start happening in the 1970s–which suggests that it is not the result of some deep-seated cultural difference going back a century or more, but instead resulted from more recent political and social choices. Schor suggests several underlying factors that might lead the American labor market toward more hours per worker.

As one example, many full-time workers in the US labor market get their health insurance through their employer. Most economists believe that although the employer writes the check to pay the cost, the economic value of health insurance is actually paid by workers in the form of wages that are lower than they would otherwise have been. Schor writes:

It [employer-paid health insurance] functions like a tax on employment, giving employers an incentive to hire fewer people for more hours. This was an accidental and unfortunate pairing; during World War II, employers began offering health insurance to attract workers because wages were controlled by the government to keep wartime inflation at bay. Little did anyone expect this would distort the labor market eighty years later.

Another reason, Schor argues, is that many US jobs are paid a salary, rather than a hourly wage. Of course, salaried workers do not receive additional pay if they work additional hours–and so employers have an incentive to push such workers for additional hours.

As Schor points out, the overall question is whether increases in productivity translate into higher wages or fewer hours worked. Through a variety of mechanisms like higher levels of unionization, European countries in the last half-century have generally used higher productivity to mean fewer hours worked, while the US has generally used higher productivity to mean higher wages. Schor writes:

 In recent decades, digitization has transformed work in many occupations and industries, but in the U.S. hours haven’t fallen. I’ve argued that’s due to biases in the economy that have operated against hours reductions. Europe has some of these biases, but stronger unions and welfare states and a more equal income distribution have reduced those pressures, so European countries have continued to translate productivity growth into free time. Since 1973, I’ve calculated that the U.S. has taken less than 8 percent of its increased productivity to reduce hours, while western European countries have taken much more—generally three to four times that amount.

Of course, there are trade-offs for a society that makes choices to take productivity gains in the form of leisure, rather than in the form of increased income. Schor advocates for a gradual move to a four-day work week. Whether one agrees with that goal or not, her essay is a reminder that, often without any explicit consideration of the range of tradeoffs between leisure and income, political and social arrangements can strongly affect this choice over a few decades.

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