I’ve been sitting for a while with Bryce Covert’s July 20 New York Times Guest Essay “8 Hours a Day, 5 Days a Week is Not Working for Us.” The piece makes an affirmative case that Americans ought to spend less time on the job. It struck a chord with me, and I recommend it.
I want to use Covert’s piece to introduce the theme on this blog that habitual overwork is inconsistent with prosperity and a happy life (perhaps one can already ascertain that I believe this from the somewhat whimsical pace of posts here). Of course, work insecurity and unemployment is even more deeply inconsistent with prosperity. So, Amen to Covert’s suggestions about job sharing. Amen to her suggestions about hours ceilings and floors. And an especially mellifluous Amen to her criticism of vicious just in time scheduling platforms affecting low wage workers in retail, warehousing, and other settings.
But I also want to point out a hole at the center of Covert’s argument. The hole relates to the uniquely high prices charged by US health care institutions, and the fact that in the US health care is linked to employment. Given this situation, it seems easy to argue that the structure of the health care system may be the biggest single factor standing in the way of fixing patterns of overwork in America.
Here is one piece of the economic logic supporting this argument. If, as an employer, one is required to pay expensive health care premiums for each additional employee, then a strong financial incentive will exist, at the margin, to extract as much work as possible out of an existing full-time employee before adding a new one. An even stronger incentive will exist to not add lots of part-time employees with benefits, even though such a situation might, as Covert argues, represent an optimal social result. Put another way, as long as American employers are left holding the bag for health care costs, they will have strong reasons to resist ideas like job sharing or hours ceilings or reduced work weeks. This especially true in high-wage sectors, since these sectors are more likely to offer benefits in the first place.
Of course, in our bifurcated and deeply unequal economy, there are many low-wage workers as well. These workers lack the skills that might give them bargaining power in the employment relationship, which means that they must either pay for health insurance themselves or rely on Medicaid. Some large employers, notoriously including WalMart, receive massive government Medicaid subsidies to maintain their low-road business model. Relieved of the need to spring for health insurance, low-wage employers have plenty of incentive to hire numerous part-time workers, and this is precisely the reality that prevails on the ground. This is clearly not what Covert has in mind when it comes to job sharing and hours ceilings. Time off from a part-time job, for many low-income workers, simply goes to a second or third part-time job needed to pay for rent and food and (if workers are rich enough to not qualify for Medicaid) overpriced health insurance.
There are of course many factors, both economic and cultural, that contribute to patterns of overwork in the US. But without a single payer health care system, or at least a public health care option, and without the political will required to reduce US health care prices to developed country norms, US exceptionalism in regards to overwork is likely to persist
(Addendum: I want to note based on a reader comment that this website offers easily digestible information on current health care coverage requirements for part-time employees under the Affordable Care Act. It seems to me that the ACA hasn’t fundamentally altered the way the structure of the health care system contributes to overwork in the US. But it is important to note that businesses with 50 or more employees do face ACA health insurance requirements for employees working more than 30 hours a week.)