Are Americans too lazy?

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I do not agree,I am freelancer from non-us city & 70% of my clients are from US & they work with me as much as I work , sometimes we work 16 hours a day but 10-12 hours a day is our regular routine…

- Accountant
http://www.banktransfers.co.uk

I totally disagree. Other countries like India end up working longer hours, but then it’s expected that there will be lots of talking around the water cooler and personal chats throughout the day. I say keep it the same and work harder!

I’d say the working time and lazyness aren’t always straight proportional. If you coerce everyone to work longer, I’d say people won’t be any less lazy. It needs to motivate people so that they work with more enthusiasm. That could lead to a longer working time, but needn’t.

Vincent

I think in today’s world we don’t work as hard as we used to. The reason I think this is, is technology.

In the old days ( like the miner days ) you could call it hard work, working 14 hours a day with shovels and picks, now that hard work. Compare that to what you do for a living and ask your self, could I do that?

Want me to work more hours than I already do. Here’s an idea. Stop taxing my overtime!!! Sure I get more take home pay when I work more hours but when you considder time and a half, Uncle Sam gets the time, I get the half. Why can’t the regressive income tax apply to me as well as the boss? It’s a huge double standard that reduces my incentive to produce more just as it does with anyone else.

Not productive enough? I should speculate that large multinational corporations would rather that our children work since the labor of two in a household doesn’t seem to adequately replace what was the duty of one. Our productions are up 40 percent since the 1970’s and yet our purchase power is under fire.

What a failure in the promise of technology! Why can’t the added stock that advancements in technology pave the way for a more relaxed society? We should all be working less and letting the difference to be made up for with technology instead of the other way arround. I cannot think of another reason for this failure than for the simple pleasure of greed.

The issue is in the fabled quest for growth instead of sustainability. World planners should revisit the works of Adam Smith to realize that their deviations from sound theory have dilluted their minds into believing that this system is bound for anything less than collaps.

I can’t speak for all of america, but in my profession, Advertising, I work from 8am to 12am nearly 4 days a week and two other days a week I get it easy. 8 to 6. (yes the gives me one day a week to do my laundry and clean house etc…) So, maybe there are some extreeme slackers out there that prefer to live off of other peoples dollar, but not this guy! I work hard for what I have.

You all should know what the word “Average” means, any way you may listen to employers at factories, farms, construction, restaurants, etc. I’m struggling every day with the expensive lazy and stupid, drug users, delinquents, psychos, etc. Finding good hard workers is becoming more and more difficult, Do you know how we can stay in business with out illegals ?? and is not about wages, believe me, Why would you blame me if I rather close and move across the boarder, plenty of hard workers, and away of this over-regulated system.

I think they need to work smarter not harder. The US put a man on the moon. Now they cant even get a space shuttle to land properly.

I really would have to agree with Douglas Prindle. Americans really work much harder than any other nation out there. The average workday is not 9-5, it’s 8-6 already. Furthermore, entry level jobs these days at the top firms and the fastest growing job sectors like media all requirement long hours and people work until 2 am in finance.

David Jang

Sorry Crawford, but you’re dead wrong. Yes, the economy is allegedly lagging, but to say its because Americans are lazy is ignorance. Look at Japan. Look at Germany. Look at France. 3 of the World’s largest and most successful economies and they work literally almost half as much as Americans.

Further, your “research” is breaking down labor across the entire population. Remove the retirees and you have a completely different picture. A picture that would show that Americans work more than any other developed nation. By FAR. Not even close.

Its easy to skew any type of “scientific” research to paint a picture of doom and gloom. Frankly, America knows it. At least the vast majority of us do. And I think were pretty sick of journalistic hacks sensationalizing issues with misinformation.

Blame it on American workers whose jobs are getting outsourced to China and India leaving the remaining workers stretched thin and yet never question the fact that the average CEO earns 300 times the average worker and pays less taxes and was the chief beneficiary of the Bush tax cuts.
The Bush administration and their ilk are making trillions of dollars and experiencing boom times from record high oil prices, military buildup from
Bush’s Iraq war which has generated hundreds of billions in no bid contracts and corruption and lack of accountability.
Great article–it is the American workers lazy ways that is the cause of all this. Workers should 1) Work more 2) Get paid less 3) Give up their benefits for the good of the stock options of their masters and 4) Most importantly, stop complaining and remain apathetic. Anyone who voted for Bush and is not part of the richest 1% gets what they deserve.

Yes!Most of Americans are fat lazy and stupid.Stumbling through life,in a catotonic state of confusion.

I see this as true fact. I am a System Administrator earning really good money and still do work only 25hrs/week where I should do 40+. This is allowed as other groups within the institution do the same and thus, no one dares speaks of it. Also, I lived in Peru and the work-load there is unbelievable. The standards to keep your job is very high which a day of work would be minimun 70hrs/week. I am sad now… I will work more from now on…

At the end of the day what is more important – the quality or quantity of hours worked? I agree that many Americans are lazy. However, many are not. In the case of those hardworking Americans – they should continue converting jobs that previously ran with special focus on production to a focus on management and services. Instead of working our fingers to the bone lets find jobs that manage the others or don’t directly compete with ridiculous work hours. On behalf of the jobs that are still focusing on production – think quality not quantity. The hand of the diligent will rule. But the lazy man will be put to forced labor. 20:12:24

Please post a list of the good paying jobs with 40 hour work weeks. I routinely work 50 to 52 and cannot get it done. Understaffing is the norm at the last two jobs I have had. So have no or 3% annual raises. And these are “professional” positions. So please, give us the list.

What he’s saying is Americans refuse to work for dirt cheap wages like other contries so that the filthy greedy rich can be greedier. Plain and simple pay us better or you can join us in the unemployment line. You outsource all the decent paying jobs oversea’s or corrupt our economy with cheap import’s. Maybe you missed it but with out good paying jobs we are not going to buy stuff. You can make us poorer but then in turn we will make you the rich greedy poorer. As for me my focus is on my family not your business.

It’s interesting to me that an article calling Americans lazy should appear in a rich man’s magazine. Please don’t buy Geoff Colvin’s propaganda. Did you know there is no law in America to protect your vacation time? Please join me in supporting “Take Back Your Time,” a joint US/Canadian initiative to challenge the epidemic of overwork. http://timeday.org/

Agree with some other comments about working after hours via email, blackberry, etc. Also, what has changed from previous generations is the excessive time required after hours raising children, specifically, time required to help with the overswhelming volume of homework now required in most schools. When my wife and I started to school in 1965, most learning was assumed to be accomplished at school and only occasional help at home was required. Now, it seems as if every parent I know spends several hours a night, after working a full day, helping their children with homework (really amounts to homeschooling). Parents these days are getting very “squeezed”, time and energy-wise, as both are usually working (unlike previous generations), demands for raising children are more than ever, and they may be caring for elderly parents, who are living longer than ever. For most parents, I don’t believe there is any “extra” time available to put in at work, given other non-work demands and expectations.

Yes we have become a very lazy country.We want everything in a hurry and in some cases will do almost anything to get something for nothing.I beleive this nation will almost collapse by July, 31, 2008.

Did anyone in this study take into account how many people are forced to work less hours than 40 because their employers are simply not willing to pay any overtime and more and more of employers are relying on temp and part time employment? This would bring the working hours average down considerably.
Also there is a concern with lack of motivation in the workplace, who wants to work for less than they made last year and the year before that? I know of several people who have earned less everyyear for the last 3 years and this is simply not acceptable to an employee whos expecting pay to rise with experienece.

The underlining cause behind many of the problems your seeing today are caused by corporate greed, NOT from the citizen. Wake up people!!!

Geoff is just trying to get more money for himself by trying to make american workers look bad. He needs to get that next union contract pay raise down. The reality is, American workers are more PRODUCTIVE than any in the world, by far. That is what really counts. He should come to my cement plant and work a few shifts, I can put him with some guys who can lose 5-10 pounds a day. The work can be brutal not just hard. He is living in a rosey wonderful world, and just has no clue what hard work even is, that is my guess. Maybe when he caddied at the golf club as kid, that was the only time he ever sweated.

I am a baby boomer. I have worked the hours. I am now looking at a retirement with stress driven medical problems. Yea, work more hours and harder. No wonder our medical costs are so high. The Japanese have a special work for the results of working the long hours and dieing early. I would put it into this response but due to information over load I no longer have it in memory.
I have children in the “new generation”. One is part of a 2-income family (due to out sourcing). There are 4 children in the family. One is the head of a single income family with 3 children. He is working as a contract designer and is living just above poverty. The third is still in school (back in school at 30) because with a science degree (major) and an engineering minor and no experience she could not get a job

Broad generalizations are seldom true.
What’s the point of working more hours anyway? Isn’t working less one of the primary reasons humans organized themselves into civilizations? Just think if we had to grow our own food, make our own clothes, build our own homes, find our own sources of energy…there would not be enough hours in a day to work.

My goal is to have enough invested such that the only work I’ll NEED to do is manage my investments. If I only want to do that for 3-4 hours per day, then that will be fine with me.

I do not beleive Americans are lazy. I beleive our CEO’s just want more in their pockets, and want us to work for less. When we refuse jobs at a low wage they say “Americans don’t work hard enough, and only the illegals will do these jobs”.

I’m not really sure how we as readers can take this article seriously. Not a single mention of “productivity”. Taking a single statistic out of context and using it to hype a baseless hypothesis that Americans are lazy . . . this is not journalism.

Let us not forget this is America and we are not lazy! What is occurring in the ‘land of the free’ is everyone that is coming here, are coming here to work and to improve their way of life. In other words, they live to work, most Americans (those legally born here) work to live. Most foreigners here in the U.S. are playing catch-up, therefore working so hard to support their families here in the U.S. and in their native homeland. So, what appears to be hard work to most, is really, modern day self-enslavement, which is a representation of the culture they originally came from.

I have a graduate degree and I have worked for 3 different Fortune 100 companies; in addition to a bunch of small ones. My experiences, here in Austin, are 180 degrees different than Mr. Colvin’s analysis. Real earnings go down each year; due to healthcare, but also due to employers making a higher percentage of an employee’s pay discretionary. Also, I am have no idea how Mr. Colvin was able to substantiate his claim of hours/week declining, but my peers all fear the consequences of working less than 55 hours / week, not showing enough night and weekend “face time” and being bold enough to take all of your 2 weeks of vacation at once. I would like to see some data from writers that did some “frontline” research at the top 100 companies.

It is amazing how hard someone will work just to feed their families or own their first home. Even if it means the whole family working for way less than minimum wage…

This article is totally biased and superficial. I worked for years in different companies in one of the 3rd World nations mentioned here, Mexico, and yes, they usually spend far more hours in their jobs than Americans. 48 hours a week spent in the job is the minimun down there; it is very badly regarded to leave the office, factory or store at the very ending hours. Overtime is always expected. But as for work my very high guess is 40 hours.

This columnist did not care enough on what the Mexican employees do with all those extra thousand hours. By “enough” I mean “enough to make fair comparisons”. Do you think they can’t work more because their outdated technologies, unskilled staff, incompetent governments, bad infrastructure, etc? Yes, those problems do happen, but they usually do have good computers just like in US. As for incompetent governments, the European ones are plain bad as well very often. By far and large, these employees plain waste time chatting, gossiping, flirting, eating, laughing all loud, etc. This is also why they are usually terribly trained and this creates a chain reaction because they not only wste time in the very moment they waste it. they also waste future time. After gossiping or eating burritos and tamales, they didn’t get good training and later they waste hours and hours trying to do works that should be routinar duties. Yet, those works are daily problems to solve that are never quite figured out.

These situations must happen in the rest of the 3rd World, just like Peru or China. At least it’s certaind that this happens in the rest of Latin America because their culture is the same as in Mexico: excessive chat and gossip, and lack of practicallity, amongst many others.

Reading this article shows again, that a lot of people in the USA think, working more will be more productive and more profitable.
I don’t agree with it. The USA is a working class country who works for a living and never knew how to enjoy there live after work.
Let’s face it. A lot of Americans cannot live only with one job. Husband and Wife have to work in order to keep a standard of living which is for example in Europe standard without having both working tremendous over hours. In Fact the majority in the USA is living from pay check to pay check even though working up to 50 hours or more a week. What is wrong with that picture? And know we have to read that Americans are too lazy? I don’t believe there is any more room for more work with out sacrificing complete your private life.
I grew up In Germany a country which has a great heath system, word class products and industries. There aren’t a lot of countries in the world who has such high standards in there economy and you can be assured that the average German Employee doesn’t work more the 40 hours a week, neither weekends and has at least 4 weeks vacation from the very beginning.
The productivity and quality is not getting better, due to working more and more hours. Sometimes people need a rest to be more focused in order to make a difference in the world’s economy and to be more competitive.

I have problems with someone who undoubtably took about 3 hours to write this drivel calling anyone, “lazy”.

I agree that Americans are not working as hard as we should have been. Last year, I went to a computer store to fix my laptop. The person working there charged me $100 and told me my laptop could not be fixed because the mother board is damaged. Last year, I visted China and took the laptop with me trying to fix it in China. (the reason I wanted to have it fixed in China is that I don’t believe the mother board is damaged.) Fortunately, I spent $5 have it fixed in China. What do you guys think?

it seems that whenever economic woes are discussed, the blame is always pointed at the non-management working class of America. Has it ever occurred to Geoff that workers only do what “management or “leadership” tell them to do? And, what does he have to say about the ever increasing rapacious appetites of executives who reap multi-millions of dollars in compensation each year despite poor, if not mediocre, performance?

I’m 30yrs. old and i work over 50hrs. a week in a maint. dept. for a truss company. I also have to drive and hour each way because there are no other good jobs in the area i live in. So that’s over sixty hours involved in work. Then i have to work on my house when i get home for about two hours a day because i can’t afford to pay someone to do it for me. I work around 80% mexicans who take jobs from americans for a cheaper wage just to send it all back home to mexico. Meanwhile companies like Delphi as an example move to Mexico to pay even less. I wonder why unemployment is getting worse.

Everyone I know works much more than 40 hrs. week. There are some areas of the country that have high unemployment and people work as many hours as their employer allows them.

I think Geoff Colvin has misunderstood the statistics he is using.

As a retiree I see a trend as I continue to work. I do not see Americans as being lazy, but I do see a lot of leading corporate businesses working employees less than forty hours in order to escape paying benefits that a full time employee would receive.

FIGURE’S.
Most if not all poll’s are operating on the same type of non principle.

If corporations would control the working class in America,and enslave them as they had their forefathers,they must steal their laborer and convince them the problem, is their doing, not us kind and gentle hearted, corporate lazy fat rich over paid, ceo and what ever, like the Carlyle gang,
Thinking themselves to be wise they became fools.
Dare you to post, A LITTLE TRUTH.

Universaly,… Media, Publicy, and Politicaly, we all agree; the best generation of Americans were working and living in the “30’s to 50’s. We have became a “bleeding heart” country. We believe 4 fire-fighters should risk their lives to save a PUPPY! We are not LAZY, we are mislead!!! We are living the direct result of, ” I want my children to have a better life than I did”. That worked fine until about three generations ago. Now we are doomed, because we have progressively spoiled our children.

American productivity, actual output verus labor input is a real measure of economic productivity and America leads the pack. This comparison is bogus.

Can we say Propaganda… This is exact information that produces misinformation not only in the states but outside the states. Of family and friends in and outsides the states are the more typical worker averaging more around 50 hours a week. But then again the report he used he must have subtracted the off pay working hours like some on here have posted talking to bosses are bringing work home to finish after work. Even with the young workers they are working more hours than ever before. This report is also a catalyist to try to fight groups trying to get American pay more to the cost of living increases. Government own statisic is the yearly raise is roughly under 1% while the Cost of living is around 30%. So workers work more and their money pays for less. The sad part is when the corporate is forced to pay a survival wage (less than living wage) they are moving the jobs overseas where they can pay a lot less and find it easier to take advantage of the workers. But they must be forwarned as you eliminate those jobs to make larger profits you end up losing in the long run because less and less can afford many of those products so you have to eventually lower price which decreases profit. Look to the other financial areas they are feeling a large pinch and it will only get worst even with the lowering of the Interest rate by the Federal Government.

Yup, that is the way to lead a world, follow
what the poorer countries are doing. Good grief
your article was WAY off the mark! Let’s all go back
to a time where workers were treated and paid like slaves as they
are in the countires you mention.
Yup, lets work ourselves so hard we have no life. After all
isn’t that what Americans were taught to believee – live to work.
Most civilized countires like Norway and Switzerland and now the US
have come to realize that the truly human
and healtly way to live is to work to live
not vise versa.

This American will not be on their death bed thinking
wow, I did a great job at my job!

I will be thinking about all the wonderful experiences I
had on my time off.

Sound like a bunch of B.S. to me.
I had a lot more leisure in the seventies than I have now.

I have not seen all this time off that is alluded to here. Let’s not forget that Europeans have much more vacation time than the typical American. However, there is one group that is over-pampered, overpaid, over-perked, over-pensioned and underworked. Naturally I refer to the biggest parasites in the world – teachers. In this part of the country a great percentage of them “earn” near, at and over $100K per year. Considering that they “work” about 1000 hours per year (do the math), that’s $100.00 per hour plus benefits which brings their total compensation to $130-$140 per hour!

I think many of us have long believed the end result of Globalism was going to be a redistribution of wealth away from many Americans to those of citizens from other lands. And I appreciate Geoff Colvin’s finally coming clean about that conclusion in his Fortune Magazine article. I suppose, if you’re an altruist, you’ve got to believe it good we would be willing to sacrifice our former privileged status and relinquish our wealth that those less fortunate may prosper in our place.

I agree with Colvin that wages for average Americans will continue to decline while the cost of goods will rise as foreigners continue to demand more of our wealth. Obviously, this will mean we’ll have to work longer hours with fewer benefits, just to survive. Despite Colvin’s denial, we see it happening already, of course. I knew no one who worked two jobs back in 1965. Now, I know many. He’s simply making use of the fact that a higher proportion of us are retired, now, to contrive his statistics as he did. And we’ll be seeing more such deception in the future as corporations hire writers to sell us on our own demise.

Still, he came closer than I’ve ever seen to revealing the truth of the devastation Globalism will have done to the America we knew, when its dirty work is done. Seems to me, in the 1700’s, we led the world toward a new way of freedom and respect for each and every individual. Now we’re seeking to move back to mindless, Egyptian times when slaves worked ceaselessly so a privileged few could enjoy lives of leisure.

The only defense I see for retaining some of what we once had, is to imitate more advanced, free nations to tax the heck out of our privileged few. They’re not afraid of 90 to 95% tax rates for billionaires in Europe and Canada. Is it no wonder we never see their representatives on our Sunday morning press shows? They’re likely afraid of their influence. If we would wish to have the benefits that accompany free nations, we’d better get back on track and stop buying all the propaganda we’re hearing on corporate controlled news channels these days.

I swear, we’ve got college graduates, galore, running throughout the land and yet, high school grads of thirty years ago seemed to perceive what was going on much better than we. They saw an adversarial system coming at them from above and they weren’t afraid to take it on. I’m sure their skeptical, challenging spirits still exist in a dusty closet, somewhere. If we could but dare shake off the cobwebs and set the mothballs aside, I think we could dress ourselves accordingly to win back some of what we’ve lost.

Come on America. Stop buying all the corporate propaganda BS you’re hearing. What good are those corporations doing most of us, anyway? Their factories are overseas and as Colvin pointed out, the cost of their goods will soon be rapidly on the rise, too. And, then, what will you have but the drudgery of an endless, tedious life . . . other than Colvin’s praise, of course?

Wise up and start looking out for yourselves instead of the billionaires Rush, Sean, and Fox are pushing you to shed tears for. Tax ‘em. And tax ‘em high. Oh, and you might ask, too, why we only charge a 2.5% tariff on Chinese imports while they charge a 25% tariff on our goods entering their nation. How many such examples are there? And aren’t our politicians supposed to be looking out for us? Is fair play too much to ask? Or does working to death sound like a more appealing option?

Corporate representatives play hardball in spreading influence. And they’ve been quite successful. I only learned this year that people, even working people, who thought they had insurance, and children, too, are dying for lack of health care in this putative, great land. I mean, they’re just not treated and are sent home to die. Don’t think for a moment those in power won’t happily see you expire in dire poverty, having lost Social Security and Medicare, too. It’ll mean more money in their pockets. I can only say, if you continue to buy their despicable nonsense, without fighting back, you deserve the end yet to be. But I hope it doesn’t come to that.

your facts and figures are just plain wrong. america is the most prosperous nation in the history of the world and this prosperity is available to all and shared by most. if americans were “lazy” this would not be possible. in fact just the opposite is true americans as a whole are the hardest working most productive and innovative people in the world.

This is overwhelmingly stupid.
1965 – one income per household and family farms. Home values equal to two years salary. Job secuity.
2007 – two/three incomes per household no family farms. Home values equal to 7-10 years salary. No job security.
Corp. downsizing to part time positions.

Yes it appears our youth has decided it isn’t worth the effort. They have grown up in an era of greed and corruption in political and corp. America. People are working harder for much less. May the Clintons and Bushes reap what they have sown for us.

I think it is all the fat rich slobs that are making money off our backs that work 24/7

Certanly Americans are working less! That’s because corporate America has been allowed and compensated to move our jobs out of our country, hire illegal imigrants to take many jobs that were left and manipulate the wages and benifits of the “AMERICANS”, still fortunate to have a job. We’ve traveled abroad-no place on earth are there people willing to work as hard as “AMERICANS”. Thanks for even suggesting that “AMERICANS” are lazy. Our “AMERICAN CULTURE” and life style/ quality of life for the masses of middle glass “AMERICANS” has suffered dramaticly as a result of NAFTA and the “World Economy Program”. Shame on you for suggesing such an untruth.

WE’RE REALLY TOO BUSY WITH OUR WORK TO BE LAZY. MOST PEOPLE I KNOW HAVE BOTH SPOUSES WORKING, TRAVELLING THROUGH NASTY TRFFIC, & TRYING TO JUGGLE THEIR LIVES TO BETTER THEMSELVES & THEIR CHILDREN.
THESE SO CALLED SURVEYS ARE TOO PHONEY!

I beleive AMERICAN”s (CONTRA TO WHAT EVERYONE IS SAYING) are still very hard working,take care of their children and business,and then they relax on their sofa. I beleive that when someone is saying American’s are lazy and do not produce this is a propaganda that makes someone feel happy at AMERICAN’S EXPENSE.The truth is Americans are working even harder to keep up the world trade workers, who mostly work for indentured wages. I beleive that they are importing their indentured low wages to AMERICA RIGHT NOW and it is not from our close neighbors,as some would have you to think. If you don’t beleive this check in various places of business where they once were high wages. We have in America right now college gradutes being fired and can’t get any job other than working for 6-8 dollers in a lot of areas an hour. Make a survey on the survey of unemployment. I not a Greenspan as u can see from my typing (bearly High School:)) at this rate we will have no free time to be (PLUMP)(tounge in cheek), and injoy our free time off. I suspect the world would still like to be AMERICANS WHO THEY PRETEND ARE SO LAZY,non producing, couch potato. SINCERLY FROM A PROUD retired (couch potato)AMERICAN. Ann Ogas

Plain greed has put this country where it is at today. I recall a produce clerk being hired into a Kroger Supermarket in 1970 at a rate of close to $10.00 per hour. A new Chevy Caprice in that year was in the $5500.00 dollar range. Over thirty years later the Caprice is now in the 25,000.00 range and the same clerk position is hiring in at 7.50 per hour. Thats over 30 years later people!! Greed on who’s end? I think not the clerks.

We have always been accused of being so lazy! No — I do not think we are so lazy. I see a lot of wonderful hard working people — both young and old. This charge of being lazy will never change. Too bad!!

I think your research is wrong about laziness. The labor market has changed drastically, especially in the last six years. We’ve gone through a serious paradign shift because of “free trade agreements.” Many high and mid-level skilled jobs are now located overseas such as: Maytag, Fruit of the Loom, shoe companies, Levy Straus, and what was more American than RADIO FLYER now in Mexico, and too many others to mention. Where are the livable wage jobs that onces gave us an incentive work long and hard hours? Just like Ross Perot Said back in 1992 about NAFTA and what it means to the US labor market: “We will become a nation of delivering pizzas to one another.” WOW! What a proit! Sad but true, indeed. Of course, foreigner workers now working these factories that used to be ours are working harder in terms of more hours in these countries. You would be too if you were makinng $.30 and hour. I love Lou Dobbs he’s the man that has been the voice of the working class for US citizes when no one else would listen in the last several years.
Susan Krieger

I was told to learn to work smarter NOT HARDER! Now that I’ve learned to work smarter you think I should get paid less for producing more. Productivity was growing constantly under Greenspan’s watch. So now under Bernacke’s I have all of a sudden become dumber and all my encouraged “work smarter not harder” my corporate mantra the last 20 years is wrong? Take a flying . . . @ a roll’n donut!!

LAZY?, maybe, maybe not. Too high sense of entitlement, spoiled? Definitely YES!

Geoff Colvin compares statistics from 1965. In 1965 there was no email, cell phones, blackberries, fast computers, virtual conferences, and so much more. Is it possible to work smarter and more efficent in order to save time?

What was not included in the study is that in the overall picture Americans may work fewer hours per week but we have less vacation days than almost all industrialized countries in the world. And to compare an American worker to a Chinese worker is absurd– they’re living under Communist rule shrouded in the auspices of capitalism. They’ve got no choice BUT to work on Sunday.

To a certain degree yes, we “yanks” are a bit lazy! But with everyone losing pay & not to mention loss of pension’s at an alarming rate! Why would anybody want to kill themselves for a greedy boss?? (esp the airline business). Another thing, when talking about the world’s worker’s, why is it alway’s refering to the 9 to 5 crowd??? What about the rest of the worker’s around the world (including the U.S.) who work nights, weekends and all holiday’s….what about them?

YES Americans are lazy! Work ethics gone, You work for the brand (USA)gone. loyalty, honor,dedication, etc gone! Everyone wants everything free, Healthcare, Money, etc. Mexicans and all immogrants taking all areas of jobs to include farm, unwanted hard work jobs. We are becomming a third world country!

This article makes little sense and I highly doubt the data that it’s based on.

I know how much I work as well as 100’s of people I have met and related to … VAST majority of them work their tails off! On top of which, US workers get NOWHERE NEAR the vacation time that other “developed” countries get.

This report is actually insulting, and if anything, it makes me think that it’s reverse psychology … as in “we’ll tell them they don’t work hard enough, so we can squeeze even more out of them to pay the Exec’s ridiculous salaries, stock grants, etc, etc.”

GAHHHH First a report is published online touting the USA as the most hard working of all countries with more overtime hours per week than any other developed nation. Now we are the laziest country. You can prove anything you want by warping statistics. Does any of this really matter??????

I am a grade school teacher and I certainly do not feel like I have it easy..Between teaching 35 5th grade school children..making sure that parents follow-up on checking homework and making lesson plans and grading papers..and because my pay is not on the same level of professionals, I have to have a second job.
Yeah most students think school is hard
on not meaningful..try to take that idea and cash it at the bank!
Most of my students think that their parents will take care of them..
Too late America when will you see the need to pay your teachers more for the work that they do!

So much for Fortune Magazine being relevant.

In 1965 the USA had no competition, because no other country could crank out more fresh patented ideas, products and processes than the US. The world marveled at what the Americans could produce and US workers felt a personal connection with their work. There were no bidding wars, just worldwide consumers demanding the goods you produced. Can you imagine not having a wash machine, car, phone, microwave or a refrigerator? The US worker transformed ideas into products to better the lives of people across the world.

Today, countries like China, India and Japan only succeed by improving products or processes, previously engineered by US workers. Can you name one product, other than gun powder, that these countries produced? Take almost any product and most likely the invention came from the US. Then these ideas were learned by our universities, which in turn were transferred to their students, which in turn went back to their country and started business to compete with the US firm that thought of the idea in the first place. The difference however is that the non-US businessperson is willing to work for less, produce more and is not subject to the same cost structure as the US (i.e. work conditions, taxes, environmental regs, labor laws, retirement benefits). Also, without laws such as patents, anyone can produce what you designed and not have to spend all of that R&D money. What a concept.

We’re not getting lazier, just more frustrated at our leaders and institutions for upping the ante to play. Let’s see I get to pay social security until I retire, but then when I retire the funds will be spent, so ask me again why I am not motivated to work more than 50 hours a week?

I would like to see a chart or table that will compare and contrast the number of holidays each country has. I know that my company only gives us 8 Holidays. I do have my personal days (7) and vacation (15 after reaching the 5 years of service goal) to add to that. What do they have in other countries? Canada, Uinited Kingdon, India, etc.

We should also be careful to find out what if any countries have FALSE labor standards because you are forced to work your job for face penalties.

Now I feel that in America there is an apathy the company no longer cares for the employees like they did back in the 60’s and you have the threat of your job going outsourced so why should the employee care.

Here is a thought for eerybody. *IF* the executives do not wake up and notice that they outsource folks, and then turn a profit and in turn take a HUGE raise and bounus for making the company profitable we will most certainly soon have riots to rival past worker revolts. Do we know our history and know of what was called the Haymarket Riots? It is my fear that we may see that happen again, but this time in my lifetime. It is time for for everybody to wake up and smell the danger that we are heading for so that we do not repeat it.

just my few thoughts.

Welcome to Wall Street. 8 to 6 would be a short day for those of us already working these hours, which is why the US Financial industry is the strongest in the world. It’s about time the rest of America catches up with us.

I don’t agree with this article at all—According to the author Americans should just “accept” the fact that their jobs will simply pay less because they’re now competing with nearly 6 billion people. In not so many words, the author is telling us that free trade (trade without tariffs) will invariably lead us “American paid workers” to a continual lower standard of living. It really doesn’t matter how hard (or long) any American works. There are simply too many people on this planet willing to work for a lot less. So, it seems many of us “overpaid” workers will simply have to accept a future where everyone (not the wealthy investor class of course!) makes a low rate of pay. With all the politicians and CEOs lauding the positive affects of globalization on the US, one has to wonder why they forgot to mention that Americans will have to compete with dollar an hour workers (Which I’m sure was a mistake!). Here’s to selling out your country, and its people, down the river.

Interesting article – which sadly for the publication does not meld with fact.

At (huge telecom company) we literally have to FORCE our managers to take their vacations – and the average manager RETURNS 4 days (out of the 10 granted for this purpose) to Accounting (without compensation – other than those in California).

While who works hard is difficult to determine here, the AVERAGE log-on time per week per manager is 57 hours – 12 of which occur on weekends. Either they are working or faking it.

One set of examples, perhaps, but I must view the “conclusions,” of this piece with suspicion.

Irresponsible comments from a corporate “leader”.Arrogant, with a flair of superiority are not admirable qualities.A baseline these countries are not,and it is a nasty, ignorant dig from Jeff Immelt.

I totally disagree. The greed factor is in place now, American people are in fear of losing their job to low cost areas. They are seeing their co-workers get laid off or fired every other day. They know their time is probably limited unless something changes. They also know that they cannot go grocery shopping with the same pay as foriegn workers let alone pay for their gas and other general bills.
Talk like this is just to confuse people and not inform them about what the real problem is. There are great hard working people in America sitting at home right now that cannot find work, when you find the fix to that problem then you can talk about lazy Americans. Until tehn do not buy into this kind of talk. It’s all hot air to avoid the real problem.

Americans are not slackers, at least those of us on the lower end of the pay scale aren’t! Maybe the fat cats are getting time off or taking it easier, but factory workers, nurses, cops, service industry employees, etc. are working harder than ever.

Only the loyal bushies would try and say we are slackers. They are trying to make us not think we are working hard enough. We are working hard enough and now it is time for them to share the fruits of our labor with us!

Time is the new luxury item. The new metric. I don’t know that I want to play the same game China is playing. They have devalued people because there are so many. If we spend less time buying and watching TV and more time actually using our leisure time to think, read, experience other people, and find time to help our fellow human being then we are rich beyong measure. We won’t need cheap junk at Wal Mart to feel wealthy.

Geoff:

Go screw yourself.

THIS WHOLE THING STARTED WITH CHANGING OUR CONSTITUTION. THE US BUDGET USE TO HAVE TO BALANCED EVERY YEAR, LIKE OUR STATES DO. THAT GOT CHANGED AND THE GOVERNMENT BORROWED TO CREATE A BETTER ECONOMY. MORE MONEY FLOW INTO THE COUNTRY. THAT WHOLE CYCLE THEN BECAME INFLATIONARY. SO IT’S A NEVER ENDING CYCLE. EARN MORE, WORK LESS, SPEND MORE, LIVE BETTER, INFLATION. THE BUYING POWER OF YOUR AFTER TAX DOLLAR IS LESS AND LESS.
THAT CLEAN DOLLAR THAT YOU ALREADY PAID INCOME TAX ON, IS HEAVELY TAXED AGAIN EVERY TIME YOU BUY.
GRADUALLY WE NEED TO REINFORCE INDIVIDUAL SAVINGS IN ORDER TO CREATE A SOUND INDIVUAL ECONOMY, THIS AS WELL NEEDS TO BE DONE BY THE GOVERNMENT.
OR ELSE THE CRAZY ECONOMIC CYCLE WOULD CONTINUE ON AND ON, AND THIS IS THE INHERITANCE WE ARE CREATING FOR OUR CHILDREN, WHO WILL CONTINUE TO DO WHAT WE ARE DOING.

I don’t think Americans are too lazy. Especially, not those from the younger generation. I am 25 years old and work 70+ hours a week. My peers do the same. We are in an ultra fast paced environment and we know that to compete on the global scale we need to work hard and think creatively. I think it is common place for those who are older to think that the young are lazy, immoral, etc. A stereotype, in my opinion, that is completely false. Hillary Clinton had once said the same but was quickly confronted by her very educated and hardworking twenty something daughter, Chelsea. One needs to keep in mind that although we may not have ‘clocked in’ as many hours, more and more are bringing work home and on the extra weeks of vacation time that we supposedly have. There is no more ‘leisure time’.

The reason America is losing its edge because the lack of education and opportunity. We are behind in almost every subject, especially math and science. For those who are lucky to live in a well funded school district, it is fine but for the general population the funds are simply not there to pay for supplies, upgrade the facilities or pay for teacher’s salaries. If we pay teachers like the professionals that they are, I bet that you will get an influx of talented people who are willing to educate the young. And those who receive a better education can likewise turn around and become more productive members of society. The problem is that we are no longer investing in to our future, our children. Scholarships, grants and fellowships are hard to come by. Instead the young is burdened with thousands of dollars in loans. We cannot count on having decent health care or a pension and is destined to live in a more politically and financially insecure world. We are tied down by debt and other burdens before we can even begin our lives and yet we are expected to keep America’s edge.

Umm… the author is misuing statistics again like so many other CNN columns and other newsgroups. Okay so less than 18% of the workforce work more than 48 hours. What you do in the 40 hours or 48 hours is more important than the entire time you spent “working”. For instance, doing nothing for 6 hours and working 7 more hours is NOT equal to 13 hours of work. In third world countries where it is MOSTLY manual labor, guess what? You will be working longer hours because you are CHEAP labor. The fact that we worked less time and PRODUCE more financial gain out of it paints the U.S. as one of the BEST countries to work in. Misguided statistics means nothing if you don’t THINK about it first.

When I get on the road at 5:30 on NY’s Long Island and see the heavy traffic, and even traffic jams at that hour, I can assure you that American’s are anything BUT lazy. The problem is an unchecked Managerial Plutocracy that rewards itself inordinately at the expense of shareholders, middle management, and competitiveness. The amounts this upper tier exacts from American business is more akin to legalized plunder =- not salary.

I didn’t know Geoff was writing for The Onion these days.

Yes! Americans workers for the most part are a bunch of lazy sloobs. Try to hire someone for a job. The people who show up look like they just crawled out of bed, the way they are dressed. And so fat they can hardly walk. They are gross. Then they want paid to sit and talk to one another rather then do their jobs. I am talking about all ages. People in USA feel out government owes them a living. And try to get a government employee to do something for you, they are the most arrogant, mean people.
USA is on the way very rapidly to becoming a very poor nation. People have rejected God. When a nation rejects God, it will feel the wrath of God in many ways. USA is not a Christian nation anymore and this is one reason why people will not work because they do not understand the wisdom of the bible.

The way I see it. it’s like the chicken or the egg: which came first? Or in this case, which approach should our government take?

Why should someone want to work for 10 bucks an hour when they live in a 20 buck an hour economy? Meanwhile, big business sends the jobs to who knows where, paying a worker 5 bucks an hour living in a 2 buck an hour economy. Of course they are going to be motivated!

Big business is the one ramming this globalization garbage down everyones’ throat. And they expect everyone to like it and buy the garbage produced by these 2 buck an hour economies.

Wow! American business is so innovative.

So I ask, do you help the employees (the egg) in the US with benefits, tax deductions and stipends while our economy slowly adapts (i.e. housing prices, cost of living all have to come down) in order for the employees to want to earn 10 bucks an hour and feel good about it.

Or, do you slow the process of globalization (the chicken) so that those making their current salaries now (which may be good by global standards) can continue to look forward to a decent livelyhood while the US economy slowly adjusts.

Big business is just as easily to blame as all those ‘lazy’ americans. After all who makes up the employees of some of the greatest comapnies ever to sell the planet.

It’s time to start helping American workers adjust to this global crap.

Lazy people are smarter/, they invent useful things to make life easier, It’s because we are lazy we have remote controls for TV’s. They have to be creative and in todays world, execution is not a problem, you can get somebody in China or India to do it. Its the ideas that propel us forward. There is nothing wrong with being lazy.

How ironic that just a few days after this, we get a report about CEO pay right here on CNN Money. I’ll quote the report:

“The average CEO of a large U.S. company made roughly $10.8 million last year, or 364 times that of U.S. full-time and part-time workers, who made an average of $29,544, according to a joint analysis released Wednesday by the liberal Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy.”

I bet Jeff Immelt isn’t working 364 times as hard as his employees.

Quite a misuse of ILO statistics by Geoff Colvin.

A much clearer picture results when U.S. underemployment statistics are reviewed… Including the millions and millions of experienced American citizen technical professionals that have been permanently displaced by greedy corporate executives substituting “fresh (inexpensive) young blood” – mostly imported from India and China.

For counterpoint, the NumbersUSA.com website is featuring a Labor Day petition to be sent to the 2008 presidential candidates regarding this controversial issue.

Wow. What a reaction. Guess Geoff got some stir, if not the reaction he wanted. I’ve lived and worked in Baltimore, New York, London, and Paris. And I’ve worked closely with people from Germany and Poland.

Point is, you do a disservice to everyone to say Americans are ‘lazy.’ There are things that need to change for us, sure. But trying to make it better this way isn’t right. We might need to work smarter, and harder in a different way. But more hours on the clock won’t be enough. The changes needed need to happen at a deeper level than that.

It’s intersting that they compared modern work habits to 1965; a time when most households only had one “breadwinner”. Modern-day households have two.

They also seem to only look at hours worked and not how much is accomplished (i.e. productivity). Maybe the average worker is working fewer hours, but the accomplish far more than the 1965 worker.

I don’t know who these people surveyed, but virtually everyone I work with puts in way more than 40 hours a week. Furthermore, I also don’t think the article takes into account how much more “connected” to our jobs many of us are today as compared to the past. With cell phones, Blackberrys, Laptops, and pagers, many professionals nowdays are really NEVER “off the clock”. I was sitting on my couch last night at 10:00pm exchanging work related e-mails with my boss via Blackberry. Would the authors claim this was not work simply because I was at home?

I don’t think Americans are inherently lazy. I think we suffer from a lack of motivation. What are we working for? To fund an unjust war in Iraq? To line the pockets of an elite few who will actually benefit? To work towards meaningful change that will benefit future generations only to see the rug pulled out of under underneath us? I’m exhausted, I’m sick of eight years of feeling like my voice doesn’t matter, I’m sick of feeling like my President doesn’t care. Until Bush and his administration are gone, I’m afraid this won’t change. I can’t wait until 1-21-09 when I hopefully will wake up to a new day.

Americans are lazy? This is a broad generalization. I can agree that the younger generations – on average – are appallingly lazy. They have been raised to expect anything they want, when they want, for minimal effort and no discomfort. Sadly, they will be running our country someday.

The majority of the ‘over 30′ work force in place today is not lazy. I work 3 jobs to make ends meet, plus taking care of everything on the home front. My husband works 2 jobs. We are not over extended on credit, we live simply, in a nice but simple home, have one very old paid for vehicle and one new, cheap car. The problem? Our main jobs do not pay enough to support living more than hand to mouth. My husband routinely puts in 18 hour days for his main job. He is salaried and not compensated for the extra time, it is just expected. There is no extra vacation, insurance is minimal. My jobs are all low paying with no benefits at all because i am working for non-profit groups who are scraping to get by. The work is fulfilling, so i stay. I used to work in a high profile office environment – over worked and salaried with minimal time off and don’t think about calling in sick – but it just came down to the fact that my mental health was worth more than $30k a year. So, my lazy American butt gets up at 5am and goes to rest at 10pm, if i’m lucky i catch the news and Iron Chef once a week. My friends in Europe can’t keep up with the pace of life here, they go home from their vacation here with several days off to rest before going back to work. We are lazy indeed.

“Instead of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., should we all be working 8 to 6?”

Um, a lot of us DO work 8 to 6. Heck, a lot of us work 6 to 8! I’m not even factoring in the hour or two most of us waste every day on commuting. Where does this CEO get off saying Americans are lazy? Did he only make $9 million this year instead of 10? Can he only pay for five vacations this year instead of six? Will his kid’s Sweet 16 present be a BMW instead of a Bentley? Poor thing. Must be the average American’s fault!!

Having lived in the US, Europe and Asia, my perspective is that American work less hors that Asians but quite a few more than Europeans. As it has been said, I agree that younger folks (18-24) have very different expectations of what working hard is. I also think that the US Bush policies force the average middle class American to work very hard just to stay alive whereas in Europe you don’t have to work as many hours to have a decent life. My two cents.

This article is the complete opposite of articles I have recently read. The other articles have noted how workers in the U.S. work MUCH more than in European nations such as France or Germany. While we are lucky to get 2 weeks paid vacation per year, some Europeans are awarded 6+ weeks of paid vacation per year! Also, new parents in some other countries are given much more time off – & with pay – than our employees. This, to me, doesn’t infer that we are slackers! I really hope that our future generations of workers won’t have to put in 50+ hours per week just to make ends meet & to remain competitive in a world market.

I do believe Americans are slacking in the work field, especially young adults. Young kids today do not believe in working or getting a college education. A large group of children who graduate from high school do not attend college or go into the work field. They just stay right at home with their parents, and it’s getting worse and worse. You have a lot of adults who rather be on government assistance than to earn a REAL paycheck as well, so that contributes to Americans’ laziness. Then you have the ones that are only focusing on getting an NBA contract or NFL contract instead of pursuing a real career. There are some other factors too, but I just wanted to just state a few of them. Overall, these younger generations are getting lazier and lazier, and after awhile, the economy will collapse.

Hard work is for animals and machines.

Do not work harder or even smarter. Just do enough to keep that paycheck coming in. Your extra efforts will not make you a better person. Just keep on loafing around, get paid, and save for retirement. Let those other nations work hard and break their backs. Americans should have learned by now that being lazy builds character.

Lazy and hours worked doesn’t add up. We should be arguing how productive American workers are. If one person works an 8hr day and anther person works a 10hr day doesn’t account for how much work ether has done.

Depends on what rank you are-
the higher the rank the bigger the slacker.

Exactly what group of Americans are calling lazy? I don’t know a single executive that only works 40 hours a week. I averaged 55 hours as an executive. Also many of my peers have working wives. This was not the case for my mother. Most mothers stayed home when I was a child (50’s and 60’s).

I’d be happy to give up all spare moments, to further the wealth of some rich guy, after all he’s my employer, and where would I be, without the benevolence of my lord? I don’t need holidays, weekends, or time off for a funeral, rather work me 120 hours a week, and then the corporations can charge me the equivalent of 119 hours a week, to live, that way, I can keep an hour of my labor, might afford me nothing. Thanks, for the same. Of course, I haven’t had a vacation in five years or more, but we can count my bathroom break, a vacation. Wait, no time left for that, so what next? Toilets in our cubicles? How about this, we can make the workers peddle an exercise bike to offset the electrical cost of the building, anything to make my employer better able to afford buying his 16 yr old daughter a $50,000 BMW. C’mon, four vacation homes aren’t enough for him, he really deserves better, whereas I’m a peasant, and should never be allowed to own land, it makes much more sense to allow a chosen few, to own it all, and call us lazy. I smell something burning, oh yeah, Rome is on fire. I’ll toast marshmallows. Remember, I’m lazy.

Americans are far from “Slackers” We all work hard and have different work schedules. I would like to see more jobs available to the American people rather than “Farm” it out to the Chinese.

The idea that American workers are overcompensated does not square with history. It might be fairer to say they are under-motivated. In the last 60 years about 50% of GDP went to wages and salaries an average. In the last few years it has gone down to about 46%, despite an increase in the percentage of people working.

If compensation to labor were at the historical average over $530 billion more a year would be going to labor. The rate of job growth over the last 7 years is the worst 7 year period since a period starting in 1943. Other than the post W.W.II let up you would have to go back to The Great Depression to find a period this bad.

The Bush tax cuts has shifted hundreds of billions of dollars a year from working Americans to the elite. Low top marginal tax rates bring slower growth over the next 5 to 7 years. When the top rate is low the economic elite take more personal income, live richer and invest less in America’s future. Low rates give CEOs an incentive to squeeze those below them to increase their own pay.

Low top tax rates have negative consequences first to the middle class then to everyone. It is no accident that annual productivity growth has dropped to 0.5%. The anecdotal evidence I hear is that employee theft is up, which would be consistent with employees being underpaid.

The worst 5 to 7 year growth rates we have ever had started in 1925 when the top rate was cut to 25%. The best growth started when the top rate was 79%. In the last 25 years the best 5 year growth started in 1982 with a top rate of 50%, the worst growth started in 1988 when the top rate was 28%.

When we have 5 to 7 years of growth data following the 2003 tax cut it will become obvious what a disaster that policy was.

I can’t imagine too many employees who actually feel that they owe their employer anything more than what the stated hours are. If you, as an employee, feel you are only lining the pockets of someone else, and don’t see anything in it for yourself, what else would anyone expect?

The examples in other countries are of rapidly expanding economies with lots of opportunities (or at least the appearance of) for those that work hard. I don’t know anyone who works for someone else that even feels there are any opportunities for growth or more money in their company. They all feel as if they are “feeding the pig” as one stated. They all started out as highly motivated, creative, and driven workers, but eventually became disillusioned. I once read a quote that said it perfectly: “I thought I wanted a career. It turns out I only wanted a paycheck.”

The employers out their that realize that people will work hard for their own benefit, and motivate their employees the right way, by sharing the wealth and the profits, will be unbelievable successful companies. There’s a ton of untapped talent going to waste in corporate cubicles.

As a business owner , I have seen evidence of the things this articles
reports.
My observation is that the younger folks ,18-24 have different expectations of what they should have to do on the job . Their defination of
a hard day on the job is very ,very different from people born before 1970.

While America trys to compete against
$1.39 per hour Mexican Labor and 43 cents per hour Chinese Labor , Our younger labor wonders why they cannot make top dollar as their fathers before them , literally paid more money for less work . they wonder why they are expected to attended work on time and daily . ( some of my mine have missed 20+ days per year and thought it was reasonable )

I hope America wakes up , we have the intelligence and the tools to compete.
I just hope we have the will.If we don’t, we will have the highest standard of living TAKEN from us.

John

It’s high time the workers of the world unite and say enough is enough.I f all of us demand 40 hr work weeks and benefits the Corporate whores wouldn’t be able to get away with murder. We the workers of the world are the majority…

This is possibly the most misguided article of all time. It’s a perfect example of quoting someone’s mediocre research without examining the intricacies of the definition of time at work and leisure time. For instance, who includes sleep as leisure time? I thought that was necessary to live. And, just because leisure time has increased doesn’t mean someone is laying on the couch. They could be playing sports, reading books, or participating in their favorite hobbies. I am an American living in Europe, and I am constantly asked why Americans work so hard. I encourage Geoff to get out more and explain to me how it is America that is “lazy” (which is sometimes otherwise known as enjoying life) or not working hard enough. Oh, and one more thing, attributing the obesity epidemic to not working as many hours is ridiculous. This article is a joke. You can’t just throw in one statistic and draw conclusions about an entire country or the world.

Hell no we are not lazy, American company’s dont wont to pay us for anything over 40 hrs( Lowes, Home Depot
Wal-mart )And the CEO’s make 2 million a year. corporate greed is the down fall of our country, IT is sucking the life right out of Americans.

What do companies expect when they convert everyone from hourly to salaried? Of course they’re going to get less work out of their people. I averaged over 3000 hours per year when I was hourly. When I was converted to salaried, that dropped almost immediately to about 2000. You want those 1000 hours back? I’ve got 4 words for you. Show me the money.

“the researchers figure we’re getting about 117 hours of leisure per week (including sleep), vs. 110 hours in 1965. That’s more than 360 additional idle hours per year.”

Instant invalidation. Sleep is not leisure; it’s an essential, biological healing process. And the other 8 a day are spent eating (essential biological process), socializing and playing sports (valuable bio-psychological processes), and being put on hold by some outsourced CSR in India (which certainly does not make India more productive).

And screw the United Nations. It has no judicial power whatsoever, no court to enforce any kind of global standard. So it certainly has no authority to judge me…

I agree with much of what has been written above…also as already mentioned hours per week is not the whole picture – Europeans have much more vacation each year than Americans so this author is just pretty stupid for not even mentioning that.

Having been to other countries, I can attest that our counterparts in developing nations are working much more than we are. Right or wrong, we are competing with people around the world that work for MUCH LESS pay and are putting in 60-80 hours a week.
Since I work in manufacturing, it’s a hard reality to face that my job will likely be in China within 5-10 years. I’m a hard worker but this will happen REGARDLESS of how hard I work since I’m not willing to work for $10k/year.
It’s just an ugly game of global musical chairs right now and some of us are going to end up out of work within the next few years.

I think the article’s author should move to Mexico City and find an eighty hour per week job pushing a broom for $1.00 per hour. After all, hard work for hardly any money builds character!

I doubt the statistics being cited in this article include unpaid overtime for white-collar workers. If they did, Japan would be way ahead of us on hours worked per worker. My wife is from Japan and ALL of her friends I’ve met (all with college degrees) work Monday-Saturday 12+ hours per day and often on Sunday. This ‘overwork’ can lead to death: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kar%C5%8Dshi

This article also is written from the perspective as if we’re competing in the Olympics. I don’t think this is completely accurate. I believe we’re in a global economy where every country and company makes ‘deals’ that benefit both sides.

Americans are far from lazy. In fact, they work too much. I know several people who work well over 50 hours a week. They are exhausted, cranky and always headed for the fast food places, since they don’t have time to cook. Checked the freeways lately? There’s more accidents every day, as people are too tired to pay attention. My sister went to a retirement party for one of her managers, who was a workaholic. Two weeks after his party, he was dead of a heart attack.

Question for the Editor: How do the global numbers skew when commuting time is averaged into the mix? I hear so many people complaining about traffic and long commutes as “work” time when commuting to a far-flung leafy suburb is actually a “non-work” activity.

When my sister lived in Germany her commute was 45 minutes each way by car. The locals thought she was crazy and were actually a little insulted that she thought the area where they worked was not suitable and that she drove instead of using public transportation. I think the commuting culture we have developed int he US is self-destructive. As an employer, I want focused and hapy employees. But their biggest complaint is how long it takes to commute — which I believe is a wholy personal choice.

I agree, Americans are getting lazier and it’s starting at a younger age. As an educator, I can tell you that our historic drive is waning. What’s more disturbing, is that American parents, as a whole, are comfortably OK with our youth doing less and living off the hard work of the parents.

There are some aspects of our work day that are being overlooked. I have friends in Houston that spend two hours a day commuting. Not exactly leisure time. I personally rarely work over 40 hours a week, and am not far from work, but I also attend school on weeknights and spend my weekends pursuing other interests that, hopefully, will eventually earn some extra income and afford me greater financial freedom. None of that is monetized, though, so I guess it isn’t important to the helmsmen of the US economy.

I think the freedom to be idle doesn’t mean people are, especially in an economy where long-term job security is hard to come by. Many people spend their extra hours developing business plans, doing odd jobs, or honing skills to fulfill their long-term goals, whatever they may be. And it’s difficult to work harder for a company that’s going to lay you off as soon it’s less profitable to keep you around.

And what about families? We’ve become so obsessed with economic growth, we’ve neglecte raising healthy, self-sufficient people and teaching them how to excel. That’s going to hurt us far more than working a few hours less.

I don’t agree with the article though I’m sure there is an exception somewhere. I think Americans work smarter for the most part yet the workers at lower paying jobs are not producing as much as they need to. It’s too expensive to pay America’s overtime charges simply because they didn’t get the job done in a 9 to 5 environment. We need more smarts and more productivity and consequences for not meeting legitimate goals.

the goal of global corporate interests is not to improve the quality of life(theirs being the exception)as we’ve seen jobs go to the lowest bidder,or the cheapest labor pool.the only considerations are profit and stock enhancement.(any consideration for workers are only for appearences and lawsuit avoidence)that’s why most work is subcontracted’as well as not having to provide any benefits.I personaly work about 50 hrs weekly on average.Most folks I know are trying to get as much overtime as they can.polititions are for the most part paid coporate lackeys.We need to take back control of this nation,and put the welfare of the people ahead of corporate interests,and globalization.otherwise we’ll be doing 80 hour work weeks.the problem is not lazy americans the problem is corporate greed.by the way what corporation owns this news service?

What I have witnessed recently is several friends’ marriages imploding because the parents could not balance their career aspirations (and concomitant work schedules) enough to keep their relationship strong and provide a nurturing home for their children.

Do you think these “extreme productivity” societies will escape the ravages of neglected marriages and children? I think not.

CEO pay in this country is out of control! THAT is the problem.

This article is a great example of the work product of overcompensated, lazy minds. Your propaganda does not work any more.

The problem in this country is corporate greed. CEO pay is at an all time high; wages are flat to declining; we do not even keep up with inflation, we get the lowest amounts of vacation in the world. CEOs can stick it! I’m no longer doing anything to support them!

CEO and management is destroying Corporate America out of greed.
Big pay and stock options and nothing but cuts for workers doesn’t make a middle working class anymore. There are only the greedy and the lower income surviving.

I am not sure what this guy is drinking but even the BBC reports Americans work longer, harder, and have much less vacation than the EU. This sounds to me like another bit of corporate propaganda such as outsourcing is a good thing and jobs Americans wont do. I don’t buy it.

Another multi-zillion-dollar-a-year CEO demanding chinese-like industry out of thier employees. There has to be more to give it all for than making rich people richer. To get that kind of dedication from someone you have to be able to return home knowing you have made enought live on and improve you life to boot.

Terrible article. Its all about productivity, which is going up. Sorry Mr. CEO but I like to have a life outside of work

I’m not sure how much confidence I’d put in this study – it goes directly against Julie Schor’s highly celebrated work on the Overworked American and Hoschild’s reports in the Second Shift and Time Bind. Also a claim that states Americans on average are working less hours since 1965 doesn’t make sense as one would expect women to be working far more hours on average.

I don’t follow the author at all. I work 55 hours per week and if my employers don’t apply enough capital to my labor/capital, that’s their fault.

By the way, I work very hard for dirt low wages so the column is quite insulting. I will win hands down in just about any competition against a comparable worker from any country in the world.

Many of the Americans that I know (I live in NYC) are extremely lazy and do just the bare minimum of what is required of them. I am in high school and I have 3 jobs. Not because I need the money, but because I need something to do that is beneficial to myself and prevents me from wasting valuable hours on unimportant things such as video-games, TV, talking about non-sense on the phone.

I work in the healthcare industry. I work one 40-hr job, 2 per diem jobs AND sell jewelry on the side. Most of the women I work with have second jobs even tho’ they are raising children. My partner has a 40 hr job at a bindery and most nights brings home books to be sewed at the frame in our kitchen for extra money. And on the weekends we assemble and peddle her homemade journals and cards. Oh–and we are elected officials of our town. ‘Lazy Americans’? Not here!

Anyone that thinks America is not lazy should wake up and smell the roses. Get out of the USA for a while and look around the rest of the world. America has had it’s time in the sun – The last 100 years or so. It’s going to be China in the sun very soon. We have had such a good standard of living compared to the rest of the world, nothing lasts forever. Workers in China will do a months work for the same cost of a days work in the USA. We can no longer compete. Sad but True. Slowly slowly our standard of living will go down over the next few years. We are hooked on oil, hooked on cable tv, hooked on cheap easy credit, hooked on fast food, hooked on thinking we are better than everyone else. The Romans had their time, The English had their time, We have had our time, It’s almost time for someone else (China)…

I have had enough of the corporate greed in this country and the politicians that encourage it. I will very soon be taking my accounting degree and experience to Canada where I can actually receive health care and enjoy more than 1 week of vacation per year (without feeling guilty about it either). This once great country has been completely taken over by greed. Until American citizens wise-up and stop voting pro-greed politicians into office, it will only get worse.

Crossposted from MaxSpeak, You Listen!

Fortune senior editor Geoff Colvin asks the question, “are Americans too lazy?” His answer (”yes!”) comes largely from a study by Mark Aguiar of the Boston Fed and Erik Hurst of the University of Chicago business school. Leisure time (including sleep) increased an “enormous” 7 hours per week in the past 40 years — that’s an earth-shattering 15 minutes a year!

As your humble and obedient Sandwichman pointed out over a year and a half ago (at http://maxspeak.org/mt/archives/003264.html), even Aguilar and Hurst were not so sure about the quality of their data and the certainty of their conclusions: “The ability to examine different patterns in time use over four decades hinges critically on the quality of data within each of the time‐use surveys.” and “Any definition that distinguishes ‘leisure’ from ‘work’ is a matter of judgment.”

For example? Caring for ill or elderly family members counted as leisure in the study because it would have been too “complicated” to count it otherwise.

There are some serious flaws in the data that is being presented. While the average worker may be working fewer hours, this most likely indicates there are more people working part time jobs and does not mean that the average full time employee is working less. The data the author quotes from 1965 is from a period of time when only one member of a typical household worked. This changes the calculation significantly. Also, in most foreign countries it is very difficult to get a part time job, which increases their “average” hours/week while simultaneously decreasing ours.

Numbers can be misleading and so can anecdotal evidence, like the CEO who stated that people worked all day on a Sunday. I know large groups of professionals who work all day on a Sunday when a project is critical. That doesn’t prove anything.

Well CNN? When will you finally tell the truth? Looks like most Americans above this post called you out on your BS.

Good, now maybe CNN’s owners will let them stop lying about the war…and stop shilling for their tax cuts for the wealthy prezident, Massah Boosh-because we aren’t buying that either.

This doesn’t surprise me that Fortune magazine would print this type of article. It’s meant for management and executive types who will always thing workers are lazy and aren’t worth the money they get paid.

Hey, news flash people, it’s us ‘lazy’ workers who buy the goods that keep your businesses in the black and your stock prices rising! You should keep paying us!

I think Marko is spot on. I do not think Americans are lazy. I do think we have become disillusioned with work as a means to feed our consumption. I know so many people who go back to their jobs everyday, not because they love them, but because they have so much debt.

In the 1950’s Corporate America promised every home owner with a television that the days of long hours and hard work would soon be over. Automated gadgets of all sorts would soon end the grueling efforts of the common man and make this a better world.

It didn’t happen! America was soon spending more effort repairing gadgets and laboring for the funds to buy new ones. Today Americans work in most cases one day a month to pay for their family’s cell phones, four days a month to pay the light bill, a week to make the house note, four days a month to pay for an automobile (and there are usually two), three days a month are spent to eat out, and the list goes on. The middle class, at least what’s left of it, struggles to maintain the lifestyle the same corporations told them it would soon be easy. Lazy, only those that have fallen from the middle class and have lost hope. They just said, “screw it”.

I was working 50 or more hours a week
last year. But now, due to the huge
number of imports our company is receiving, we are lucky if we can get in 40 hours. Maybe I am lazy, but I can’t work for 25 cents an hour!!

Study after study says that when you factor in vacation time, our hours are more per year (but maybe not per week) than nearly every industrialized country. The evidence is that when employees have less weeks to work per year (i.e., more vacation time), they are more productive and can work more hours. The productivity numbers bear that out. Colvin is flat wrong. Americans aren’t lazy. They are just tired and need more time off.

Geoff Colvin, this is a great provocation. Keep prodding the sheep till they turn on you. I’m selling my stocks and buying gold.

The notions forwarded here are incomplete and misrepresent most of the issue. American workers are highly paid because they are the most productive in the world. As the relative wealth of those developing countries workers grows so will the desire spend more time with family. After all the markets are going to adjust those disparities, but adjustment works both ways.

I do not think that it is fair to include people who are retired in this study. As a country we are getting with each year and people are retiring earlier than in years past. To include them does not give an accurate number to this study.

“After all, we’re a much richer country than we were in 1965, and we’re enjoying our wealth, just as economic theory would predict. Sweating less and having more is the whole idea.”

Congratulations americans. You have finally realized to change the puritan “american dream” based on hard work to the great ideas of Karl Marx. Enjoy your life -dont work too much.

br,

Lasse Lahtinen, Finland

When does the middle class get a break?
I teach in a self-contained classroom with 37 children..As a grade school teacher our hours are long and many..Look at other jobs in America before you call teaching lazy..

I don’t beleive it. Unless the figures from other countries include forced child labor into their average. That would significantly put the U.S. at a disadvantage. Perhaps, we can beef up our numbers by including the hours our children spend in school. Or maybe, the numbers reflect American jobs that went overseas vs what jobs are still left here. Or maybe the whole thing is rigged to justify reducing our wages, so we can become as globally competitive as other exploited 3rd world countries.

This article sounds amazingly like what many upper level managers think. But the impression comes from starting out with the idea that the American worker is lazy – then cherry picking the data to match that thought.

The American worker gets, on average, less than two weeks vacation. Compare that to five in the UK, and six in much of the EU. Most American professionals I know (and more Americans are classed as “exempt” than other countries, so the figures are very hard to track) work more than 48 hours a week. Particularly with all of the new communications devices bringing the workplace into the home.

Of the non-professionals, many work two jobs, further skewing the numbers.

Given that productivity continues to rise, I find the claim to be suspicious at best.

I find it far more likely that American workers are working harder than ever, but that American CEOs and upper management are far less willing to reward the hard work than ever before.

Work smart, not hard and Americans can enjoy a competitive advantage and take longer vacations. Crushing global competition doesn’t mean working longer hours, it means building a machine that does the work of hundreds of sweaty back breaking Asians.

We have the least amount of vacation time of any developed country and you push this crap. You may also want to consider the amount of time we commute to work. Our hatred of mass transit exacerbates the problem.

Just because child labor in china works 20 hours a day doesn’t make the average american worker lazy. We still have the most skilled most educated workforce in the world.

I will gladly put 4 hours of my coding against 20 of hours my Indian equivilent. My code will be correct and defect free the first time while the off-shore team will produce something that doesn’t work and can’t be contained.

Give me a break.

Last time I checked, people are coming to this country, not leaving. When people stop immigrating here, then I’ll worry.

“By global standards, we’re lazy. We’ve been getting lazier. And the days of the American dolce vita may be numbered.”

“A fish rots from the head down.”

“President Bush’s approval rating has reached a new low for his presidency. The latest USA Today Gallup poll reveals a new high in opposition to the Iraq war and the President’s role in the immigration debate as the reasons for the loss of confidence in him. The poll shows only 29 percent of Americans approve of the president’s job performance, which means that during his presidency, George W. Bush now has both the highest presidential rating in Gallup’s polling history, at 90 percent, and one of the lowest. Only Harry Truman, Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter had lower approval ratings.”

“But again, President Bush isn’t alone. The American public has the lowest confidence in Congress since Gallup began asking this question in 1973. A recent USA Today Gallup poll shows just 14 percent of Americans have confidence in the job Congress is doing.”

Dobbs: Lame ducks in a row http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/07/10/Dobbs.July11/index.html

CEO’s are pocketing millions while keeping working wages stymied and sending jobs overseas. This society pays professional athletes multi-millions each year. I have heard the comment “federal workers are like old guns, they don’t work and cannot be fired”.

This all sounds reminiscent of great societies throughout the ages. Hopefully global equilibrium will wake up the leaders of this country before this country follows the examples of many other prosperous societies in mankind’s history.

This country is a mess b/c Americans work too hard. Gotta keep up with the Joneses. Why? For Who? For What?

Did anyone ever think that maybe the Europeans are the ones who got it right??

Does this research take into account that a good majority of our population is entiring the age of retirement? You know, those baby boomers.

So the Chinese were working on a Sunday. Since when does that day have any significance for the majority of the Chinese?

I think there are too viewpoints on this. On the one hand there are those that just want to do what they have to do and that’s it. Less if they can get a way with it. On the hand, there are those that would hard as hard they could, give themselves over 100% but management doesn’t appreciate the hard work and the sacrifice so they think why should I. This lack of appreciation doesn’t provide any motivation, incentive to work extra hard to get the work done. So this can be interpreted as laziness or I don’t care attitude.

The question should have been posted as: “Are Americans less ethical? – instead of being stereotyped as lazier..” is more accurate for the following reasons:
1)Why Unethical can be translated to being lazy – corporate policies of short cut, bypassed procedures of doing what is right==> less quality, more disregards towards US governmental regulations (the damned evil lobbyists) more harmful to the consumers due to the corporation cut cost, outsourcing, use of untrained illegal aliens who could careless about this country, let alone environments or community – all they did, do, and will are to suck up the resources, regardless how many of them are legitimate searches of freedom and better life in US.
2)Why Unethical = Lazy ==> look at from the top down of America corporate cultures – the more your CEOs, VIPs, etc.. play golf and yatch surfing, head to head, shoulder to shoulder with US politicians the more they make money – the more prestiges and greed they grow to unlimited kingdom (the word “GOD” is cheap or non-existent on their lips, let alone the mere ethics word – these unethical behaviors subsequently led to many unfortunate results of chain reactions and exemplary models from the bosses to the hard workers who eventually turn their sufferings of – less pay, long day at work – UNPRODUCTIVELY – and more costly in the long run – less healthy, not creative, workplace shooting, more angers…

3)From immoral contributions to the culture of American laziness – RELIGION – they all promote it well and smoothly over the years for hiding under the big black cloth or the big talk, the more they yell Jesus name, the more stupid followers grow… FROM IMMORALITY to covert SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS with multi-colored and multi-flavored blasphemy of God’s name..

In summary, put all the above ingredients plus more spices of irresponsible, incompetent, selfish leaders – you get not only the lazy workforce in America among many other negative things to make a hellish scrumptious meal. BON APPETIT.

Well now I dont buy a bit of this. Espacially the people that are saying we are fat because we are lazy. You know why we are fat? We are fat because we are so busy, we cannot prepare a good meal. So we go to McDonalds, grab a big Mac and go back to work and eat at our desk. Why do we do this? Because we feel threatened by companies that want to move our jobs to some other country. It is the corporate America politics making us behave like this, just so the board members can get million dollar bonuses, why youget a heart attack and die at work, instead of living a nice long life with your family.

People working 45-70hrs a week and commenting are correct to be insulted and upset. You are working much more than the article states. However, the facts are that you are hard working, but many in the US are not as hard working as you. Why is it hard to understand that concept. People working fewer hours are probably not commenting or reading cnn.com either, so you are surrounded by like-mind, hard working Americans. That does not mean the facts are not correct!

I dis-agree with the “American Laziness” theory. I believe corproate greed, and lack of dedication and committment to the American worker has created a lack of commitment and dedication to corporate America. If you look at the American self employed, you will find the hard working Americans that helped to make the U.S.***You can only kick a good dog so many times, then he won’t come when you call. Wake up greedy corporations or lose you greatest assets.

What I think is, in a truly free market, everyone has access to the means of production. Employers are able to dictate what people are paid for their labor only because land/natural resources are controlled by private monopolies–meaning the natural human right of access to the land for sustenance has been shut off for most of the people of the world.

The corporations no doubt feel that the people in the developed countries should return to Industrial Revolution employment conditions–you know, the days when everyone over 8 years old worked 16-hour days in the mills and the mines, and small children were beaten if they didn’t run fast enough.

These are the conditions that made people clamor for the right to settle the American West. They knew that if they were allowed access to land, their own labor alone could provide them and their families with better housing, a better diet, and a better family life, with fewer hours of work, more enjoyable and healthful work, and a more enjoyable life.

Or, to put it another way, a worker’s compensation for long hours of highly productive, mechanized labor was then FAR less than what he could wrest for himself from the land, using the most primitive methods.

I’d say many people who are now working in cubicles, living in city apartments, and eating processed food are, right now, in the same situation–even if we haven’t yet reverted to Industrial Revolution conditions for workers. They could build a better life with “40 acres and a mule” than the life their compensation in the modern workforce affords them.

And this is despite the fact that labor in the mechanized modern workplace is exponentially more productive than subsistence agriculture using primitive methods.

Our modern methods of production enable the individual worker to be hundreds of times more productive, even working 40 hours a week, than in pre-industrial times. Yet that worker’s life, and his real compensation, is worse than it was in pre-industrial times. Clearly, someone is making off with the surplus–or, to put it another way, making out like a bandit. Perhaps because that is what the beneficiaries of these surpluses in fact are: thieves.

I’m no expert on the Divine will, but my guess (and observation) is that people who so egregiously subvert justice by stealing the labor products–the lives–of others, are “storing up trouble.”

I think people in America work more then in other countries. (I came from russia). The problem is that people in a lot of debt and huge portion of their income goes to pay for their *American dream* – house.
Someone mentioned that American do more in two houres then Italians? Maybe. But what I have experienced. Mexican, Russian, Romanian and other nations do actualy faster and better…because they are interested to keep the job. It’s not their country and the only thing that pays their bills is their job.
I think it would be a good experience for some american try to lieve in other countries (like Romanis, Russia and etc)

What a goofy article; just a bunch of S.A.G.s (stereotypes, assumptions, and generalizations)!!!

Completely untrue. People are working more than ever.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7184214/site/newsweek/

I recently retired after a long career with a Fortune 500 company. Over the last 30 years, America has been on a steady path of decline. The quality of our educational system is abominable. At least 1/3 of our high school graduates are functionally illiterate. Our college graduates, at the bachelor’s level anyway, are not much better. Our work habits have declined as well. Corporate managers are forced to endure a never-ending series of socialistic “feel-good” meetings that add nothing of value to the company. Those who work staff jobs spend their days in their cubicles, stuffing their faces with food while they tell all who call that the task at hand “is not my job.” When confronted with work, they then request overtime approval to get their jobs done.
I grew up believing this was a great country. Today I think we’ve become fat, lazy and stupid.

Obviously not many people in the telecommunications industry were surveyed for this. For you telecomm folks you know what I mean!

I believe that there are two critical items not taken into account over the last 40 years. The US has had a significant increase in productivity and Americans have had a significant increase in commute time. US corporations have benefited remarkably by the first and workers have been hurt by the second. Corporations must provide compensation to match productivity enhancements to attract better workers and truly address the commuter issue which has a serious impact on the US workers ability to put in a good days work.

Stupid poll…even stupider conclusion. Try this out for size, maybe we’re actually working more efficiently? 40 years ago we didn’t have computers so it took 10 hours to do what takes an hour now. Polls are made by people who don’t do any work and the only people who generally answer polls are those who aren’t busy so naturally these kinds of ridiculous polls are scewed towards to lazy! If you think working 12 hours a day is what’s required to not be called lazy, then I’d rather work 8-10 hour days and be called lazy and doing what is more important that just making money and that is to live our lives as humans!

Americans are DFH. Dumb, fat, and happy. But the party will end.

Americans have gained 7 hours of leisure time over 40+ years…that makes us lazy?? That works out to 10.5 minutes a year. Attacking the American worker is just ridiculous. Although our leisure time has grown a measly 7% over the last 40 years, productivity has gained by an average of 2.7% per year since 1965 http://www.chicagofed.org/publications/fedletter/2002/cflfeb2002_174.pdf. To call that “lazy” is an example of lazy journalism and sensationalism. Go work harder on your next article, and shame on you.

Lazy NO. Not in touch with the reality of reaping what we sow..YES. As an educated professional in the IT field, how is it that a union laborer makes more than I do while working fewer hours? Apparently I could be hanging drywall and making a better living.

We continue to reward and accept this type of work ethic, low quality craftsmanship, union pay entitlement model, and then wonder why we are loosing jobs to Mexico. We are the architects of our own self-destruction and should look no further than our own borders to find out what’s wrong. That’s the beauty of self-delusion; you really believe it not you.

When the 52% of us in private business who pay for the 48% of those who are not becomes 49% vs 51%, the latter will never vote themselves out of office!

I have taught in middle school, high school, college and university LOTE in the NE US since 1995. American kids get lazier with each passing year (and many teachers too). Yes, there is a lot of “activity” in US schools and universities, but the glaring problem is that kids are not motivated to get ahead by focusing on studying, behaving in class, and preparing their minds and skills for the future. Kids want grades handed to them and feel cheated when they don’t win awards or get on honor rolls. It’s sad.

Still, there are about 10% (maybe more, maybe less) of US students who want to get ahead and show great work ethic, but too many are just floating along. Parents are working harder than ever to please their children. The parents often ply their kids with every toy imaginable (some kids get with two or three new iPods and cellphones each year; gaming systems, new games, designer bags, etc.) It’s no wonder many kids feel they are owed so much.

An economy will not grow without a motivated workforce (and a growing manufacturing base), and with the current crop of students, it’s going to be slim pickings. As for the current workforce, many people are killing themselves to provide for their households. It used to be just one parent could provide for the family, now it seems that everyone needs to pitch in. The US is becoming very third world (consider the dollar against a basket of currencies!).

For the folks who thinks the US is still super-productive and more efficient than Asia, take a look at Japan: It is super-clean, efficient, crime-free, peaceful and VERY productive with a strong manufacturing base. The Japanese have cleverly observed the US and Europe and tried their best to imitate and improve (cuisine, automobiles, beer brewing, franchising, railroads and transportation, nuclear power, cell phones, computers, electronics, sports, a/c). Unless you’ve lived in Japan you can’t judge it, but I can assure you it’s an amazing place. The Japanese are VERY hard workers. I’ve lived on both coasts of the US, Spain, Italy and have explored quite a bit of Japan.

I simply don’t think “hours spent at work” is a genuine comparison of work ethic or productivity. I’ve spent an extended period of time working in South Korea, and yes, they do work very hard there. On average, many of my colleagues would be at work for 12-14 hours a day. But in that culture, work has many social aspects as well – there were multiple coffee and smoke breaks throughout the day in which everyone participated. They also take an hour for lunch and for dinner. Comparitively, I would get my work done in a much shorter time by simply not taking all of those breaks. Productivity should count, not just time.

What a poorly researched article using only one variable to predict an outcome. How about vacation and time off for various countrie where the US lags by an order of magnitude, how about GNP comparison? Could it be that Americans work smarter than the rest of the world and are provided more tools to do so? Does this include work at home and on the weekends because your company forces you too wear a Blackberry?

Perhaps people like “Geoff Colvin” need to get a real job?

But I’m very curious about this concept that American’s aren’t working hard “enough.”

If a society can’t reach a point where it can finally relax and spend more time enjoying life than working, what the heck is the point of it all this nonsense???? Is it just to enable the top 2% to enjoy life, while everyone else gets to work themselves to death for their benefit?

Life is about living it and ENJOYING IT

It is NOT about toiling away day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, until you get the privilege of retiring….and even then, there’s still a good chance that you’ll have the pleasure of standing by a door and telling everyone who comes through: “Hi! Welcome to Wal-Mart!”

This whole mind set of “work! work! work!” for no other benefit other than to fill your house with useless junk that apparently we shouldn’t have time to use in the first place is starting to get really, really silly.

most of the hi end jobs still belong to the us, because we are the thinkers for the whole world. just take a look at all the inventions in the past 100 years; how many come from countries other than the us? let’s face it–the world needs to feed itself, so, give all the low end jobs out there to the 3rd world and us will survive because it’ll be us creating all the new stuff in the next 100 years. wheather we work 40 hrs. or 60 hrs. a week, the quality in work produced should not be measured in time but in doing things smartly to benefit every one. your article is complete nonsense. maybe we should build three new pyramids and hire 100,000,000 people to work on that project night and day. that would put us on top, now wouldn’t it?

My Brother-in-law in Singapore can’t replace a faucet or door handle in his house, even if you asked him on a bet. He works 60+ hours a week IN HIS FIELD and hires people to do ALL home-related maintenance. That’s how these people can work long hours and weekends – they don’t do any of the maintenance work that US people use their ‘extra’ time for. Instead, they hire someone do to this work, and for a very low rate since there are so many people competing for this business and a high volume of customers.

American work ethic varies widely between industries. Manufacturing & Accounting, for example, depend on individual productivity, and hard work is the norm. When I moved from an accounting firm to a healthcare company, I discovered the healthcare industry was miserably wasteful, and productivity is an alien concept. Fincancial corporations, insurance, education, military contractors, governments and burocracies tend to be lazier. Find ways to pay people based on productivity like sales commissions or ‘billable hours,’ and US productivity will skyrocket.

I work at a dialysis center >48 hours per week. I’m a worker bee. Most of the young adults are lazy. Their time at work is spent tex messaging, talking on the cell phone, checking personal email, and just doing nothing on company time. Every legal American has so many opportunities to be and do so much for others and themselves. I work hard at my jog. I moved vacations higher up on my priority list (other countries do it) as of this year. Advanced technology has helped creat the obesity epidemic. Majority of American’s are just plain fat/lazy.

I agree we are getting lazy. Do we need to work more hours to compete. No. At some point India, China, and Mexico will get sick of working 60 hrs or more per week. It’s human nature. People don’t really want to work that long. People is those countries do it because they have to. They have nothing. I say we take advantage of the cheap labor why it lasts.

all you have to do is observe the “wide track” posterior of the majority of the American people. They didn’t get that way by overwork.!!

I’ve heard and read all this before.
More or less slamming the blue collar worker.Is anyone paying attention to what the CEo’s and excutive types are raking in today? While we on the bottom are expected to “suck it up for the company”,They keep raking in more and more.I fed up and don’t care to hear this type of drivle any longer.

I don’t work for the government, but they do give me a pay check. Of course I’m lazy-why else would I be working for the government

I’ve had several jobs. Some I’ve been admittedly lazy, some I’ve been amazingly productive. What mattered was if the job fit my skills, style, personality, passions, etc. It’s easier to work hard at something you love. Sometimes it takes awhile to find that. Isn’t the average number of jobs in a persons lifetime in the US 7?

And my husband biggest beef with his boss is that he doesn’t want to put in overtime and prefers to get his work done at work, and does. His boss brags how he does tons of overtime, yet is mysteriously gone for hours at a time during the day. I agree: it’s productivity and not hours that matter.

One more thing: did they factor in the American farmer? Those guys are always working, and probably don’t make much more than their foreign counterparts…

It would seem to me that some measure of overall productivity is the only way to compare our workers with those in other countries. I also find it odd that you use lazy in relation to the number of hours someone is at work; some of the most lazy people I know spend a lot of time at work – but they get little done.

It does not matter at all.
Heck ,I just hit the snooze button on my butt.Let your Business C.E.O.’s keep exploiting the Chinese ,Korean, people till they can rise up and get the lead out of their “third world nation”

I just believe that workers in other countries are more dedicated to their companies. I have seen many American workers stay for 2,3 years then move on to another company: either pay is better, work hour is less or that they have gained a trade in an area that they were required to work at another company. I personally have no compalaint in those areas because it benifits them and life is tough, we have to live somehow right?. But as for a company I would rather have dedicated workers who want to strive for the best even in a tough situation because competition doesn`t end within oursleves.

Creativity. The only way Americans can stay on top WITH Chinese and Americans this century.

Look at Europeans. Resting on their laurels. Taking a month off (at least) every year. Oh right, Americans woop their behind last century. Big surprise here! (sarcasm)

Look at the Americans. Resting on their laurels. Taking two weeks off every year… Oh wait, they are still on top. But for how much longer (when Chinese and Indians taking a lot less time off)?

Only Intellectual Property can save America.

While we Americans like to brag how hard we work there are those who say they work hard but they come in late and leave early. It seems to me that while we do become more(higher) educated many people believe this extra education exempts them from real work. Additionally, too many times salary and position are dictated by politics and not performance. This has a drastic impact on employee moral. Now that our country is at the point where basic needs are mostly met employees need another motivating factor for them to work harder and smarter!

Get it straight – have you seen how Chinese workers live in their dormitories, 8 to 20 people in the same room. Do you know what they eat – rice and lard? Do you know that communists enslave people working on their factories in China and Russia? Sure, for this kind of living $1/hr is enough. Are you ready to compete for these working conditions?

The poll seems to have contacted people who don’t work full time. How many full time versus part time workers did they interview? I agree on the productivity comments but on the flip side of that is finishing the days work from your PC at home in the evening. My dad thought I’d never amount to anything but now I work 15 to 20 hours a week longer than he did. I average 60 hour weeks. I wasn’t home for the pollesters cause I was at work.
There is a percentage of people in this country that expect to get paid for no work at all. Welfare receipients screaming, on T.V. interview, I want MY money. (In Cali we had a 52 day budget impasse and many welfare checks were withheld.) That just doesn’t sit well with me. The poll sounds like an incomplete data sample and doesn’t cover enough data to include the 60hr workers in this country.

that is the stupidest thing i have ever head. just more illeagal alien guilt trip crap. ammericans just too lazy we need more mess i cans… give me a break

The reasearchers are nuts. I have NEVER worked less than 40 along with many, many hours of unpaid overtime. When we had a retail store, my wife consistently worked 100+ hours per week. She sometimes slept at the store to avoid being picked up for erratic driving. We are retired now, and I still put in more than 40 hours, unpaid now. The truly lazy guys are on the Continent. I have NEVER taken a classical vacation, such as at a resort over 3 days or on a cruise.

It’s not the hours, it’s the results. There is no doubt that we are more productive/efficient than we were 10 yrs ago. Culturally it is not as important to have office “face time” as it was in the past.

I also question the validity of the survey… does it take into account the work performed out of the office given blackberry, internet email, etc.

Net,

This article is absurd.. BTW, I am South Korean and know the worker exploitation that is happening there. Why do you think there are so many riots and protests from workers.

The true reality is American workers are one of the most productive workers in the WORLD…. They have produce more and in great quality. Do not even go there about China and their quality.

But COMPANIES are all about lowering cost. And American workers have the one of the highest benefits (which are deteriorating as we speak with outsourcing and insourcing) that companies do not want to pay. That is why people view us as lazy because companies do not have to pay the international workers like health care, actual cost of living wage, and labor guidelines and safeties.

So to compare this global economy is like saying, we are lazy to take a break (which is a fedeal mandate) while illegals and international workers are not because they are forced to work hard without given any benefits.

The author here do not understand nothing but dollar and cents. He is equate human capital as monetary value and not treating people as human beings. Try set the standardized human worker safety and fair treatment. Then you see American workers are most productive

I am an electrician who works in the commercial and industrial portion of the industry. If I only work 40 hours a week its a blessing. It is not to unusual for us blue collar guys to pull shifts longer than 24 hours during power outages and go right back into our normal scheduled week after just a few hours of sleep. Some or maybe most Americans may be lazy but if someone told me that I need to work harder I think I’d have them spend a couple days in my shoes. Power plants and 2:00am emergency calls have me wishing I could just get fired and collect a 100,000,000.00 bonus like our corporate CEO’s seem to always get. Maybe if we just got real about what we pay those people we could all do a little less work.

Heck no. We’ll kick anyone butt anywhere anytime all across the planet! Guaranteed!
We are tired of these unbelievable high taxes, not just income taxes, property taxes, citizen taxes, occupation taxes, almost any kind imaginable tax! Sick of it! All of us are, except those who no longer live here. We also will never be allowed to make decent salaries. How many of you work a full-time and a part-time or second full-time job and see in your paycheck that besides the three levels of govt. getting there share that the company you work for is also taking a cut? I know I use to see it in mine. You realize that cuts your take home right around 40 to 58 percent? That sucks! Give me my grandfather’s economy, more money for the freedom of taxation and greed!
No, americans are not too lazy and never will be. We are just way too tired of all the greed and political Bull that the last three decades have generated. Period!

Europe has more vacation time, more sick time, less hours worked, comparable wages, and still has more productivity (and overall health) than us.

Unfortunately, our middle class jobs are being outsourced at an alarming rate, leaving people with more and more mundane and lower-paying jobs. It’s hard to be productive when you are in a job that’s going nowhere.

Our dollar is getting weaker and weaker; wages aren’t tracking the decrease in purchasing power at all. People are having to rack up more and more purchases on credit cards. Many families are living paycheck to paycheck, only a month’s wage loss away from bankruptcy.

research done by the U.N. no less…………..haahaa

Shouldn’t we be asking instead if the top execs that make millions and don’t have their pay attached to performance are working enough? Why should they be making millions more than the rest of the workers and be bolstering the profits by mass firings and outsourcing?

Americans frequently work two jobs to be able to survive and probably have the shortest vacation periods in the world. To compare them to Norwegian and Swiss workers and say that they work less is ludicrous.

I hope your magazine will have in the future more imagination and objectivity in its choice of articles to be published. How about an article showing the other side of the American workplace?

I welcome some lower paid, less lazy, peasant from some other country living in a grass hut to come over here and do my work and my co-workers work in the mechanical service industry. You are welcome to come into a plant, speak intelligent English to the management, work for lower wages, prove yourself, and live close enough to respond to emergencies.

Peasant will need to be approved with all the proper certifications, licences and have proven skills.

Peasant must be prepared to invest in himself/herself, buy and maintain quality tools, and commit to constant education in English speaking environments. This does not include the education required to get into the door.

And if the peasant’s work is inferior, do not worry. Peasant will be told not to return, instead of being taken out back, executed and thrown into a ditch.

This assumes that the plant peasant services is still in the USA and hasn’t relocated closer to another peasant’s grass hut.

This article is completely out of touch with reality.

There are too many American people, both blue and white collar working smarter, better, and faster than most.

Are all the small business owners in the USA part of this lazy, vacationing bunch?

We revert to what the lowest-common-denominator thinks, the CEO.

CEOs and CFOs are orchestrating the destruction of this country with the aid of their partners, the boards of directors and our elected officials.

Glad he is working on Sunday. That is his business. His paradigm states that he has to be in a foreign country on a Sunday peddling his wares.

That does not make him better, nor does it make Americans lazy.

I’ve just seen a reportage on the dutch television about the working people in the USA. The
average vacation days people recieve in America from their employers is uncredible low comparing to the Dutch standards. It seems americans useually get only 2-3 weeks off, and there are a lot of fulltimers (40H) in the USA comparing to the Netherlands. They also spoke about the minimum days of vacation you should get with a full time job, I think it was 12 days in the USA. Here in the Netherlands its 21 days, and its very common people take 5-6 weeks vacation throughout a year. I dont think Americans are lazy, and here in the Netherlands USA has the reputation of being one of the hardest working people in the world. I do think that people have also become more efficient in their professions. That could be a reason why Americans are working less now then in the past, thats what we see in Western Europe aswell. This report kinda suprises me.

Greetings from the Netherlands,
where you can have up to 8 weeks holiday a year
Erik

lazy? no. worked darn near to death & getting nowhere yes. this global insanity of 24/7 work for obscene amounts of profit is not healthy for anyone, anywhere. it’s destroying the time people need for family & community. we’ve all seen both suffer & unless there’s a global paradigm change, it’s only going to get worse.

This is the most ridiculous survey. Americans are the hardest working people I know. I’ve been to Europe and some third world countries and see a lot of leisure time. China is producing crap products that poison our children and Indian workers are mostly unqualified in the IT field. Of course they put in more hours, they’re incompetent. America is an innovative and efficient country. Without American companies, there is no China or India.

SOME Americans need to actually work for a living. How many of us have run into the “It’s not my problem” attitude. Nobody is accountable any more for their product or service. Too many people go to their jobs under the influence of some mind numbing product; OR they are just there to collect the paycheck and do NOT give a darn about the customer.
P.S. Some of us DO care and work hard to help, But we’ve lost so many jobs to outsourcing because other countries want work and are willing to work.

Working for less than 1% of what the CEO of their company makes and then being asked to work longer hours doesn’t seem equitable. How about we cap the salary of every CEO at 100 times the wages of the lowest paid worker in that CEO’s company and eliminate stock options as a form of executive compensation? That should lower expenses a bit and make us more competitive with those Chinese workers Mr. Immelt is so concerned about.

How about it, Jeff? Why not put the $17.9 million you got from GE in 2006 on the line before asking your workers to work harder for less. In fact, why don’t you forgo a salary completely, seeing how your net worth is already more than the average worker makes in several lifetimes. I think some altruism in the executive suite would be well-received by the rank-and-file. They might even work harder for you.

Yes, we are not working harder, but smarter. There is a key difference. Someone who comes up with the solution to a problem in 2 hours versus 6 or 8 hours has more value and will be compensated as such. Value to an employer or client has more to do today with thinking rather than doing. Many high paying jobs created in America focus on thinkers and problem solvers.

In Japan, we work very long hours and we are very efficient, and we don’t

whine about work like americans. We also don’t need giant SUV to compensate

for insecurities.
My friends who worked in America tell stories about lazy american work

ethic, they prefer to eat donuts and surf the internet at work rather than

be productive. Then they go home and eat chips on the couch. Maybe that’s

why everyone so obese over there.

I can’t believe the stupidity of some of the comments, I’ll try to respond

to some of the worst offenders.

“Never confuse activity with accomplishment. I’ve seen Western European

workers in action. They may spend 10 hours a day at work, but they get as

much done during those 10 hours as an American can in 2.”

Classic denial, rationalization, and american superiority complex.

Next:

“You’re kidding right…lazy???? We are working more hours than what is being

reported. Personally, as a tax accountant, I am working 65+ hours per week

from January – April, 60 + hours per week September – October 15th, and 55-

65 hours per week December 1st – 20th.
At the “Big 4″ accounting firms, some of my co-workers have pulled 20 +

hours shifts, basically, spending the night in the office!”

“If we are lazy and have so much more leisure time that in 1965 how come my

minimum owrk week is 65 hours vs 40 for my father”

But the article says:

“I know, I know — you’re working harder than ever, and so is your spouse.

But we’re not talking about you; we’re talking about the whole country, on

average. And I’m afraid the findings are dramatic.”

Apparently some have trouble with reading comprehension, blame it on

inferior American education system I guess.

Next:

“Now thats a but complex, but overall, its brainpower and innovation that make Americans great workers. If that means we have more free time because we are more efficient, thats great! But thats not laziness, thats using our creativity and brainpower to our advantage over what others are doing around the world.”

“You only talk about hours, what about productivity? You can not jsut use hour of work as measurement. We are the most efficient nation comaring to others. We do not need work too many hours to compensate incompetence like the rest of the world.”

More rationalization and unjustified american superiority complex. And there’s much more stupidity after this. This is why everyone thinks Americans are idiots. But by all means, stay fat, lazy and in denial. You’ll be that way right up to the point when our economy devours yours.

Any study like this begs the question – what was your demographics , how did you get this data etc? Everyone I know and work with hardly use the vacation they earn let alone work short hours. Pretty hard study to believe.

But heck if all you do is talk to people that have time to talk to you about a study then yes thats probably the sort of data your going to get. If they conducted a phone survey they missed my demographic simply because we don’t get home from work before 8pm at night and Oh — most of us don’t answer our home phone when it does ring – they are always solicitors.

Seriously I want to know how they gathered their data.

Americans are very lazy and spoiled also.They put fun and games before work.

More spew by the CEO to increase the slave production. I work from 4am to 9pm, but this includes the insane drive time. because my tax dollars are wasted.

YES, Americans are considered “lazy” compared to the rest of the world. Have you ever worked with people in other countries? South Koreans, Japanese, Indians all work so much harder than the average American. Americans watching Homer Simpson for the last decade does not help either!!! No wonder China banned the Simpsons from every showing in their country. Let’s face it, we’re fat, lazy and arrogant. We first need to admit to this and FIGHT BACK like real Americans!!!

I believe that Americans are working shorter (more productive) hours. If different countries have to work 50+ hours to get the same work done as Americans can do in 40 hours does not equal that Americans are lazy just working more smarter not harder.

I just noticed something. The author included sleep in his “leisure time” tally. What?? Sleep isn’t “leisure time,” it’s the time you spend performing a biological function which if not performed adequately can lead to extremely poor health. Calling sleep a “leisure” activity is like saying, “I breathe just for fun!”

Paying bills, doing laundry, washing dishes, mowing the lawn, preparing meals, and parenting children isn’t leisure time, either. It’s all work, even though most of us don’t get paid for it. And, as many have pointed out already, Americans are WAY behind most other industrialized nations in terms of paid time off allowances, including sick time, vacation, and maternity/paternity leave. Did the author even take that into account?

I wouldn’t call americans lazy, we just want to enjoy our leisure time. I used to work 60-65 hours a week in Peru, now about 45. I love it here of course.

Yes, Americans are getting more lazy, but only in the sense that they are too lazy to stand up and stop the corporations from destroying the middle-class and selling out America to China, too lazy to demand the basic right of the health care the rest of the civilized world receives and too lazy to vote. I’m sure the corporations would love us to work harder, so that we have no time to think about what’s wrong with this country…and fix it.

I think this queston should be directed to public servant in the government since they only work from 9-5.

This article is either poorly researched or intentionally misleading. The study only counts people who work more than 48 hrs/week. That means hourly (most aren’t allowed to work overtime) and part time workers are ignored. Five minutes of internet research uncovered numerous articles showing that the average worker in the US works more hours/year, has less time off than most, if not all industrialized nations, while the US has the highest productivity. I expect more out of CNN.

Shouldn’t it be the goal of progressive civilization for citizens to be able to work less and still prosper? The “toil from dawn til dusk” labor model applies to agrarian and pre-industrial societies, not post-industrial and certainly not post-information age. If we’re working less, leisuring more, and not suffering economically, that’s a *good* thing.

Besides, when you take into account that both spouses frequently work outside the home, and that both mothers AND fathers now spend more hours per week with their children than 50 years ago (documented fact), overall, we are working more. We’re just not getting paid or recognized for all of it.

I think because we have no more factories all those people who were working with their hands are now at desk jobs! They don’t belong there and employers need to bail them out with expensive technology

This is absolutely an outrageous claim. Employers want a slavery type workforce. WE work without adequate staffing and resources. Work overtime with little or no recognition or compensation.

Congress allows our jobs to be offshored. Now we do not even claim to make anything in America! How many hours do CEO’s work? NONE. Yet they make zillions on our backs.

I own a small business, have been stuck with two homes to pay mortgages on thanks to the real estate market and am single. To stay out of financial trouble, I work six days a week at a very physical job, take care of the two homes and watch the budget. I never just sit around.
The staff I have are hard-working people like me, but I interview tons of people and the work ethic simply isn’t there. I’ve noticed that even at the grocery store, the cashier is chatting with the co-worker, my P.T. visited with her boyfriend while I sat on hot packs for $180 an hour, restaurant service can be so bad, I would like to call them on my cell to get them to my table.
And what’s with this country crying over forclosures? Why did these people buy more than they could handle in the first place and then blame the banks, and if they want to keep their home, get a weekend job. That’s how I do it
As for vacation, I get it only if I have extra money to afford it after the retirement accounts and mortgages are paid and I work extra hours before and after I leave to make up for it. Part of being self-employeed is there’s nobody to whine to.

No way! Biggest descrepancy revolves around CEO pay and I’ll throw in Politicians and Government workers. No retirement worries for those folk. Corp Boards need to be much more careful with shareholder money as example; when they sever someone and give him $200 million golden p.

Personally, 15 years ago I had one job, then consolidation, then consoldation again and again. After all that, I am doing the job that once took four people. Am I doing it as good as those four…no…you can’t… it is too much to expect quality work from overtaxed people.

This is one of the most idiotic articles I have ever read. Man the eilite in this country are out of control aren’t they? You have two parent households in this country where one or both parents are working more than one job. We have an epidemic of latch key children all over this country because parents have to work outrageous hours just to get by and this moron sits on his elite (probably fat) rear and calls us lazy? Hey buddy, the South Koreans, Indians, Chinese, Mexicans, and who ever else you exploit are stupid enough to work like slaves for your silver spoon fed syndicate don’t expect us to. Americans have always given an honest days work for “honest” pay, and don’t you ever forget it you Moron

Work harder? Bite my free trade agreement.

Ridiculous. We work harder, and smarter, than any other nation. That is why America is the greatest country on earth!

I think if you were to measure manufacturing jobs, this would probably be a true assessment, but its a twilight truth – there are fewer people in the US making widgets than ever per capita, and in most cases the job losses are being made up by people who live in starvation economies and so are willing to take even the pittance that they are paid because its the difference between that and not eating.

I find it significant that as the skills necessary to perform certain jobs increase, the expectations of wages for those jobs also increase, which usually ends up being the signal for the C-Level masters to push those jobs even farther down the economic ladder in some other third world country.

Realistically, with automation eliminating manufacturing jobs and increasingly eliminating service jobs, with an increasingly harsh investment class demanding more and more money for the investments that they likely never earned in the first place, and with corruption and venality increasing the norm among the upper-level management class and the politicians which they’ve bought, perhaps its not surprising that people are no longer buying into the productivity myth.

Only one other comment mentioned the obvious concerning China—it is COMMUNIST. The people there are SLAVES. They don’t have any choices. This article was written by an anti-American globalist. And NO BUB, we won’t Lower our standard of living to raise up that of SLAVES. Those businessmen who have exported jobs to a Communist state are TRAITORS, pure and simple. My family didn’t run away from Communism to see it brought here.

I have seen really hard working people in my office who put in more than 40 hours a week and also work from home. I also have seen or known people that don’t want to work but still want to make big money….Everywhere you go in the world, there are always hard working people and not-so hard working people. This report is bias and unaccurate.

From what I see in the work place, the people who stay the latest get the least accomplished. I am a single working mother who can work circles around counterparts who purposely stay 12 – 14 hours a day to look good in front of the boss, which by the way, are usually the ones who get promoted. Let’s start managing by goals and objectives instead of seat time – that’s what is wrong with corporate America.

Americans, in general, have an unjustifiable sense of entitlement. We expect everything for the least amount of effort, especially the younger generations. Most of my fellow Americans would rather cheat the system, or live off of mommy and daddy’s bank account than break a sweat to earn a paycheck. Manual labor or a $10/hr job seems to be beneath most people in our nation, even the young kids today. But they’re typically the first ones to complain about jobs being outsourced to other countries. Maybe if we didn’t “need” that 50″ screen plasma tv or that new fancy cell phone, perhaps that “menial” paycheck would be enough. Lord knows, it could support a family of five in Africa for generations. This country needs a collective reality check, or a quick swift kick to the rear. As a proud member of the physical work force in this country for 23 years it frightens me to think about our future if we don’t get off this ego-driven high horse and get a little dirty.

I’ve spent hours on the phone with someone in India on an issue that may have only taken a few minutes with someone in America. More hours work does NOT mean more efficient.

When the average CEO salary returns to 36 times the average worker’s wage, rather than the 260 TIMES it currently sits at…I’ll gladly let a CEO use any statistic he wants to call me (and us) lazy.

Until then…grab a mirror and behold the enemy…for it is most certainly you.

Your baldfaced, endless greed and complete lack of team-building skill (loyalty to company means company is loyal to me) has left the majority of the workforce tired, angry and frustrated that the American Dream has truly become an unattainable hope for ourselves and our families; an outsourced pipe dream now reachable only in fleeting moments of peaceful, hopeful slumber.

What a hpyprocrite ! GE boss says we are lazy…well he and other CEO’s don’t mention the run away wages they make do they ? In the last 30 years it has went from 5 to 1 to the present 232 times to 1.

Also, these CEO’s started the out-sourcing for greed….at last check, the average hourly wage in China is 11 luan…around 25 cents an hour…in India…it equates to about $1.75/hour. Of course all of these countries have lower standard of living, where as the western nations, it costs more for basic living expenses.

There is no way, that any western nation can compete with that wage disperity. Besides wages, these companies avoid taxes, Social Security, Medicare, Unemployment, government regulations on labor, health, environment. Don’t let them kid you, this is a wind fall for companies of a HUGE magnitude! It is greed. To matters worse, wages for people are going down dramatically, hundreds of people are applying for one job opening. Economic Policy Institue has stated that 44 million jobs have left the U.S. in the last decade.

they dont even have a clue! We have many service profession that are on-call 24/7 thanks to mobile communication technology. American are so busy working they dont even have the time for their own family. Some senior citizen are working beyond the retirement year. Many American are putting in many volunteer hours for their community that are not account for. So please, who is listening to the silly research anyway.

Wow – not sure I’m buying some of those statistics… I kind of think the study is flawed… 5 to 10 additional vacation weeks per year? Conclusions drawn from such observations of “ growing number of people spending more time in retirement”?

I guess from a purist perspective, the observations might be “considered” correct… Large numbers of people retiring has created the greatest proportional representation of this population class in US history. Couple that with life spans increasing by 12-15 years as compared to 1965, and I guess you could say total population is, on average and in aggregate, working less than the population did in 1965… Like duh…

Regarding the observations of Jeff Immelt on his trip to China, noting we have to march against the competition in China because they are willing to work on Sunday… Well, let’s look at that… Basically, China operates their economy on a centralized government planning model, their citizens are in a sense indentured servants / slaves. And while were at it, let’s just rave about the quality of product coming from China, assuming we don’t all die of poison food or lead, or mercury, of some other product defect we haven’t identified yet… And we know that China’s R&D costs are significantly lower than those costs in the USA – I guess when the government supports open piracy of products, it helps keep these costs down.. Also – if you plan on visiting China, bring your pollution protection gear – you’ll need it (Asthmatics’ need not apply)…

What do we need to do to compete in the global market place…? One of two things… Either move the country to mutually beneficial trade balance accords, or, our government needs to adopt the same policies as China and India, target specific industries that we in America want to own, and subsidize the living hell out of them…

If the ‘captains of industry’ in the US are going to transfer all our developed technology, jobs, processes, etc.,. all the proprietary “stuff” that America built and figured out over the past 150 years to these countries for free in an effort to jack up their corporate returns and provide for their heinous bonus and stock option plans, then the US rank and file (aka, average Joe) need a way to recover / compete in the global work place, and that’s through Government interdiction to counter balance this wholesale ‘gutting’ of American enterprise…

And while were at it, why the hell am I still paying $35 for a shirt that now costs $3.98 to produce overseas, when the same shirt in 1965 cost me about $6 at retail, cost a $1.50 to make, but was made in the USA…? That shirt today should cost $16… I, and all Americans, should be experiencing a significant increase in our standard of living, but we’re not… I guess the big guys can’t get the $100 million or higher payouts if they only charge $16… And I guess the USA can’t get the benefit of full employment, lower taxes because more people are working, etc., because the big guys can’t make it with anything less…

I disagree. I think American workers lack appropriate leadership that turns out the profits necessary to stay in the lead. I’ve experienced a decline in appropriate leadership over the last 15 years of my work life. American workers lack clear direction and objectives. The American work force has the energy, smarts, desire and backbone to do the job. They need good leadership.
Thanks
P

Since when does working LESS go hand in hand with obesity??? America is getting fatter because they are spending 12 hours a day chained to their desks!

I think “work” needs to be clarified. I work for a Japanese company and work +56 hours a week. My counterparts work longer. However, they take many smoke breaks…totaling 2.5 hours a day (15min X 10). In additon, they sit at computers creating documents to aid in communication. So, Long hours does not equate to increased production.

The main thing I took away from it is how glad I am to not be working at GE, unlike the thousands of others who Immelt presumably thinks aren’t putting in enough hours.

“I believe in quality of life, work-life balance, all that stuff. But that’s the competition.”

The way he worded that leads me to believe he doesn’t believe in “that stuff” at all. Let’s see, according to one estimate Immelt took home $12.6 million in 2005. If we generously assume that he worked 16 hours a day every single day of the year (highly unlikely) that works out to a rate of more than $2,150 per hour.

Jeff, I’m willing to bet that if you paid your workers even a tenth of what you make that they’d enthusiastically sign up to work as many hours as you’d let them. Until that happens, though, I’m going to consider you just another clueless CEO who’s so out of touch with reality that you don’t even know how asinine you sound to 99% of the population.

I can definitely see both sides of this argument. On the one hand, the U.S. is the most productive country in the world because we work the most hours. On the other, the newest generations of college grads expect something for nothing. We believe we are entitled to high paying, highly respected positions because we have been given everything since we were born. However, this will fade with time because of the high volume of students attending undergraduate and graduate schools. In the end, we aren’t necessarily in a time of laziness, but rather a time of confusion that will eventually turn into a time of more intelligent, creative, and innovative professionals running this country.

This quote kills me… “General Electric chief Jeff Immelt put it bluntly while recalling a trip to Beijing last year, when he got a big order from the Transport Ministry: “The whole ministry was working all day on a Sunday. I believe in quality of life, work-life balance, all that stuff. But that’s the competition. So unless we’re willing to compete …” HELLO! Show me anywhere in the US where there are NOT people working all day on Sunday. I work Sundays all the time and Saturdays, and nights etc. Sunday is only a slow work day in the US because of the Christian Religious Right and as far as I know folks in Beijing don’t really care about our Religious Christian Right… pull your head out!…

I work in international quality assurance and have colleagues all over the world. I can truthfully say that in my field, Americans work longer and harder for less money, fewer holidays or benefits, and with a much greater threat of being fired or becoming redundant with no package when we leave other than a two week or 30 day notice. My co-workers get 4-6 weeks off a year, if they have to fly longer than 5 hours, they get boosted up to business class, 2 years off without losing their job when they have a child, mental health time, on and on. I work 12-18 hours a day (at work and at home), including weekends and holidays. I have to get up in the middle of the night or early morning for conference calls, and I usually have to split my vacation time up during the year because I’m covering for others. I am one of the newest, so abuse is expected, but it hasn’t changed in 6 years. When they have come here to work, they hate it because we eat at our desks, we seldom have the amenities they are used to at their facilities, and they don’t like the hours we put in each day. The only thing they do like about coming to this country is the cheap shopping! I think the author needs to do more research!

Before anyone can make a judgment about how we address the findings, where is the real investigative reporting about how the results were determined?!!! What were the methods, what kind of work are we talking about, are we supposed to be aspiring to the work schedule of those in unregulated professions where workers are exploited? How is productivity measured? Does working less simply mean hours at the office? How are hours of work done at home or through telecommuting counted if at all?

In education productivity is now measured in how many students are in our classes at the university ie how many dollars come in in tuition for the salary paid to the professor. It has nothing to do with how much learning occurs. Hours of work in the evening and weekends do not appear at all in the required number of credit hours of course work and office hours required of faculty but we put in those hours nonetheless.

Why not stop the superficial reporting and find out the details of the study before plastering it all over the news as a headline while assuming the research to be valid? Where’s the critical thinking?

I have always worked more than 40 hours per week even while I put myself through college! Do I stay at the office 48 + hours per week? No, but I certainly put in 16 hour days when I need to and I check my e-mail and voice mail at least twice every night from home and take care of business then as well. I doubt that this study took into account the number of people who spend several hours per week working from home or while on their commute. I think a lot of it has to do with technology. Let’s face it, 15-20 years ago we could only really work at the office and e-mail and cell phones were only used by a few people. Now, I’m constantly tethered to the office whether I want to be or not that’s where all those extra hours of work come from.

I think Americans are working sufficiently long hours but have lost the educational edge in sciences and math ,which is needed for most industries to thrive successfuly. In the services sector we are soft and do inadequate work and expect greater compensation. This is why we are less competitive in the world.

Seriously…our Nintindo/xbox/Play Station/World of Warcraft generation is mentally and physically lazy. In technology we have to hire foreigners to get good workers. That’s just the reality. The long term implications of this to American Culture can not be underestimated.

Why do American workers have to compete with the rest of the world?

Every nation has the right to construct and regulate its economy to benefit its people. In fact, the only reason an economy exists is to provide goods and services to the people.

America’s economy should be as self-sufficent and local as possible. We don’t want our children living like slaves in a corporate state. Dependence on a global economy is reducing our skills, work ethic, and capabilities. It is also distorting our economy and leading to national bankruptcy.

Tell the competition promoters to go jump in the lake!

Hogwash! Try and reach a European in the month of August. The French get 8 weeks of vacation which they MUST take each year. Germans, Swedes benefits are similar. The average American takes just 9 days! Euros also have national healthcare and a decent social safety net. USA is the only industrialized nation without a national health care system. Don’t you realize that all the talk radio preaching about self-reliance and personal responsibility is a way to convince you that you do not deserve the benefits citizens of other countries take for granted? Don’t you realize that big business is lining its pockets at your expense? The bottom line is: You work harder and for less in real dollars and benefits than people in most industrialized nations.

America and Western Europe were the first countries to industrialize and have since realized the benefits of less man power and more machines. We work less now because we can. Calling Americans out today for working less overlooks the fact that we were THE most efficient, intelligent, and hardest working country in the world 100 – 200 years ago. And because of that, we have been able to afford more leisure and free time. The countries the author mentions, South Korea, Peru, etc. do not want to work 60 hour work weeks and once they reach our level of technology will not have to. It is much more plausible to think that the work effort of those countries will come down as they become more modernized, rather than ours increasing to “compete” with them. It is human nature to work as little as possible and soon those so called “hard working” countries will be able to enjoy the fruits of modern technology as much as we do.

Just measuring “hours worked” is fairly meaningless. A much more useful measurement would be to measure the output of each worker rather than just the hours.

Putting that aside though, if we assume that the hours people are putting in really are declining, there’s a couple of easy explanations for it.

1. A lot of companies are reclassifying as many people as possible from hourly to salaried to avoid paying overtime. Anyone reclassified like that is going to see their hours decrease from whatever they were before to 40 hours per week. I’m salaried and on a slow week I might put in a bit less than 40 hours a week. In a busy week I might put in 80 hours or more.

2. Since wages are not increasing for anyone but the upper level executives, what incentive do workers have to actually work harder? If I know I’ll be getting a 3% raise every year regardless how hard I work, why would I go above and beyond when there’s no benefit for it? Cost cutting by reducing or freezing wages and/or benefits is a double edged sword. Shor t term it might save companies money. Long term, it’s going to reduce productivity which will just require hiring more people.

CEOs aren’t lazy. They work hard spending all those millions they have stolen. Thinking up all those resorts to fly the company jet to is hard labor.

CONFLICTING SURVEYS

I don’t understand these survey results when we’ve heard for years that Europe, particularly Germany and France, mandate a maximum of 30-35 hour work weeks for their employees.

Amreican are lazy – according to a UN panel and as accepted by a GE CEO. Uh-huh. The UN wouldn’t know anything about being productive – except when they are busy critcizing the US on nearly every front. I question the use of the 48 hour benchmark. 40 hours has been pretty much the accpted standard for nearly 100 years. I’d like to see their data to back their claims up – good luck getting that. Citizens of the US have never been given the opportunity to earn or to take as much vacation as those in other industrial modern countries (GB, France, Germany, Norway, etc.) Seeing us as lazy as compared to China or other Asian countries belies the fact that those poor souls are laboring for less per day than most CEO’s would pay for a double latte at Starbucks. The GE CEO fails to recognize that for the past 40 or so years the mantra was ‘Work Smarter, Not Harder’. I dare say that this mantra was put to the test – most sucessfully – during the 1990s era of downsizing. A lot of use did get better in order to take on the additional workload created by departed employees – or face dismissal. GE regularly ‘rewards’ its lowest 10% of productive employees with a pink slip – even if they were top stars the year before. The reward of working smarter was to get some of the non-work leisure time back in our lives (you know, raise a family, get some rest, see friends, maintain a household, not think about work 24/7). Now the GE CEO is complaining that this is not enough – bolstered by the US bashing cretins at the UN. Maybe he lives to work – and at his salary the end to the means is that he can retire and do what he wants earlier in life. Unfortunately, more tend to work to live – knowing the number of CEO slots are extremely limited. I don’t think the UN or the GE CEO have taken into consideration that living to work down at levels below a CEO means more hours (as opposed to more productivity) away from taking care of one’s self or one’s family. I’d like to think that a better homelife translates into less crime in a society. I really wonder where the UN and this CEO think quality personnel come from – the Stork? No, they are raised by people who succesfully find the balance between work-life and home-life. And that doesn’t mean those folks don’t contribute more year after year – it only means that they do it better in that imaginary 40 hour time-box. By the way, that 40 hour time box doesn’t really exist anymore. Folks are more tied to work via VPN, BlackBerry, CellPhone, Beeper, home PC than ever before. And if you throw in commutation time – you’ll blow past that 40 and 48 hour committment to work real fast. So to answer the question, “Are Americans too lazy?”
NO. We aren’t when you look at the real facts – we earn and take less vacation, our GDP continues to surge, our standard of living is still the rival of most of the world – and the labor of Americans is what keeps CEOs, like the ones at GE, well compensated. BTW, when was the last time a GE CEO’s overall compensation go down? .

In the article it states, “Put it all together, and the researchers figure we’re getting about 117 hours of leisure per week (including sleep), vs. 110 hours in 1965. That’s more than 360 additional idle hours per year. We are a couch-potato nation.”

I take issue with the part of the statement that the 360 additional hours per year are “idle hours” This assumes that if you are not on-the-clock you are idle. What about people who spend this idle time volunteering time to help a cause or other people, or those that work around their homes and gardens in the evenings? They are doing something that has a benefit and just because it doesn’t have a direct monetary gain you label it idle? Actually, one could argue that building community and improving your home does increase property values and therefore has a direct monetary gain. Perhaps people are using there time away from work to reenergize themselves so they can be more productive while they are at work. After all the video clip where this article was posted mentions “a growing trend where worker productivity is up …” I found the idle comment very myopic.

Two words for those who think that we are lazy: @#$% ^&#!

All too true. Worse yet are the tens of millions Americans who have never worked and have no intentnion of doing so.

I think it is great that there is competition in this world and there will always be room for improvement as well. But what quality of life we are aiming for should be the question….do we live to work? or do we work to live? It’s great that we are economically better off now, but i think we have to realize why we even care to win this global “rat race” in the first place. Most importantly at what price, with more mothers and fathers working full time jobs, and tv shows and videogames, more sexual and violent by the minute acting as our children’s nannies….where is our nation going with all this? I think we need to start prioritizing our choices, as well and not puting so much pressure on always having the newest car or the bigest house. Fulfilling our needs and spending time with our loved ones should be our priority…work for a better quality of LIFE i say, one that will make you happy and proud you lived the day you die.

Wow your an idiot… What posessed you to write this story? We arent working 48 hours a week like they do in the third world? Hah are you kidding me, in france the work week is 35 hours, and they get a 5 week vacation. In spain/ italy/ many latin countries they take a 3 hour lunch break and the whole economy shuts down. As far as Americans go we are a very hard working people.
But with your line of reasoning we should all be working 60 hours a week and making less and less money so we can compete with workers who make pennies on the hour in third world countries.
This story is pointless and if we ever have to work more than 40 hours a week Im moving.

I would bet the majority of people reading this article are people who put in long hours and are productive to boot. After all, they do at least care enough to read CNN. But think about the country as a whole…For years we paid people NOT to work with the welfare system, fraudulant disability and unemployment claims, frivalous lawsuits, paycheck advance loans, downright stupid mortgages, running up credit card debt and who knows how many other ways ingenious, but lazy, Americans find a way to get money without earning it. Most employees I see only show up to collect a paycheck, not work. “Work ethic” is term they never heard of. America will turn a blind eye to this epidemic, continue liberal handouts and bailing out poor business practices until we get our economic butt kicked. The nation, on average, IS LAZY.

Who makes up this stuff!! Who’s to say working longer hours produces better quality work. I can produce more results in 20 hrs. than I ever could in 40 hrs a week just through experience over the last 40 years. I think Americans are working longer hours than ever. We still have a standard work week of 40 hrs. Canada for example hasn’t had that in 20 years. Their standard week is 35 hrs or less and their economy is roaring ahead of ours. You have omitted many European countries who have 6 – 8 weeks standard vacation plus statutory holidays.

So, the total hours of “leisure” per week INCLUDING SLEEP rose from 110 to 117. That’s 15.71 hours per day up now to 16.71 hours per day. Take away those wonderful “lazy” eight sleep hours (my assumption) and we’re now at 7.71 hours of leisure growing to 8.71 hours. Take away 1-2 hours per day to commute and on and on. This story is sensational and misleading. As several others have commented, we haven’t even started to talk about productivity. Signed – Dennis who is working from home, monitoring two video screens, accesible from anywhere in the world by e-mail, IM, phone, cel phone and fax… watching one sick child while the wife gets her measly work hours out of the way so she can come home to her “leisure laundry”

What a load…

Let me make myself crystal clear. I work to live, not the other way around. People in Europe enjoy 35 hr work weeks and more benefits than we could imagine.

I like my job, but if my employer takes away my free time by insisting I work 60 hours a week, I’ll just get a part time job. I don’t mind being poor. What I do mind is wasting my life away in a cubicle.

This article about Americans working less is completely misleading and very annoying to someone like myself (I am a CPA) who normally works 50 hours a week, often 55-70, on top of an approximate 2 1/2 hour commute a day! It’s misleading because it’s based on overall statistical measures that include retired people and students(who work few or no hours per week), people who are unemployed, and those unfortunate many who are what are called underemployed, i.e., not able to secure a full-time job even though they want to. What appears to be actually happening is that there is a certain amount of work in the U.S. to be done, there are more people in the U.S. who are working less than 40 hours a week(and many are being supported by the payroll taxes paid by the people who work, like me), therefore those people who still have full-time jobs find that those jobs take much longer hours than before. And I won’t even get into how most of the companies in which I have worked deliberately keep their companies understaffed so they can increase short-term profits and the pay of their executive officers.

My husband and I have owned our business for over 12 years, and we’ve always worked over 60 hours a week, no vacation, no weekends. But we’re not complaining and we are proud to be able to put our daughter through private college (no loans) and law school. We have also supported both of our parents and siblings. And if we wanted to we could retire in 6 years.

Of course, we are 1st generation immigrants and we think a lot of Americans who were born and raised here are “lazy” in our standards, but you get what you work for. People can have vacations and 40- hour work weeks but live from pay check to pay check with all sorts of debts and loans. Some others are thriving simply by working hards and long.

Most of the comments i read were personal. Everybody is writing how much each of them works or how much hours each of them puts. This topic is general, its about the whole country in general and cannot be represented by any individual. I am a temporary worker here and i am giving my honest opinion, life here is very good, i can give lots of time to my family and personal activity as compared to my home country. In my country i use to do the same work for 12 to 14 hours a day and was paid just 20% of what i make here in US. I worked like this for 5 years and now when i compare this to the standards here life is very comfortable, everybody just waits to get out of the office at 5:30pm on friday vacation almost starts at 3:00pm. I am doing the same quality work what i use to do in my home country but making lots as compared to earlier pay. Overall what i feel is competition is the factor, everything is about demand and supply. If there are more people to do the job the rates will go down. If american workers will not work for less pay the job will go to other country where they can get cheap labor with same quality work. What matters for corporates is profits and share value at the end of the quarter to remain competative. So when corporates want to remain competative why can we ? Have rare skills which are in demand, work hard to get better and better.

Before getting hysterical, lets have a reputable American economist evaluate the report and the numbers shall we?

I suspect that UN reasearch is about as useful as the UN itself.

Wayne

I agree with Rob from Greensboro– it seems like everyone in America is working these days, from people in their sixties who are “semi-retired” to college kids performing unpaid internships to wives and mothers whose sole occupation would have been homemaker or mother 30 years ago.

In any event, the language used in this article is very biased. The ability and / or desire to work less than 40 or 50 hours a week is attributed to “laziness,” period. The fact is that leisure time can be spent with your family, volunteering in your community and broadening your mind.

The world would probably be a BETTER place if people in all countries had more leisure time. I suspect ny own time is allocated like that of most Americans: I spend the leisure time I have doing housework, running errands and decompressing from a job where I’m doing the work of 1.5 people!

I got more from reading the comments than the article itself, so thanks to all the people posting.

Peace!

Give me a break – the author has obviously never worked in Europe! germany has 30 national holidays and by law 6 weeks of vacation plus 2 weeks of sick leave. Europe will definitely be speaking chinese first before america. =)

Why do you write this stuff?? Please do more homework than this literary puffery.

Americans work harder per hour. With technolgy available it is hard to even quantify my work day. I answer emails and take calls until almost 10:00 at night.

I can work 12 hours spread over time and am still more efficient. Does that mean my cost per hour and value added component is compared to the a South Korean or Chinese laborer?

learn to ask the right questions and get all your facts straight before you print this garbage. You’re better than that.

Wow! I am amazed that this “journalist” actually gets employed to produce junk like this for a living.

This article does not place enough weight on these issues:

- Comparing number of hours worked is bogus. Many people in developing countries have to work 3 jobs just to eat.

- The massive increase in US productivity allows American workers to complete more work in a shorter period of time.

- A large percentage of America’s population has reached retirement age, driving down the statistics on hours worked.

- There are many people who were creative and hard working enough to make large amounts of money and leave the work force. This does not happen as a result of being lazy.

- US companies work very hard to minimize overtime for their hourly workers in order to avoid paying benefits.

I find it ironic that this writer calls us “slackers in the world economy” when it is widely acknowledged that the US drives the world economy. Lastly, this article looks like it was written by a 4th grader (no offense to 4th graders).

What rubbish. Maybe if all our factory jobs were not sent over to a communist country we would be “working harder”. It doesn’t matter how hard you work when your competition is someone earning a dollar or less per hour working in a country with absolutely no safety or environmental standards. I say we stop buying all communist made goods and we’ll see how the equation works out then.

I find it hard to believe that America is made up of a “lazy” workforce. Compared to our European counterparts, we work more hours and take far fewer vacations. We are constantly being accused of being a nation of workaholics not to mention the increase in stress related illnesses from working too many hours and ever increasing responsibilities. What is it that we need to do? Work more, work harder? Working smarter might hlep. Why don’t we just forget to live our lives and forget about our families and move in with our employer?!? Is that what it’s going to take? Not worth it.

What matters is really how many ideas America generates, not how many hours we work. Our economy, for the most part, isn’t based on sweat anymore. Becoming a nation of automatons would destroy our economy. Anybody worried about China should look at Japan for a good example of their remote threat to us (export driven economy with little intrinsic innovation, steals most its knowledge and ideas from the West.) If I remember correctly, Japan was feared 20 years ago, but didn’t they just come out of a 15 yr recession? Work smart or Work hard, I’ll take the former. We all need to revisit our Adam Smith, Alfred Marshall, and Milton Friedman to see our true comparative advantages and stop this nonsense about us being lazy and to defeat the protectionists.

As a supervisor it has been my experience that people are actually not using their time well and think they are very overworked. A lot of time is spent also redoing jobs that were not done properly in the first effort.

With profits of corporations the highest ever, American workers must be doing something right. With bounces up to $200,000,000 for CEOs and Americans not working hard enough. Sounds like Corporate greed again trying to justify another million dollar toy.

This is a fantastic article, but I wish it gave more details. I’m obviously in the wrong industry. Which ones offer the extra vacation and fewer hours I read about?

Maybe what we really need to correct here is all of the free-loaders that are out of work on bogus workers comp claims or people that are receiving unemployment benefits and can easily get a job. We are becoming a nation that takes to much from the producers and hands it over to the non-producers.
I’ve worked 60 hour work weeks for over 20 years, I pay in the upper 30% tax bracket while others don’t pay any taxes and sit at home?

This article is terrible – one of the worst I have ever read. More so than ever, two spouses in America have full-time or near full-time jobs, so, of course, overall each person works a little less, but by family we work a ton. I bet we lead the world (by a landslide I might add) in the % of families that have two income earners. So if that is not working hard, I don’t know what is.

This article is misleading. Average American have to work 2 or 3 jobs just to get by. If we really want to get ahead, we need to greatly reduced the pay to our executives. Look at our competitors, do they pay millions of dollar to their CEOs?

I recently added a comments and it was deleted. Don’t know why it was perfectly appropriate. This censorship is rediculous.

I think that, in addition to working fewer hours, Americans are also working less efficiently. Modern conveniences like the internet and cell phones serve as distractions from productive work time. It is also my opinion that there is a misguided value placed on multi-tasking. Instead of concentrating on one task and perforning it adequately to completion, workers attempt to do too many things at once, completing none of them or completing them haphazardly.

Cheap labor that works under conditions with low standards and long hours is not what a country should strive for. The countries that are now producing cheap goods will eventually have to offer more to their employees as they develop. The US used to have sweat shops also. And going back even further in time we had sleve labor that worked for free with very long hours. I don’t think we want to go back to that. We should shorten our hous of work and reduce our consumption. This would improve everyones quality of life. I have young people that work for me and they don’t seem too lazy to me.

Where is the incentive to work harder? I bust my rear for a company just so the CEO can increase the disparity in pay between me and him. I’m told I am helping the company incrase the bottom line and increasing productivity but it doesn’t hit my bottom line. Plus, when the CEO quits or gets fired, he ends up taking a 7 or 8 figure severence package with him. All for what?

you anti american spin big global business fools. i worked two jobs for last twenty years so i could retire comfortably. my hope was my heart broken children would try to emulate me…they have no chance in this job sickened purposely killed once wonderful country. kruschev was right i was faithful republican now for a forth political party and mad enough to take up arms against those pinkertons that our childs school books would deny their existance!!!

The old adage goes work smarter not harder. The reality is that we are one of the top technological innovators in the world but we are playing for yesterdays ambitions. Until we as a nation realize that there is more to life than tabloid headlines and we turn off the bubble gum for the brain TV shows and actually look within ourselves to push for the next big innovation or breakthrough for our society, for national pride we will continually lose ground to those that are hungrier than us. Complacency and conceit is the beginning of the end for any nation, person, business, etc. that is on top. Look at any great civilization of the past and learn from their mistakes. A unifying factor is the impetus for great civilizations!!!!! FIND IT!!!!!!

If we are getting lazier, why do we lead the world in productivity year in and year out. What is the measure of productivity? Isn’t it the amount of output per unit of input? We lead the world in gross domestic product per capita as well. The basis of this article is simply false.

You’re darn right Americans are getting fatter and lazier. It’s just incredible how many people think money grows on trees. Practically every employee I’ve ever met has an excuse for not working and a deep held wish for someone else (and the federal government) to pay for everything they wish for.

Overall, American is lazy because American were forced to work comparing with most of other countries. The people live on other countries are willing to work for better. That is a major difference on the work attitude and it makes others more productive. However, what made, and will continue to make America to slow down on the growth in general on all aspects is the ego. American just got too much ego and will not realize how much the rest of world have been changed and catching up with America. American will only focus on the domestic issues and some time only personal issues instead of taking a careful look at a bigger picture. America is not going to be the same super power country 10 or 15 years from now. World is constantly changing so are the people. Wake up and look around you….. Be friendly to other countries and their people. Together we are a team and let us make a difference together for the world peace.

JEFF IMMELT IS A DOUCHE BAG. CNN SUCKS.
YOU DESERVE EACH OTHER.

I just read another article that shows Americans get fewer days off (25 including holidays) that almost any other country. Some other developed countries have nearly twice that.

My name is Alex, I am an American living in Barcelona, Spain. Upon seeing this article, I would say however wrote this story has a one sided mind. We American are the most hardest working people and I can attest to that especially when I was living in Los Angeles, California before. Now that I am living in Barcelona, I still work very hard with more hours. American are born to compete it´s in our blood. That is why European find us very intimidating because we never stop from working. What have changed in America are the Corporation. They want us to work more for less money, what they want is to is to make their belly full while leaving behind the rest of the working people hungry. Even here in Spain, American Companies are taking advantage of the people, they want them to work more hours while paying people less. Since the labor law are not as strong as in the U.S. they are taking advantage of the law. What needs to happen is to change the attitude of Corporate America. They need to realize that Quality is not the same as Quantity. See what happen to China. People work so much producing a lot of quantity products, where is the quality now. Who is now suffering of this? of course our kids, because we are buying these products. Products that Corporate America is selling. To keep becoming competitive, Corporate America needs to change. They should give more incentives, increase pay and give more holidays. Here in Spain everybody has 30 days of holiday not counting the official government holiday. If Corporate America thinks we are getting paid good then they are wrong. They are living in a fantasy land. Commodity prices keep rising that includes gasoline but they pay check is still the same. Remember they just increase minimum standard pay recently and that is so many years.

Gee….are they counting unemployment as vacation time?

Also, many companies are forcing employees to work part time hours in an effort to reduce the benefits that an employee can receive.

I find studies like these to be disturbing because it only supports the belief that jobs need to be out-sourced in an effort to be competitive in a global market….thus leading to more layoffs and reduced benefits.

This study is BS. In 1965 people were working less in total. There were less people in the country and many women were not working. Now there are more people in the US and usally both husband and wife are working. Also, it is hard to compete with countries with such low standards for their workers. I don’t think were want to live like a 3rd world country and produce defective goods that kill animals and hurt people. This atricle is plain stupid. 40 years ago my dad worked less hours than I am now and my mother did not work at all (like most of my friends’ mothers).

Mainstream Americans are not lazy. Maybe we need less governemnt handouts to get more people working. I know our take home salaries aren’t rising much because the goverment keeps taking more of our money and redistributing it to lazy people who want hand outs.

The only lazy people in this country are journalists who, instead of reporting valuable information, avoid real work by writing idiotic articles on how Americans are lazy. If you think Americans are lazy, go to Europe…or Asia…or Africa.

working smarter is much better than working harder. I dont see any mention of that.
In Bejing if you dont work you may lose the little freedom the government is giving!
outsourcing is also a MAJOR factor

I totally agree with this study, I have worked in many countries around the world, Nigeria, Germany, Finland, England, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil and its a big difference.

PEOPLE, please see that this study doesn’t talk about everybody being lazy, its just certain individual that are being the average down to the point they called Lazy.

I can agree with a lot of this people, most US companies use the Salary excuse to squeeze every working out of the person. If your company paid you hourly they could not profit as they do now…

Here is a good example, take a look at the people working for the US Government or a Government agency (Except the Military)… those are the laziest people EVER! like the DNV… Just by having this government people on this study, it brings our standard down a lot. Now if you have ever had to take your whole day off to get a drivers license renewed you would agree.

Not in Seattle…..

so americans need to work harder and longer??
sounds like elitest propaganda to me.
we are being compared to third world countries like-mexico? i truly believe most americans have no aspiration what so ever to be like mexico.
truth is,most (working americans)-this doesnt include elitest tools like mr. clovin and most of the upper white collar america(including state and federal governments), are working harder and longer for less..to compete with china??look at what this has led to-poisonous kids toys and clothes,poisonous food and pet food,defective tires,etc.. and yet today china shot back at our soy beans for pesticides and being dirty!?
we need to isolate and force change within our selves. the anit-christ was invisioned as a “RED DRAGON”,people do you realize what the red dragon is -CHINA.

This is a total nonsense. Most of us pharmacists work 12 hrs days, no or very little breaks during the day and not to mention weekends/holidays. I am most certain that there are people who do not want to work for a living but that does not mean that all of us are lazy. Get the facts straight!

This “news” story looks to me like yet another well crafted piece of propoganda eminating from the Corporatocracy of Globalization. What the business leaders at the top of the pecking order who earn salaries that could feed nations want us to believe is that we are underworked and overpaid. This fits right in with their master plan to gain control of every market in every corner of the earth through exploitation, manipulation, rhetoric and deceit.
It is interesting that when you read all the blogs that are posted here on this topic, most countrymen feel they are working harder than ever for the American Dream that is so quickly vanishing for the middle class. This country was built on the dream of a better standard of living for all and we, as average working Joes and Janes had better defend that notion against the Corporatocracy.
This is not about Americans working harder for less; this is about making a better world for everyone to reap the benefits of their labor.

Of course a CEO is going to think working more hours is essential — he’s not the one working those hours!

Jeff Immelt needs to get downwind of what he’s shoveling.

I agree with those who say this report obviously had nothing to do with actual productivity. I used to work directly beside/with a European and it’s true that they spend more time trying to get out of work than actually doing work. When it comes to productivity, we can run circles around them!

There are some lazy workers and there are some who are ten times more productive in the same time.

I used to work in an office where one of the bimbos complained about her “stressful day” … it took her a full 8 hours to type something that I could get out before my 10 AM coffee break. Needless to say, after getting my own work done, I usually put in at least an hour a day helping her keep up her work flow. At times, I spent an entire day catching up one of our less-productive people who’d gotten hopelessly behind.

Studies show workers waste 2 hours a day on the internet. Before that, there were people who wasted at least that much time chatting, or reading newspapers, or calculating statistics for their sports league, or daydreaming.

And then there are those of us who believe that the only thing you should be doing at work is working.

I’m now self-employed so that I don’t have to deal with people trying to guilt me to do more than my fair share so that they can do less.

This is not a particularly helpful or informative editorial. Almost any economist would scoff at the way it constructs its argument, including:
- Using “hours worked” as a stand-in for productivity
- Implying a relationship between hours worked and average wage per hour
- Implying America faces a zero-sum “competition” with other economies
- Insinuating that more leisure time makes Americans obese (actually, data suggest it may be the reverse)
In sum, it’s pretty ridiculous. Perhaps economists should write more articles (or journalists should learn some economics).

I’ve been both employee and consultant for large corporations, as well as small (very small) design firms. For salaried folks (and I’ll speak as a representative of the IT world), most often than not they only are allowed to officially report 40 hours a week. In order to meet deadlines and mandates more hours are worked — 50, 60 or 70 hour weeks are not uncommon, and usually are not going to be reported to management except for “project estimation” purposes. This has been my life for nearly 9 years. The lazy American? You’ll come across them, but I haven’t met many at all.

The convenient correlation between American “fewer hours worked” claim and American “expanding waistlines epidemic” is a flimsy one, at best. Battling obesity usually means getting up out of your office chair every day and engaging in some sort of exercise. That’s extremely difficult for a person who is rounding the corner a 72 hour work week — hours spent in the office or from remote office.

Additionally, for those who have families, another 1.5 hours in the gym 3 days a week is still time they aren’t spending at home with their kids and spouses. Some folks find ways to balance out a little activity with their schedules, but in the end, exhaustion usually wins out over a 3 mile run in the park with a jogging stroller.

I won’t even get started on the horrendous diets of those IT folks who start their mornings with a bottle of Coke and a doughnut. Sure enough, a bad diet and no movement contribute to obesity…but I have to point again to the hours already committed to work and family often trump commitment to personal health.

This is a puff article. More leisure time does not translate into “laziness.” Many Americans use leisure time to work side jobs, volunteer work or exercise. This article is an example of journalism that may be provacative, but not entirely accurate. But hey, I clicked, read and responded.

I hardly ever respond to these topics, however, this time I can’t help myself. We are one of the few countries in the industrialized world that work as many hours as we do. Here’s part of the problem: 1) more non-residents are granted H1B visa’s to do jobs in the U.S. that plenty of Americans could do, 2) At the same time we have a $200 billion dollar plus trade imbalance which means we buy more foreign products than the U.S. produces and sells overseas. This equates to fewer jobs in the U.S. because fewer countries are buying our products, 3) We have way to many immigrants, with more coming everyday, to complete with fewer jobs that are left in the U.S. The U.S. census shows that our population increased from 240 miliion in 1990 to 300 million in October 2006. With the birth rate flat in this country, where do you think that population increase came from?, 4) U.S. companies continue to outsource overseas because of cheap labor. When you move a white collar $50K job overseas it become a 25K job. That job never comes back to the U.S. Oh, by the way I didn’t even mention the 12-20 million illegal immigrants in our country once again competing for fewer jobs. It’s not a question of not working enough hours or being “re-tooled” for other work. It’s all these outside forces converging to make this an extremely difficult job market. If this trend continues for 2-3 decades our college graduates will have to go overseas to get a good job becuase that’s where they’ll all be. For the first time in my life I’m willing to pay more for all products I consume just to keep those jobs in the U.S.

This article was very aggravating. We should not be compared to developing countries where workers are forced to work horrible hours in order to just survive since wages are so low. I, for one, feel as if it is very hard to take decent care of my family and home if my spouse and I both work 50 hours a week. Shouldn’t our goal be to work more productively while putting in less hours? Why don’t we compare ourselves to developed nations that work less and get more vacation time? If we are indeed becoming lazier then I believe that should be measured by something other than hours in a work-week.

I am wondering if retirees, children, students, and those on public assistance or disability are included in these statitistics. If any of these groups are included it could make a big difference with the statistics. I think that Americans play hard, but also work hard in general. If Americans aren’t working hard it is often because they are bored by their job or discouraged with the pay. I don’t believe working more necessarily makes you better as a nation. Creativity and ingenuity is what America has thrived on!

I all comes down to one decision in life. Are you going to work to live or live to work. Personally, I would not commute 3 hours a day to a job that I do for another 10 hours a day. That leaves me 11 hours to eat,sleep,take care of personal business………and be on call 24/7 to resolve any ‘emergencies’ at work. I don’t care how much they pay me……..I would be to stressed and exhausted to enjoy anything that money could buy.

Media sensationalism. Of course we work less as a nation – it’s because baby boomers are enetering retirement! You can’t average out these numbers; look at the individuals. Of the people who do work full-time are we working less or more? I wish that these discussions would give the real data crunched rather than the media sensationalism that makes a good headline.

Has anyone looked into the fact we have more wealthy people and younger retirees these days – who are not working – impacting the numbers being thrown around in this article. Also, how about the unemployed, self-employed, work from home/paid under the table folks? Are their ‘free’ hours being added in here? Was this last group accurately represented the last time this sort of study was done?

I ask because I feel like I’m working harder then ever. As an exempt employee there is no overtime. There was no wage increase or profit sharing last year and benefits are more expensive then ever – but cover less. Our vacation time and sick days have been cut back and the expectation is you just can’t be sick. It’s frowned upon. Add in 2.5 hours a day commuting and I’d like to know where all this marvelous free time is that your refering to.

I don’t think I’m the exception. It seems as if the majority of Americans are grateful for their jobs these days; especially those working in the financial industry. The expectation is that we need to work harder, do more, be better, in order to keep our jobs. But, at some point burn out is going to hit.

How is it possible that Germany an incredibly large economy can offer their employees amazing benefit packages? They have actual, real vacation time – an entire month! – and can take a sick day without worrying about loosing their job.

If anything I would think there would be a study showing Americans are probably some of the most stressed out, unhappy people on Earth, because we spend so much time working we don’t have time to spend with our families or to decompress after a long work week. It could at least explain why Americans use more pain reliever than any other country in the world. We all have stress headaches and back pain from squinting at computer screens hour after hour.

I’d like to suggest you dig up some other studies and consider rewriting your article. There has to be more to the information you provided here because this somehow just doesn’t add up.

I think the Millenial generation is sorely misunderstood. We don’t WANT to work as much as the generations before us, just like Gen X wanted different management practices than the baby boomers. Not because we are lazy, but because we want to experience more than commuting, sitting at a desk, and commuting home. How do we progress as a society if we just accept everything that the generation before us did because that’s what they wanted? We may want to work less, but in the end, we are the generation who will get real things accomplished because we actually delve deeper into issues and want to understand why things are they way they are instead of just accepting what was put in front of us. We would like to actually enjoy what time we have left here rather than spend that time being miserable at work!

I simply don’t believe it. How were these statistics generated? I think this is a case of cherry-picking the data that make the controversial point you want to make.

I grew up in the sixties. My father worked long hours but my mother stayed home full time. Most families that I know today put in 80 -100 hours of work between both spouses. And if they have only one parent they work even harder. And everything takes longer. People today have less time to socialize, read, or do simple household chores than they did years ago.

As for obesity, I think one reason it’s growing is that we don’t have time for exercise. Or if we do we’re too exhausted.

This research seems to suggest we should go back to the old model of working round the clock six days a week, like we did during the days of the robber barons. Is it really our goal to work longer hours than exploited Indonesian garment laborers? This article misses the point entirely.

Go back to work people, nothing to see here. Better vote for Hillary Clinton, she’ll have the government help you more than ever! Better vote for Rudy Giuliani, he’ll save you from those scary terrorists! Nevermind that we don’t have the money to pay for any of it… What does this have to do with anything? Government regulations make it much easier for jobs to get sent overseas, and for company’s pay to be decline, do to inflation caused by government. People, this would never be talked about if we didn’t elect a bunch of corporate puppets into office year after year. Face it, Americans aren’t too lazy, in fact, we’re very ambitious! Americans are stupid, though; we have lost individual thought and replaced it with mob thought. You hate the CEO that gets paid 400 times more than you… but why? You buy crap from Wal-Mart and then get pissed off when a bunch of jobs get sent over to China… why? $1 is less today than yesterday; thank your representative. Your jobs are getting shipped to Mexico, which is primarily because of NAFTA; thank your representatives. BTW, NAFTA is NOT free trade. Your taxes are high, and they’ll go higher; thank your representatives, parents, and grandparents. America is full of suckers… probably not the full 300 million, but pretty close!

It is clear that the numbers don’t tell the whole story. I just thought that those of you who believe that working smarter is the one great answer could benefit from an opinion from a healthcare worker. As a recent retiree from healthcare, I can tell you that patients need hands on labor. There is no quick, “work smarter” fix for that. The nurses that I have worked for, for many years take pride in giving great care to thier patients. As I am sure we can all agree, there are always good and bad employees on every team, but as a whole, these are folks who are dedicated to making a difference. When the hospital is full, some nurses step up and work an extra 12,24 or even 36 hours in a week. Others do not. I know that those who do are generally motivated by goals or need. Those who do not need nor wish to chase more money don’t. That should be considered an American accomplishment not a downfall of US Labor standards.

Send this article to all the troops in Iraq working 12 or more hours per day with no days off.

I hate the comments, Americans must be lazy because they are fat. Excuse me it is the high number of work hours that are part of the cause.

After all if as a salaried person you work 50+ hours and only get paid 40+ .. and the job is not terribly physical, when are you going to find the time to exercise? Or afford that gym membership, or cook healthy meals for the week, when you are always on the run?? We are fat because we work more, with no time to work out, but chained to work by phone/computer/blackberry.

Dear author: You obviously haven’t read Atlas Shrugged very well.

Hi I just want to share this impression. I am sure there are exceptions and areas where people work a lot and work hard, but I have the impression that foreign workers tend to work harder than their american native counterparts. that´s a least what I have seen in some offices.

This is contrary to everyting I thought I knew. Everything I have read has indicated that Europeans think Americans are nuts for working as hard as most of us do. The report may be true of course, but my experience makes me doubt it.

I bought a foreign car because it was better than a comparable domestic car, not because it was cheaper. Boeing’s 787 is selling like crazy because it is better than its competitor’s. We need better executives with vision, not cheaper labor. Perhaps we need to outsource them at a less bloated salary and perks.

Amen to this. The more time I can have off from work to spend with family and friends the better. I don’t plan on being on my death bed wishing I had worked more hours of my life.

1. This article should be a wake up call to most Americans who don’t seem to have any idea about how much harder most people in Asia are willing to work for a few extra bucks.
2. Europeans are definitely too lazy and will likely see their economies collapse soon if they don’t start working harder. This article should be an even bigger wake-up call for Europeans!
3. Most people who have posted here seem to agree that American CEOs are grossly overpaid, and yet what are you doing about it?! You could start by refusing to invest in companies or mutual funds that over-pay their CEOs or outsource jobs!
4. Many people here seem to think Americans are very productive. That’s nonsense! Having worked at one of the biggest Wall Street investment banks I can say without any doubt that there are at least 200,000 “excess” jobs on Wall Street. These are jobs that add no value and involve a lot of manual data entry type functions or schmoozing with clients and other such activities. Hopefully the next bear market will eliminate all these excess jobs and then there will be lots of white people working as maids, janitors, cab drivers and burger flippers in New York City and Connecticut again! That would be a nice change! Mitt Romney isn’t intelligent enough to be a janitor and yet if someone as incompetent as him (or Guiliani or Hillary) can actually think of becoming President, it’s easy to see why America is in such deep economic trouble! It’s a great time to Sell America short and make a FORTUNE!

The issue is not the amount of hours worked. It’s what passes for productive work today. Excessive e-mail conversations,multiple meeting per day all reduce real productive work.

What a pitty, Americans aren’t running the rats race as hard as they were in pursuit of the almighty dollar. They are actually, *gasp* sick of living in a cubicle farm for most of thier lives. If this means we can’t compete with up-coming nations that have worse working conditions, then so be it. I’m not going to try and compete with a slave driven factory worker in China, thank you very much.

I would prefer to enjoy a little more leisure before I die rather than work my ass off to pad the pockets of some CEO.

What are you talking about? Everyone I know in New England is working more than one job, both partners in a relationship are working full time or more, boomers are putting off retirement and working full time… who has more than 2 or 3 weeks of vacation?? Not many..and even if they have it on paper they do not take it because their jobs are too busy…or if they do take vacation from one job they are usually working on another perhaps their own business. I believe your research is flawed.

Yes America is the most efficient Country in the world, and yes most of you responding to a poll on a news website probably work more than 40 hours a week. However, most Americans are lazy. Too lazy to cook for themselves, too lazy to work out, and too lazy to discipline their own children. We are becoming a nation of video-game-playing, tv watching, fast food eating, I would rather take a pill than figure out why I am getting sick, I want it now couch potatoes. The bottom line is, if you want the better things in life you better work hard and take them, otherwise someone else out there is going to have them. Work hard, play hard, and enjoy life that is what I say!

I feel that many people are not working at all. A large portion of our population is now on some welfare (excuse me, social service program) program using up the energies of those of us that have worked all of our life. This is especially true here in Alaska. In my community alone, at least 50% or the population receives some sort of welfare assistance.

Hey with kind of argument you can justify slavery!

Utter rubbish!
Try these stats
http://americaninathens.wordpress.com/2007/08/14/eu-vs-usa-labor-issues/

The problem with this article is that it does not tell us anything about the research model, what were counted as data, operationalization of terms, etc.

Statistics don’t lie, but unrelated data can be correlated and/or manipulated to produce a desired outcome. A good example is the correlation between shoe size and intelligence: When a baby is a year old, his or her shoe size is quite small, and the child doesn’t know very much. But by the time the child is twenty-one, his or her shoe size has increased significantly, and so has his or her intelligence. However, despite the fact that the relationship can be made, the conclusion that intelligence can be measured by shoe size is and invalid one.

One must always keep in mind that not all research is good research.

I think there is a much too high percentage of American workers who are too lazy. And these are usually the workers who complain about illegal immigrants taking “our” jobs. The people who do work hard enough often don’t need to worry about being replaced. Many Americans have become accustomed to a certain level of productivity and often want raises in pay to increase productivity to where it should be in the first place. Too many Americans feel a sense of entitlement. I generally work 45-50 hours and am the top producer for my company. We actually had one employee quit because I began “rallying the troops” in an attempt to get everyone to start producing better. We are in the housing industry which has slumped lately. I figured we could use a boost in productivity to offset the decrease in business. One of the workers didn’t enjoy his lack of productivity being published and quit recently. Just an example.

I certainly agree with Zane Zirkel, Keokuk, IA.

I have worked with Europeans and South East Asians for a number of years and we are clearly far more productive with our time. In a lot of South East Asian companies, the staff never leave the office before their boss does. Those hours add up!

And the amount of time they spend to make a simple decision is unbelieveable.

This is one of the stupidest article I’ve seen in a while. “Counting hours”; oh brother what way to gage productivity against “Korea” and “Peru”.

Technologies allow us to to more in less time. People telecommute.

If you’re talking about “factory work” maybe this applies.

Work smarter not harder.

Why would I work extra hard so that the managers and execs can take home all the money? There is just no incentive to work hard when recieving salary

REPOST THE LINK ONLY:

http://www.cepr.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1184&Itemid=8/

My last post has been censored.

Although I can’t vouch for lesser developed countries, I can truthfully say that Americans are overworked, because the average employer provides only 10 days of vacation time per employee. In several European nations, law dictates a minimum from 21 to 35 days of vacation per year. I think the Europeans can well afford to work 48 or 56 hours per week, when they can take off for an entire month for R&R. Studies have proven that Europeans are more productive than Americans, and this is just the reason why.

Americans, on the other hand, don’t have that luxury. And with a presidential administration and corporate climate like we have now, it will not get any better in the foreseeable future.

I found this article offensive and ignorant. This person obviously started with a flawed hypothesis (Americans are lazy) and then cherry-picked the numbers to create some inane argument. The reality is that Americans take the least vacation of any other major industrialized country. We have more 2 worker households than any other major industrialized country. We work harder for less money and fewer benefits than previous generations. We continue to have increased productivity because technology enables our workplace and creates efficiencies. I don’t know about you, but I already feel overworked and underpaid and I don’t need some jerk from Fortune magazine trying to make headlines by insulting me and my fellow Americans.

Americans do more and have quicker ways to get things done then years ago. I DO NOT think Americans are lazy….in Italy they have 3 hours for lunch and go home and cook an entire meal…business’s close for this time and in some European countries they have off 6 weeks for vacation…Americans have worked hard to get where we are……..

From a pscyhological stand point, this is the truth. We work all week to break bread, so we enjoy eating it. Who wants to re invent their lives when they are eating happily, paying bills on time, and driving their nice modern vehicle that hogs up gas and pollutes the earth. Most Americans are lazy in this particular situation. Look at the last president we voted for. Look at your your surrounding neighbors and tell me their names. Chances are you don’t know. Americans are comfortably numb post 9/11, and it’ll be hard pressed to change anytime soon. We are in for a real rude awakening letting our government use consumation to generate political climates. Gasoline, Alchohol, Tobacco, Firearms, these are material strongholds the government use to stop us from trying to change anything. comfortably numb. Its payday, go buy a sixer and sit on your bum and watch the war….its good for you. yeah right.

Even the most unsophisticated researcher would not equate putting in more hours with hard work.

How productive are you during the time you are at work counts much more than doing your time.

On the other hand, I’ve seen the GenXers who are coming into the workplace waste hours text messeging friends and family, doing personal business tasks from work, playing games, and surfing the net.

This same group also seems to make full use of their alloted sick time.

Maybe they’re resting up to watch the next episode of Real World.

I feel we are raising a whole generation of youth that are not being taught to work. I feel this is going to be a problem for the employers as time goes on.

You know what I resent about this article is that I work on Salary and my work after 40 hours isn’t something that is officially tracked in any way shape or form. I read an article last year saying we were more productive than most of the rest of the world. I am a software developer and I can say that I HAVE completed a project myself in less time than three non US workers and they had less tasks to accomplish then I did. I think this article is just telling upper management level Fortune readers what they want to hear — American workers should be paid less. After all, who wants to subscribe to a magazine that prints stuff you don’t want to hear and isn’t uplifting to your bottom line? I certainly didn’t like THIS article.

You must be joking! Americans are the hardest working people I know. I’m not an American. I actually think Americans are getting ripped off by businesses. 10 days vacation if you are lucky, minimum 40 hr week, fired at the drop of a hat. Give me, or more to the point, the average Joe a break. No one works harder than the average Yank, and I have lived in lots of different countries.

The biggest problem with the global economy is corporate ethics. Should companies be happy that some poor workers in Asia are willing to work all day on Sunday? Do you think those workers are very happy about being away from their family on Sunday while the executives fly around in their corporate jets? I write this from Mexico where I am visiting one of the assembly plants for the company I work for. If any of the executives had to live and work like the line workers at our plant for one week, maybe salaries and work hours would actually change to benefit the average person.

One problem with the data used to show Americans are working less is that it includes those who are retired from their major life career. Does the research take into account that many of these retirees are actually working in new careers, or otherwise contribute to the workforce through volunteer positions? Are these hours counted in this data? Also, in the example of the Chinese workers putting in Sunday hours to complete a job, it’s assumed that the job actually required those hours. How do we know that Americans in a similar field would have to necessarily spend as many hours to do the same job? Perhaps the same group of workers in America have done a smiliar job many times over that the Chinese group is perhaps doing for the first time. Besides, Sunday in America is for many (but not all) a day of rest, but is it in China? Maybe that’s just another work day for them, and they are compensated on other days for time off. In Germany, workers get lots more time off than we do in the US, but their economy is largely intact and doing well. No one would accuse the Germans of being slackers.

I totally agree with this article. I am the owner of a business of about 500 employees where most start at 11 dollars an hour. 90% of our workforce is scheduled 40 hours, but we are lucky if our every employee hours worked hits 30 a week. I have some employees that say that they cant work 40 hours because they will make to much and wont get their welfare.

If we do not change our ways then we will be swallowed up by the emerging markets.

I read about a study a while back that found that the more hours spent on the job the less productive people were per hour. People who work longer hours are tired and stressed, so they have a harder time getting things done.

People in China and India are working longer hours but they are probably too exhausted to get a lot done. Plus, because of high levels of poverty middle class people in these countries have servants doing much of the housework giving them more leisure time off the job.

Also, Western Europeans are more productive than Americans, yet they get a lot more vacation time. If Americans took more vacation time they would be healthier and better rested and be far more productive when actually on the job.

“Put it all together, and the researchers figure we’re getting about 117 hours of leisure per week (including sleep), vs. 110 hours in 1965. That’s more than 360 additional idle hours per year. We are a couch-potato nation.”

Wow!! Including sleep time, we have gained 6% more “non-work” time over the past 40 years. Yup, that definitely makes us a “couch-potato” nation.

Who puts this garbage out? That’s right, it’s the CEO of General Electric and his buddies, who now want that 6% of “lost productivity” back and a cut in our salaries as well!!

So much for increasing American living standards – according to “Fortune” magazine, hard work is only supposed to get you more hard work. And the same for your children and your children’s children. Welcome to the new America – brought to you by General Electric.

I find this survey very insulting, I live and work in NYC, I am a mechanical engineer. My typical day starts at 7:30am to 6:30pm my work requires me to also check in and respond to emails 7 days a week. I work hard not for myself or to be patriotic but for my family, New York City is very expensive and the cost of surviving not living is outrageous.The American work force has no choice but to put in extra hours or work an extra job, to afford his/her family the necessities of a good life (ie:health care, education & retirement)I cant speak for the average european worker all I can do is compare their unemployment rate (very high for a productive work force) and vacation/holiday schedule (I would lose clients & projects if I had that much time off).So, I hope the next time when the good & all knowing people of FORTUNE conduct their next survey, they ask the working mothers and parents who work day & night, you know the real work force those who contribute to society.Instead of their staff of pompous over paid journalist and out of touch editors. Thank you,canceling subscription due to laziness.

This is a lot of bull crap. I get 2 weeks vacation a year after 15 years of working at the same company. On the weekends, I’m doing housework and landscape work. What a slap in the face.

It is said the American people cannot expect a fair share of the wealth this country creates so abundantly because we have a fundamental flaw in our moral character. We are lazy!

The article was insulting enough without having to insult the American workers intelligence.

cnn should refrain from spreading the lies of multi-national corporate public relations campaigns.

Read em and weep.

http://money.cnn.com/2003/10/06/pf/work_less/

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/41404/

That article is factually wrong and I can find at least a dozen more sources if necessary.

Some Americans are layzy. Most Americans are working far too many hours. This leads to all kinds of probelms in society , health and home life. The work environment will continue to deteriorate becasue corporate America will drive down pay, benefits and working conditions as long as we have chinese, indians and lationos accepting these conditions. People from these countries are destroying the American way of life.

American workers aren’t lazy we’re doomed.

Being at the top of the economic food chain we will suffer the worst in the new global economy. I don’t care how many hours I work I’ll always be more expensive than a foreign worker companies can hire for a third or forth of my pay plus not having to offer other benefits such as health care, pensions, contributions to 401ks not to mention other lucrative incentives these countries surly offer for our biggest companies to set up shop there.

The developing nations better develop pretty fast so they can buy their own stuff because when the American worker’s loose their jobs or have to work for a lot less and stop consuming, look out economy!

That’s crap. Everyone I know works exceedingly hard. I think it’s attributed to the habit of blaming things on the people, and not the failures of the prevalent structure. The structure is falling apart. Wealth is grossly, dangerously stratified, and there needs to be drastic, large-scale changes made to the system–Write an article about that.

I think the report is scewed and doesn’t take all factors into account. A recent article on CNN: http://money.cnn.com/2007/06/12/pf/vacation_days_worldwide/#table, indicated that when you look at paid vacation time and number of holidays by developed country, the US is near the bottom. People in Europe get 30 days vacation + 14 holidays on average per year, with some overseas countries getting even more than that while the average in the USA is about 15 days vacation and 10 days holiday of which the average US worker doesn’t even use all of the vacation days they get. If you factor this in, I think you get a more even picture of work.

Does this article include America IT workers? We have to work 40 hours a week to maintain systems for the business. Then we make upgrades and changes every night in the middle of the night. We call out to our global vendor’s call centers that “follow the sun” for support during these changes and upgrades. Their cheaper “expertise” read from a troubleshooting script and are completely useless. I heard chickens and pigs in the background the other night. We work 60-70 hours a week every week. How much more can we do?

Being a European, Americans seem more like workaholics to me. People here put in long hours and/or have more than one job. Wages are nothing to brag about. Neither are the alloted vacation days. Health insurance and pensions are falling by the way side. Meanwhile big corporations are making out like bandits. For the longest time the American working class has been able to sustain itself because of the availabity of easy credit. We’ll see what happens when that ends.

I work at least 60hrs per week, I am a commissioned salesperson. If I don’t put in the hours I could lose an opportunity to make money. But many people at the place I work are very lazy, they come in work only as hard as they have to get by, without anyone noticing. But if you truly want to suceed in life you have to put in the time, both at home and work.

I have two weeks vacation a year,most europeans have six starting a new job, go figure. I think your numbers (statistics) are mismanaged, or weighed in error.

I think there are a few basic points. When we Say America is getting lazy, we are talking about the broad middle class. I think the people who do want to get ahead in America are the hardest and most efficient people in the world. But there aren’t too many of them. Most of the new generation, thinks that the world owes them a living, or think they are going to live the MTV life, and hang out all the time. I also think there is a large portion of the new generation who doesn’t think it makes sense to work hard, because there is very little chance to work your way into the American dream. The difference in their life between working an extra 10 hours, is minimal at best, and they say, “Why Bother”.

Just a reply to somebody who said obesity is due to working lessser time !!!.
i’m sorry, But I’m really surprised to hear that!!!In that case in poor countries there are more people not even working!!So, shouldn’t they all be obesse.
Obesity is genetic dear. Even if you did not get it genetically, you could have got it, thanks to fast food habits and the sodas we drink everyday.
It can also be seen this way. I spoke to a Bus driver a few days back and he was upset with the job coz he was growing fat and fatter day by day. And by the way he works two jobs. He’s getting fat coz both the jobs are driving…he just has to sit and drive!!!! Don’t you think linking obesity and waist sizes to getting lazy is a bit awkward!!
Hope that helps.
http://www.youradu.wordpress.com
That’s my blog catch me there.

Fortune and its capitalistic 16th century views.
Corporations have been setting record profits over the last 7 years but they want all the money to stay at the top and they do not want to pay their employees.
I wonder who works harder:The migrant worker working in the fields or the reporter in her air-conditioner cubicle who wrote this article.

Apparently, the writer and the researchers that help shape this article believe everyone in America is either working or sitting on a couch eating. While I agree that Americans are getting fatter, I do not agree that we are getting lazier. How else do we keep up with with our overly scheduled kids who go to softball, basketball, football, swimming, ballet and piano lessons? And how many articles have warned us that we aren’t taking our vacations? Personally, I only get 2 weeks a year with 5 sick days – and actually use them for illnesses!

Obviously, this writer works for a boss whose intentions were clearly for his own purposes. Perhaps, he should tell his own workers to get to work. Personally, I have work to do so I cannot write anything further.

Lazy? Riiiight. I have one 40-hour-a-week job that doesn’t pay enough for my family to live on. So I also work 10-20 hours a week at a part-time job. My spouse also works two part-time jobs. We’re barely making it. I know a lot of people in our boat who are working 2-3 jobs just to break even in the face of medical bills they can’t dig out from under.

Rightt, Americans are sooo lazy: we don’t post comments after breakfast. Everyone just happened to stop commenting at 8:50 AM.

THIS HAS TO BE THE MOST RIDICULOUS ARTICLE I HAVE EVER READ. HOW ARE WE TO COMPARE OUR SELVES TO CHINA,INDIA OR MEXICO? ARE WE NOT PULLING TOYS OUT OF OUR CHILDREN’S HANDS THAT CAME FROM THE EVER COMPETENT CHINESE FACTORIES? AS FOR MEXICO…ISN’T THERE AN ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION ISSUE CONSTANTLY IN THE NEWS OR AM I MISTAKEN? AS TO THE CHARGE OF BEING LAZY…I FOR ONE,TAKE OFFENSE TO THAT
CHARGE. WE GET UP @ 3:45AM (5DAYS A WEEK)-I WORK FROM 6:OO TO 4:30P.M. MIKE WORKS FROM 7:00 TIL 3:30 P.M.,BOTH IN THE CONSTRUCTION FIELD-WHICH MEANS OUR HOURS ARE SUBJECT TO INCREASE AS NEEDED. THAT’S A 53 HOUR WEEK FOR ME AND 40 FOR HIM…NEXT COMES THE 2ND SHIFT @ HOME. COOKING,CLEANING,KIDS,ANIMALS,HOMEWORK,ETC.. THERE IS JUST ENOUGH TIME IN THE DAY TO TAKE A SHOWER AND GO TO BED TO START ALL OVER AGAIN!!!
I’M SURE BY THE TIME COMPANIES OUTSOURCE ALL OUR JOBS THERE WILL BE MORE ARTICLES SAYING HOW WORTHLESS & LAZY THE AMERICAN WORKER IS. AS FOR ME – I DON’T BUY ONE WORD OF THE ARTICLE AND I’M SORRY I READ IT AND WASTED MY VALUABLE TIME RESPONDING (ESPECIALLY SINCE THIS IS ON MY 15 MINUTE LUNCH BREAK).

Each person who already commented said what I was thinking when I read the article. Majority does not agree with the article as whole. The journalist has overexpressed our laziness compared to other countries with little or no labor laws to protect the citizens. Also those same citizens work as much as they do to just survive and have a meal at the end of the day. Middle aged Americans don’t drop dead while work because they’re worked until they drop. Americans don’t work likes slaves thanks to the government protection. I bet if we did not after the overtime or minimum wage laws… corporate fat cats would have us all working for 2 cents a hour for 20 hours. Great 80 cents a day to get 3 hours of sleep. I doubt the employers are forced let the employees have a lunch break too.

Don’t compare America to Asia; paid vs under paid. Of course the under paid has to work more hours, duh.

America is becoming unbelievably lazy. It’s not just about work hours. My younger co-workers think that if they have gotten ANYTHING done, they have worked hard. Never mind if the task, that should have taken an hour and a half, took them four. They still feel they DESERVE to screw-off the rest of the day. As far as they are concerned, it’s not like they didn’t get anything done. And it goes so much further. Their homes are neat but not clean. Their yards are just clean enough to not get a violation. If they do something that makes them exert enough energy to breath heavy, then they have worked hard enough. There are the same amount of hours in my day and my mother’s day and her mother’s day as there are in theirs. Their standards are so low, they are uncomfortable to be around. This is ALL OF THEM. It’s not about how much time is spent working. It’s about whether or not you worked all of that time.

fat and lazy – you bet. let’s sue
Mickey D and get the gov to help
pay the mortgage!

Its all pretty simple really,less pay less quality.

Maybe we’d all be more motivated if we weren’t losing jobs at such an alarming rate to India and illegal immigrants.

My Father is a master builder, and general contractor in Atlanta Georgia. He can’t even find work building decks, because illegal immigrants can do it for half what it costs him to. How? They put 15 people on the job and it’s finished in 3 or 4 hours, at the same hourly rate. Those 15 people are all related, and live in a 3 bedroom house built for a family of 3 or 4 people.

Sorry if we’re too lazy to work for $3 an hour so I can compete with people who are breaking the law just by being here.

Sometimes, I am amazed by how privileged elites brazenly patronize working-class Americans. These people have a tendency to see the world in a very abstract, high-level way – which of course, blinds them to the underlying reality. Who “works” more: a single mother with no education or transportation at three part-time jobs totaling 45 hours per week, or Geoff Colvin writing articles at 30,000 feet encouraging companies to push workers for longer hours and eliminate employer-funded healthcare at 50+ hours a week including the “toils” of zig-zag air travel and staying overnight at expensive suites?

You must be kidding!!!! I just took an early retirement package just to get out!!! I had 5 weeks vacation when I left and I NEVER took more than a week off at a time because I would never of been able to get caught up!!
Not sure who’s not working hard but I do know it’s not the 50 something!!!

comment from Germany.
well,i´ve read that article and was more than astonished….americans are lazy??
in comparison with germans americans work very much!!
3 examples:
we have 3 times as much vacations.

we have nearly the double of public holidays.

we work less than 40 hours on average a week.

and enjoy benefits of which americans would dream of.

and Germany is still the export world champion(which will probably outrun by china next year…a nation of 1.3 billion.germany has “just” 83 million people)

so it´s not about how much hours you work,it´s about how much you get done during the time!!

my job brings me in ontact with dozens of people every day and what i see is thet there are ctually two ” societis’ in this Country. one made up of people who work a lot, infact I dare to sy that many of us put in way over 50, 60 and even 80 hours a week. then there is a growing percentage of people who do not work at all, work on occasion, work part time… etc.
why there is a growing number of ‘lazy workers’ is really multifactorial. the reasons vary from a growing number of wealthy individuals, the longer lives we live, but also the ever more forgiving and complacent welfare system, that allows manyof us to choose, for whatever reason, the no work or as little work as possible attitude. in the end, having lived in two continents, having traveled quite a bit, i feel absolutely confident that the american worker, i mean that one who works, works harde, longer( and pays for more benefits for those who dot work ) that anybody else in the world.

I’m glad I don’t work for this CEO if he equates hard work purely with hours logged on the job. He sounds like a boring, unimaginative drone who wants people sitting around in the office just being seen to pretend to be productive. The advent of sophisticated IT must have saved a lot of time that in 1965 had to be expended on tedious, mundane tasks. I think many Americans work too hard and suffer stress under current working conditions (and I say that as someone who does about 60 hours a week gladly at a job I love.)

What people fail to look at is the new order of the day for businesses is to reduce time, to not to allow workers to do over forty hours a week to save the overtime. It’s easier to bring in another (contract worker) and pay them then allow the rest to do overtime. It’s the fat cats up top looking to increase their bottom line then improve their employee’s way of life. It’s like these companies that give a production bonus of a couple of hundred dollars rather than give you a pay raise. The companies that hire contract works for a 90 day contract and then let them go at the end no matter what kind of worker they are just to save from brining them on full time and having to pay for health care. This is the reason that there is a health care problem in this country. They pay pennies in these border town to produce items for industries and take away food from U.S. workers plate.

Im working harder, 40 hours a week, and im depressed and miserable. Im just staying afloat. On the other hand, i see a big corporate executive driving a cadillac complaining about how americans are lazy.

Lets shipping all the corporate executives over to China and India, let em compete for a executive job over there.

What a baffling article. It seems to imply that all work levels are voluntary – in other words, people aren’t working as much because they are lazy. Actually, perhaps they got fired or had their hours chopped.

Plenty of people still work really long hours in this country. And which is more valuable, a doctor working 25 hours a week in America, or a manual laborer working 60 hours in Thailand?

This research or what ever it is called …is based on no correct and complete data. When you do a research..you gotta take the complete scenario into account.
yya it is correct that the average number of hours we in USA work is less than the ROW. But why is that so. It’s because…most middle class and upper class families in Asian and African countries and to that matter some European countries where man power is less costlier have maids to take care of house hold. Every people come to your home to vaccum it, wash your clothes, to drive you to work, and much more. That takes off much burden from them physically. So, they can work more numebr of hours without getting too much strained.
Whereas here?? How many people have a maid to clean your home, how many have a 24 hour maid, How many have drivers?? I don’t think it is even any where near the average for the ROW!!!
That should explain why Americans average number of working hours is less than the Rest Of World. It’s not just because we are getting lazy.

Moreover, also take into consideration,that most baby boomers are retiring or cutting down the numebr of hours they work!! Did your so called research take that into consideratino? I am sure NOT!. Sorry to say, but making illogical statements look true and drawing traffic to websites or to your institutions doesn’t seem appropriate.

I work more than 40 hrs a week. But I know people who work less than that. They are mainly people who travel as consultants. They come around Monday Noon and Leave Thursday Noon. They say they are working for 10 Hrs a day. I dont see that. I understand if the person is consulting for a short term. But their contracts usually go more than a year. Still they travel. I being an IT Consultant move from place to place if it is a long term project. I work for my own company. But people who work for large IT consulting firms usually work less number of hours. Even at critical time they are never there for help. People like them usually lower the efficiency at a work place.

Becoming more like Peru is probably not the wisest of policy goals.

You say the report was done by the UN? Just confirms my belief that they cannot be trusted.

I would imagine that you have worked quite hard on your research and investigating for this report. Also that you have put more than 40 hours a week into your job. So, are we unproductive or overworked?

Americans are the key to the world
economy, without us producing
25% of the food for the world,
and Technology the rest of the
countries would struggle just
to keep alive.
This view that we’re lazy is
a falacy and fraud by some left
wing special interest group which
wants to still drag the American
Economy, which is the best in the
world to 3rd world levels.
Why don’t you go out and get
a real job instead of having
your hand out and asking for
money like the rests of the
spineless jellyfish liberals
out there. The Federal Laws
for the last half a century
gave us a 40 hour work week,
and that gives people down time
to spend with their families
and rest. You probably don’t
need the time because you
haven’t got a real job.

i think we spend way too many productive hours supporting non-productive legislated processes. the federal government has legislated many unfunded rules for security and anti-terrorist activity. i would suggest the hours spent are way more than most people even suspect..

In my 10 years so far of work I have yet to see people slacking because they are lazy. It’s usually because they are bored and not motivated. There aren’t enough rewards. We have lost any kind of job stability. We have a hard time paying our bills. We owe so much more than what we have been able to save, if we have been able to save. It doesn’t seem to matter what we do because there is a lot of B.S. in the business world that never gets addressed. It’s easy, far too easy to blame the people but would that solve the problem? NOOOOO!!! I have taken a graduate management class and usually people are not the problem. It’s the management system that is the problem. A lot of senior managers are complete idiots. We don’t have enough good ones. The baby boom generation, too many of them are whiny and lazy themselves. They delude themselves into thinking they work hard. They are too busy getting lipo and face lifts.

I work in IT. I start work before I even shower in the morning. I generally eat at my desk. TV time at home finds me on the couch with my laptop VPN’ed in to work until I fall a sleep. I analyse data or develop projects as I ride my normal 20 mile loop for my daily work out. I respond to emails from the bathroom. I multitask every part of my life. I am not lazy.

Hours at work (or going to/from work) do not necessarily equate to productivity. However, in this age of “entitlement”, we’re more concerned with everyone getting a fair share. And don’t worry too much about China and India — they’ll experience the same thing down the road in a few generations!

Quite possibly they didn’t even think to survey the productivity benefit of the American Worker. We are one of the most productive nations on earth. Any one with a productivity of 2, can work 35 hours a week and still compete on a global scale.

My husband works a minimum of 50 hours a week. I hardly think that is lazy. He is quite productive in the so-called offtime.

Give the workers more vacation, a better chance to keep their jobs when they get older and “more expensive”, better benefits and the feeling that they will not get screwed over the second the upper management figures that they can save a buck or two if they fire them, and you will get workers who respect you and who will do everything for the company. Until that day comes, we will continue having motivational and productivity issues. Rightfully so!

I didn’t see any mention of productivity ? Working longer hours doesn’t necessarily equate to more productivity.

What about our European friends ? How do they stack up ?

Maybe there should be a lobby against laziness. Does anyone here think the lazies referred to herein have read this article? Of course not, they’re too busy drinking beer on their porches. New bridges and beers, that’s where our taxes are going.

i think the owners of production will be finally happy when we’re working 7 days a week, 24hrs a day for free. only then will they be able to maximize profits to the nth degree.

This story is 100% true. I’m at work right now reading this article and adding a comment to it. I’m on the clock, too. I haven’t worked more than 40 hours in a week in at least five years and haven’t worked on a weekend in even longer. Just look at your co-workers (and yourself) and think of all the people that think they deserve more money to do less. Also, just look at how many obese people we have in the US. We are the laziest country in the world.

Although I can’t agree with many of the assumptions and conclusions of the article, it is good to see that there’s a great deal of interest in the topic. Now, if only the level of economists’ scientific knowledge about the issue could come up to the degree of popular interest in it! Sydney Chapman cracked the code of the relationship between hours of work, productivity and output nearly a century ago but his theory is virtually unknown to the current crop of economists.

I am sorry, but to call us lazy is a bit much. There are people too young to work; there are people too old to work (or retired). They should not have even been included. I am 25 years old and I work very hard for a paycheck that barley covers my bills. Everyone I know is in the same situation as I am in. You work hard just to “get by,” whenever I work extra I try to save it, but something always comes up and my savings disappear. It is not that we are lazy; it is that American Companies would rather hire cheaper labor outside of the United States than within the United States. When the CEO’s are making millions, they frankly don’t care if we at the bottom are just making ends meat; and if they can even save themselves more money by taking what little they are giving me; and giving my job to India or China, they will do that.

While Americans may consider themselves to be hard workers, the fact is that bright, hardworking people, who live in the developing world and speak passable english outnumber bright Americans by about 5:1. Due to transportation and communication technologies, Americans are competing with these folks (like it or not). Workers in these markets cost 10-30% as much as an American worker. Without belaboring the math, I think it is evident that American wages are very likely to fall–perhaps by quite a bit.

I find that the more foreign competition I face in my job, the easier it gets. I and my American colleagues have far better educations and easier lives outside work, allowing for greater focus and productivity. I’ve seen the figures at my company, and what I see is that Americans produce significantly more and better output than their competitors in India. Being compared to them makes me look good while my week keeps getting shorter and shorter.

I like what someone wrote about being task oriented and not so concerned about the hours. I feel very burnt out and I’m only 33. I worked almost an entire year without a vacation. I’m also a graduate student on the aside. I don’t have enough work to do. I wish that I did. I’m smart and a very hard worker. At my last job, I worked from the time I got there (7:30am) until 5:10pm. I would have worked longer if I didn’t have other responsibilities. A lot of people were leaving too at 5pm and why should I stay when I got there before them and I felt like I was going to drop because I had been working at such a frantic pace. I only left because I found a job for almost the same money with a much shorter commute. I was able to continue my education as a result. I put in about 70 hours a week between work and school. Lazy! I hardly think so. I don’t want anything handed to me because I am capable of doing it myself except that there are a lot of cheaters out there. I am so tired. I’m at work wondering what should I do. My boss is almost never hear. He is on vacation again. I worked so hard when I first came here but none of the extra stuff I did mattered so why bother. We are in a different industry. It works differently than most. I would be more productive if I had work and more vacation time. You need the break to feel better.

Poor management in Government has created a lack of motivation. Broken promises and lies add up to negative output. The problems are all management
related. After all, isn’t that why they are called management? Go ahead, continue to outsource your jobs to third world communist countries, the recipe for failure.

Why does anyone give the UN any consideration at all. The UN is one of the most crooked organizations in the world! I say the American worker should be celebrated. All that hard work is paying off as leasure time so why would that make us lazier?

I do my best to seek out jobs that are less than 40 hours a week (usually 35-37.5 hrs/week). When I’m fortunate enough to get a job like that, I skip lunch and take cut the lunchtime from the end of my workday, so I leave earlier. I’m a software engineer and I’ve never had any complaints about my productivity or the quality of my work. My credo is, “work hard when you’re working, then get out of the office in time to have the life you want”.

As Mark Twain says, here’s lies, damn lies, and statistics. Statistics tell us that American worker productivity is going up every year. Statistics tell us that American hours worked have gone down… what, 5% in 40 years? Have productivity gains outstripped this rate? If so, then the math is easy — we’re producing more than we did 40 years ago. If so, then there’s no logical basis for the arguments in this article.

This article says that Americans are lazy in the workforce; yet I’ve also read that Americans take fewer vacation days than almost any other nationality. Personally, I’m tired of the media telling us what we’re doing wrong! Let’s start the discussion about what Americans are doing right – I know there must be something!!!

Most Americans know only work and chores. Do the math – work and commute all day, then who cares for the home and kids? Once it became mandatory for families to have two incomes, the value of women’s home-based labor was effectively siphoned off to enrich the elites.

As for obesity, research is confirming that stress is the major contributing factor, not to mention no time for exercise, no time to prepare healthy meals. Gawd, what do they think our mothers spent all day doing?

This article IS what is wrong with America today.

Too many people sitting at desks pushing pieces of paper back and forth to someone elses desk.

Geoff Colvin needs to go get a real job.

Ummm yeah..Im gonna have to go ahead and uh…disagree with you here…

I work more than 50 hours aweek not to mention the 2 hours a day commute.

My brother works for a bank in zurich CH and tells me all his Swiss counterparts form a single file line at 17:00 every day to leave the office while he is still toilling away. His manager as he walks out the door at 17:01 tells my brother he wishes more Americans worked for him…

Also, How much loinger before families are completely torn apart by hard working mothers and fathers…

I work 5 days a week from 7 AM until 5 PM. Slacker who ?!?
Pay is not bad. But if prices keep going up watch out inflation will heat things up and up!

That’s funny. Americans actually get less vacation time than most of the developed world, e.g. Europe, Australia. Americans constantly take work home, e.g. teacher grading papers, office employees carrying laptops so they can field emails and write reports from home after hours. As for motivation, Americans have been facing downsizing of salaries, pensions, and health benefits. Americans are facing unemployment in their chosen professions as skilled jobs go overseas where salaries and benefits are a fraction of the comparable U.S. rates. Young folks entering the job markets have no incentives to pursue difficult math, science and engineering disciplines as the salaries in these fields are dramatically shrinking due to corporate offshoring practices. Finally, all that free/global market malarkey is a big lie. The jobs go to countries with totalitarian governments that permit sweatshop working conditions, lack environmental controls, are rife with corruption, and are not really “free” markets at all. You cannot compete with slavery, folks, no matter how much these corporate types would like you to believe it.

Who did this research and what data did they use? I’m a single man with no kids and I work ON AVERAGE 10-12 hours A DAY, 6-8 on the weekends. Most of my friends work at least 50 hours per week. Maybe the poll was only taken of the lazy Gen Y?

I think this is good news. More people globally need to spend less time at work and more time at raising their children, less time toiling and more time enjoying the great outdoors before they’re gone, less time stressing and more time relaxing. I wonder what the study says about how “Lazy Americans” are using that extra hour a day, my guess is they’re not wasting it, they’re using it for something other than earning a buck, something ever more important…

Rubbish articles like this that quote stats without references and just spout some right wing fat-cat perspective are the main reason that I’ve never bought your magazine….

The equilibrium mentioned started 6-7 years ago and is seen in disinflation. The ultimate affect will be a lowering of real-estate values (which is where most of the wages go…) which will allow us to make less and still get by. However, the loss will hit on the insurance companies, banks, reits, that hold all that…

Lower wages comes with a price to be paid on a macro level.

There is less incentive to work hard. Raises, bonuses and overtime is harder to come by. It’s all about the bottom line, so the top 2% gets their millions. Corporate America has gone in the wrong direction. The moral values that America once has, slowly has diminished by corporate bullying and greed.

No, American workers aren’t lazy. They’re just tired of exploitation, crooked CEOs, and politics that favor those self-same criminals over the people that actually DO the work.

Face it, it’s hard to compete with third-world sweatshops where people work for $1.00 a day just to eat a single meal (if they get THAT much). Or try competing with countries that use political prisoners as a free labor pool!

The solution: STOP BUYING THESE GOODS. Send your most-hated CEO to the poorhouse!

This article is typical of the attitude of corporate America towards the working class–skewing the meaning behind studies like this and attributing blame on the lazy American working class.

To be sure, I have not read this study, but by the author’s own admission, the study includes in its average the working hours of workers in developing and third world countries, who typically work close to 100 hours a week, many of whom work in sweatshop conditions, and who barely receive bathroom breaks, much less vacation time. Further, these workers comprise a vast majority of the world’s workers. I suspect that this would have an upward influence on the average hours worked worldwide. Is this the standard that we want to hold ourselves to–the lowest common denominator? The article also fails to point out that many studies now find that workers are actually using far less of their allocated vacation and sick time, and even for workers that are working 9 to 5 (I don’t know anyone who works 9 to 5 frankly), the amount of productivity expected has gone up dramatically.

A word to the wise–Mr. Colvin, the editors at Fortune, and corporate executives might want to keep these sorts of bizarre theories to themselves. Keep up these kinds of outrageous accusations against the American working class, and they might inspire something that they haven’t had to worry about in decades–a new American labor movement.

Americans have become lazy when it comes to exercise…our bellies prove that. As far as work goes, I think we work hard but sadly, we have also become greedy. I have a friend for example that refuses to take any job that pays less than 12 an hour which explains why he lives with his sister doing odd jobs.
Not every American is lazy, just like not every American is fat. However, the speed that jobs are going overseas speaks volumes that we are a labor force that is being squeezed out and part of it is our own fault by demanding more. It is sad but I don’t always blame the companies every time I heard about one moving.

My experience in the IT business shows that people fall into one of two groups. Those who are very bright and creative and those who work very hard. The key is the production. And hands down the most productive employees are in America.

I’d say in general…YES however, this may or may not be the case for everyone and it is an opinion so calm down and remember that everyone is entitled to one before you get upset with it. Here it is: The problem with America is that we are like house pets. We’ve forgotten what it’s like to hunt on an empty stomach. We’ve lost our “hunger” because we’re so use to eating off the fat of the land expecting more and not acting to better our situation(s). To those that need to hear this; lower your expectations and suck it up. We definitely have it in us as Americans to do better but, some of us just choose to be content with where we are. There it is. Thank you.

I don’t think we are getting lazy. American’s is a nation that takes the least amount of vacation days in a year. I think the employers are lacking in upgrading the technology that would increase efficiencies, instead of upgrading there spending there money to buy & build Plants overseas cause it alot easier there to run a bussiness or get one running. I don’t think this is the American Citizens faults. It a majority of things one of the biggest thing is our Taxes here from our over obese government that wastes our money more then if they would allow us american’s to spend that money to start more companies here. Also alot of these companies are deaf to listening to there employees on how to improve savings and improving efficiencies to make things cheaper to run. These companies are to busy pleasing there share holders then working as a team within there companies in America. So are Americans Lazy the answer is No. We as Americans are just getting sick of the Bullcrap that is being fed down our throats and not getting anything in return. Also we punish those with Ideas to improve companies then to look at the ideas, because those in charge or higher up in the company feel they didn’t think of it, because they have the piece of paper that says they should be smarter then those that are doing the job hands on! Pretty much if we don’t all start working like a Team and find solution on how to make things better, it will only get worse in this country. We need to stop bitching at each other, and just work as One big team and Win the compitition that is now competeing among the world, and not just inside of America no more! I work 75 hours a Week so I am trying but My ideas to save money or improve the company don’t seem to matter unless those with book smarts feel they thought of it first!

This article is statistically misleading because it reports the average hours per individual worker. It does not consider average hours per working age person. In 1960, the average worker may have worked more hours, but the workforce was only 55% of working age popualtion compared to 64% today because women have entered the workforce in large numbers. For example, in 1960 I may have worked 45 hours and today only work 40, but my wife might not have worked at all and today 20. In this survey, we would bring average hours per worker down to 30, whereas our family hours actually went up from 45 to 60. But notice when corporations publicize income figures they publish household income (because it has gone up while per worker income is down in real terms); then, when they publish work hour figures they do it per worker. Don’t believe misleading statistics like this – ask the authors how much large corporate shareholders and CEOs are working relative to income.

Unfortunatly we are being paid to be slackers. Organized labor has a stranglehold on it’s members. Pride in work well done, common sense and very often ethical,honest behavior by businesses are punishable by committee man.

Having worked in Taiwan for two years, I can tell you that there’s a huge difference between number of hours worked and productivity. I used to work with a Taiwanese man who would work 12-14 hour days on a regular basis, yet accomplish very little because he wasn’t working efficiently. Eventually, he was let go and, spending at least 33% less time a day, we accomplished twice as much. I also think it’s misleading to compare a country like ours, where there are strict labor laws regarding hours and overtime in place and powerful unions to enforce them, with other countries. I’m sure a lot of workers wouldn’t mind working extra time, but their companies or unions won’t allow them to. You also can’t tell me that the movement in the retail sector towards more part-time labor doesn’t hurt the average as well.

The bottom-line is that counting hours is about the worst measure of productivity you can have. It’s not how much time you spend, but how you spend it that really matters.

Don’t believe a word that comes out of the mouth of a CEO or corp. exec concerning the productivity of an American worker. They should look at their own bloated salaries relative to their performance before they cast stones. Do you think for a minute they are worth the millions they make even if the companies they lead are loosing $$’s

The author states that he is rolling into this number the burgeoning retired population and people “who don’t work or work partime”, so he is comparing two unlike things and coming up with an irrational conclusion. If you want to measure productivity, you need to measure what actually workers are doing. We are given and take less vacation than anyone in the developed world. Other articles state we are working much longer weeks than 40 years ago on average, and it now requires two people to support at family, not one. It is expensive to live here, compared to developing countries where lower wages can still get you a pretty nice living. India now has a middle class larger than the entire population of the US! Who funded this research? While US corporations are making record profits, avoiding american taxes often by basing themselves elsewhere (Haliburton), and CEO’s are earing salaries and bonuses obscenely higher than those in the rest of the world. American wages stay flat. Hmm.

No mention of the hours spent at home on the computer, cell phone or crackberries.

No mention of the Middle Class Doughnut Hole in healthcare coverage, disappearing pensions, and other disappearing benefits.

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I hate generalizations like this because it undermines the Americans that work very hard and for very little I might add comparatively speaking. We get very little vacation time when compared to the rest of the world. We are sleep deprived and there are people that have very long commutes and quite often we all get stuck in very long traffic jams. This article really gets to me because I work very hard and go to school. I’m tired and need more vacation time so that I can be more productive. We highly productive people need to be more vocal so non-Americans know that there are plenty of hard-working people who deserve more vacation time!

The hours supplied in the article may mean something in terms of overall time, but most, if not all, developed European countries, take the entire summer off or have the equivalent or close to it in leave.

Add to the American “working” hours commute times to get a picture of what is not leisure time and adds to stress. Many cities and their immediate burbs do not still have adequate public transportation.

Additionally, many organizations are disorganized, stretched, into too many things, and, therefore, don’t work smart. This adds to the workload and stress and results in many Americans being contacted while on vacation or sick, which should be the rare exception.

This was one of the most absurd and stupid articles that I have ever read. The American workforce is more engaged than ever given all the technology. We can no longer go on vacations, stay at home sick, etc. without logging on to our laptops, blackberries, cell phones, etc. Did anyone attempt to include all that time in the big picture?? I have read other studies indicating that too few Americans are even taking vacations and that taking more than 2 consecutive weeks is one the decline. I grew up on a labor intensive farm in the 60s and truly know all about hard labor. As an agriculture banker today, I may not be working as physical hard as a farmer, but I am still working hard! Get a grip you ^%$$^%$%$ idiot!!

Interesting but you lost all credibility when you said Britain works harder. This is a country where 1/3 of all households receive at least 50% of their income from the government.

I spent much time in industrialized countries in Europe and Asia and, while many people spend many hours on “the job”, they are often just taking up space.

The thing that’s important is total useful output per person which includes market value and productivity.

Since foriegners have recently lost millions of dollars investing in US mortgage backed securities, I guess this means that the world will now preceive Americans to be lazy deadbeats.

Stupid Article. I’ll work more than 48 hours a week when I get the same vacation that these “Harder working” countries get.

KS Queens NY,
Do not take this article so personal, it did not say KS is the cause and she is lazy, it is referring to the American people as a whole. And I have to say I agree more and more, the american people feel entitled to everything nowadays with lifting a finger.
Things need to change.

I am an Norwegian who came by this article by chance. At my workplace we work 35,5 h/week, have 5 weeks of paid holidays and women get 1 year paid absence when they have a baby. Seeing the standards of the ordinary Americans (or chinese!) is something, but hearing a CEO complaining about lazy Americans is something of a surprise. I think most Americans working for minimum wage would deserve better pay and more social rights. Trying to bring to bring US down to Chinese standards seem like the wrong way to go.

I think the piece mentions some good points but misses just as many. I also do not think your asking the right questions.

I work for a South Korean owned company in America. In Korea they work harder and longer. In America we work smarter. I can not say where the company gets the most for it’s money but we produce 2x as much per man hour as any operation in Korea. We are “on the clock” so too speak for 7hrs 40min a day but anyone with managment knowledge will tell you you only get 6hrs of work out of an employee in an 8 hr day. They average 14hr days.

This has got to be one of the most ignorant comments I’ve ever heard. Lazy? Are you kidding me?! I live and work in San Diego and Los Angeles Counties where most people commute for hours, work an average of 5-60 hours per week salary and vacation once every 3 years. Lazy? No.

I am an engineer working in the Citrus industry, I would like who ever thinks Americans are working less would take a few minutes to leave their plush office and come out to the real world and see what people are doing to make a living. Frankly I think the author hasn’t a clue what the working class has to do in America to make a living.

Every single one of the comments made have very valid points. One of the most interesting was from the Norwegian citizen. The research that the writer based this article on is completly skewed or just plain inaccurate. You can’t compare apples to oranges or third world countries to developed countries. There is so much more factual evidence out there that the writer missed that I think maybe he was either at the water cooler too long or working from home half asleep and counting that as “productive” time. Fortune magazine needs to reevaluate their mindset.

This is hilarious…on the same page that provided the link to this article is another link showing how Americans have 3rd fewest vacation days among 45 industrialized countries (we did, at least, beat Vietnam. Barely.).

If you are an American who has ever lied and worked overseas, you will know the facts supporting this article are suspect at best. Here, in Atlanta, I routinely get in traffic jams as I head to work at 6AM, and again as I return home around 7PM. That means a LOT of other people have the same hours I do. Show me one other country in the world that routinely has commuter traffic like that…. most places are sound asleep at those hours.

We don’t take siestas or reposas. We commute much longer distances than probably any other nation in the world. Many of us have second and third jobs to make ends meet. We have a whole industry devoted to taking care of our kids since most families cannot afford to have just one working member. And we do not have laws that mandate paid vacation. Did any of this get factored into the “laziness factor”?

All this makes me wonder how much critical thought went into the research and writing of this article.

I would love to see the breakdown of how many hourly vs salary workers are working less than 48 hours a week. I think this is caused more by corporate cost cutting (it is expensive to pay overtime so companies won’t allow it) than laziness. Every salary person I know works around 60 hours a week minimum. We just have to donate 1/2 week free to our company! And forget about skipping out early to make up for it, doesn’t happen.

Most Americans are not as hardworking as their parents. Their parents were also dedicated to companies that trained and took care of them thru their whole careers. Companies now want someone fully trained and do not nurture younger staff. Young people do not have that allegiance to companies and feel they are entitled to better conditions; and if not, they will take more breaks and time off from work. Companies are no longer run and owned by Americans exclusively. If you want to do somthing about foreign workers making more than us…BUY AMERICAN. Unions will probably go the way of the dinosaurs. They have been branded as supporting the incompetent, lazy American workers, far too long. True or False.

How about working smarter ?

- If the CEO
cant come up with ways to work intelligently – It is He who is
not competitive.

I believe we can get harder working CEO;s for far less money overseas.
DG

Of course not. I think if we had a better work life balance that it would be much better. Most of these countries have paid national holidays as well as 4-5 weeks vacation from day one on the job. We only have 10-12 holidays and not everyone gets them. You have to work 5-7 years to get more than 2weeks paid vacation. Let’s move on to another topic…

It is all about leadership. In the absence of good leadership people will not be as motivated to work hard. There is no loyalty to the workforce and consequently no loyalty to the business entity. Leadership is just concerned about their salaries and bonuses and stock options and what they can do in the short time to impress Wall Street.

I think the answer to “Are Americans too lazy?” is pretty obvious: just check the “waistline index”. Obesity is epidemic in the US. We didn’t get that way by overworking.

Actually, that’s exactly how we got that way. People are spending nearly all their waking hours sitting behind desks, or sitting in cars commuting to and from those desks, with neither time nor energy left for the physical activity they so desperately need.

Forty years ago, the average middle-class family had a single income and more children than we do today. Yet they were able to afford to buy a house, buy a new car once in a while, take vacations, etc. Now families like that are struggling on two incomes, buying used cars, over their heads in mortgage debt, and vacations? That would require taking time off from work! There was a time when 9-5 work meant from 9 am to 5 pm, and a lunch hour really was an hour. Now 9-5 is 8 am to some time past 5 pm, and doesn’t include the 15 minutes you can take for lunch if you want to risk management’s disapproval by not eating at your desk.

The author of this article could give lectures on how to lie with statistics. For example, he admits at one point “Compounding the effect, fewer of us work at all, with growing numbers of people spending more time in retirement.” So, when he says that “We have increased our leisure time enormously over the past 40 years — so much so that it “corresponds roughly to an additional five to ten weeks of vacation a year,” he’s averaging in retired people who are now living longer, for example, with working people, and getting his 5-10 weeks. He is no doubt counting salaried employees (a category that was massively expanded by the current administration) as 40 hours a week, despite the fact that few of them (other, of course, than senior editors-at-large and corporate CEOs) get out of the office anywhere close to that. How about people holding two part-time jobs: is he counting them as one person working 60 hours, or two people working 30 hours each? He doesn’t say. We know he’s included retired people in here; he admitted it. How about other non-workers? Is he also averaging them in? Saying that we have 5-10 weeks more vacation time (that’s more time than most people I know have taken in the last five years put together) because there are people who are not working is like saying that if you put one hand in ice and the other hand in boiling water, on the average your hands will be at a comfortable temperature.

Take my husband, for example: a salaried employee of a consulting company. He works about 50 hours a week. He’s only allowed to take time off (including Federal holidays, sick leave, paid vacation, etc.) if he gets all the necessary work done either before or afterwards because “nobody else can do it.” Paid time off isn’t time off for him; it’s just permission to shift some hours of work to a different day. We haven’t had a vacation longer than a 4-day Thanksgiving weekend in over a decade.

And the rest of the world? American workers get less vacation time, less sick leave, fewer holidays, much less family leave, and far lower health benefits than the workers in almost any other Western country. We’re working harder, and longer, for proportionally less pay, than our parents did. Except, as it happens, for corporate upper management; the ratio of their salaries to those of their employees has skyrocketed over that time.

There’s a problem, all right, but that problem isn’t on the workers’ end.

This article just “irks” me from every angle. If we think that someone in China or India can do it so much better…than let’s just outsource everything. Let’s face it…the jobs being outsourced are those that are mindless. The work that requires creative ingenuity, business acumen and knowledge and that makes us the wonderful country that exists today is still being done right here in the USA.

In terms of obesity…we are sitting more at our desks in front of computers or in our cars driving hour plus commutes. What do we expect? Dead metabolisms combined with fast food life styles are more likely the culprit of obesity, not laziness in and of itself.
Furthermore, Sunday should be a day of rest…those corporations that feel that having a warm body present on a Sunday, versus having a well adjusted mind and soul are probably short lived for this earth anyway and not worthy of truly intelligent employees who understand the benefits of a work/life balance. Ever hear the phrase ‘going postal’?, Employee burnout will cost more than 100 days of employees working ovwertime and weekends.

In Europe they generally start with 6 weeks paid vacation and 2 for the US. Some countries in Latin America have holidays every month. I’m not really worried about being compared to China or Mexico where conditions are often poor and the workers are usually treated like slave labor. We may not work as hard as generations past but we still put in plenty of hours.

I’m not sure if counting the average of working hours should be the considerable factor. Perhaps it’s more to do with the quality of our products, our production, and the lessening of bureaucracy within corporations.

While we may have and produce quality products – our service industry is lacking, our production capability is poor, and most corporations can take more than a week to push a simple piece of paper through.

Without per-hour efficiency taken into account, this is a useless comparison. The article is not an apples to apples comparison.

Another thing to consider -American/European consumerism is fueling overseas growth. Reducing the buying power of the average American/European means fewer luxury goods are purchased. In short, the global economy needs the average American/European to earn excess money to pay for development in other countries. It is no wonder that the majority of luxury goods production is done in developing countries. The income gap is too significant between the average Chinese worker and the average American worker to sustain continued growth in luxury goods.

It is more likely that the American or European worker will continue to receive more income than their counterparts in the developing world, until demand for luxury goods increases in those countries enough to balance the economies. That balance will require global standards of living to increase to a commiserate level with the United States rather than a significant drop in the SOL in the US if the economy is going to continue to expand.

Every comment that focused on the # of hrs demonstrates what has happened to America. It just shows that we have lost the ability to analyze situations. I was also a teaching assistant at MIT for 4 years and every year I saw the quality of students come down. Our math and engineering skills have diminished at an alarming rate. I’ve worked in engineering companies and on Wall Street and it has nothing to do with the # of hours worked, rather inefficiency. There is no reason you can’t finish all your work if you truly worked a full 8 hrs. Rather, count the amount of time you’re chatting about unimportant things, checking personal email, surfing the web. A little bit is fine, but if you were honest, there’s way too much time wasted on those things.

Most professionals are working as hard or harder than our previous generations. 60-70 hour weeks are common. However, corporations broke the social contract in the 70’s and 80’s that us to provide incentive for hourly workers and some salary workers to “give their all” to the company. Many of these folks were rewarded for their hard work by layoffs, pension fund eliminations and forced early retirements. Can you really blame the average American for not showing loyalty and therefor, working harder when there is no return on their investment? I also ask my younger colleagues about their values and they tell me family and friends are more important to them than work. It remains to be seen if that attitude is healthy or leads us down a path of being as uncompetative as Western Europe. This new generation seems happier than mine. Do I sound jealous?

I think the dramatic increase in technology has a lot to due with less hours at work. The hours we spend are now much more efficient than years past. Think of how computers and cell phones have changed our society. Certainly the ease of communication has got to manifest itself in some way in the work force. You call it “lazy” – I call it “efficient.”

Biggest load of bull I ever read. Since it originates from the UN, one can safely assume that this is rubbish

Is this about rich people. because every one i know works more then 50 hrs. I work about 50 hrs a week. So i think this is wrong. We should get pay more then other people. that is the goal for every one.

I think the problem is Americans are far too consumed with the almighty dollar. We do work hard, we are productive, and we want too much.
Lynn fr/ Atlanta said:
“Americans work harder than almost any other nation in the world. We have less vacation time, less benefits, and less guarentee of a decent retirement than ANY of the European nations or Canada.”.

We also pay the LEAST amount of taxes! WE spend too much, things cost toom much, and we expect to have more than our parents ever did. If we learn to slow down and accept LESS (ha ha ha) then perhaps we will enjoy life more and not be so consumed with CONSUMPTION, and be healthier too!

I echo the comments of many others here. I do not know many people who work 9-5. Most of my acquaintances have hours of 7-4 or 8-5 with a 30 or 45 minute lunch break.Most also work another 1-3 hours past their official time and often work at home. This includes my ‘30-something’ children who work and average 11 hours day. I work 65 hours a week as a consultant doing contract work. If I don’t produce, I don’t get the work. No vacation in 7 years, and work many of the few holidays that we get in the US.I do not see coworkers working short hours or lazing off. Part-time workers at places like bigbox stores and grocery stores may do less than 40 hours a week but most of them don’t seem to be lazy with their work either, so hours worked don’t necessarily correlate with productivity or laziness. People in other countries do generally seem to have more holidays and other time off as I have seen working in other countries in the past. From personal observation and experience I can’t believe the basis of this article.

This article is a joke. There is no detail about what the study actually measures. Where is the detail? More people than ever are working salaried positions that require “casual” (unpaid and often unreported) overtime. People are taking less vacations. Also, we have more women in the workplace than average across the globe. Pregnant women tend to take time off (duh), did they account for this? Did they account for more people working part time jobs for any number of reasons? More importantly, where does the data from foreign countries (like Mexico) come from? Is it reliable? This article is going against what most other studies have found. I get the feeling the author is simply trying to “stir the pot” so to speak.

Many are and I believe its sparked by our Welfare system that pays peole to not work. Many of us, especially in the field of education put in over 40 hours a week if we do our job well. I hope the accountability under NCLB catches up to those who put in their time for a paycheck. We need some peosonal accountability in all jobs or I agree, someone else will do them and our country gives everything away to those who make the money.

In general the issue that has to be reviewed is not the quantity of time spent, but rather the direct results. I am an American Expat in Mexico City and to be honest the work weeks in Mexico are much longer than in the US. In fact, as a CPA, the average week here is around 70+ hours.

However, it is also important to note that in many different parts of the world as a director you have to do a substantial amount of the work, be a trainer, mentor, coach along with reviewing the work of your subordinates.

Would it be fair to equate the UAW, and the products they produce with the now number 1 auto maker in the world that just delivered a huge blow to our economy?

Geoff Colvin, what are you smoking? I work in the computer industry. My current job has me working about 60 hours OT a week, my previous 2 jobs had me working 80 hrs OT a week and 40 hrs a week OT respectively. the majority of my peers work 20 hrs OT a week. We work that much OT without complaint because we need our jobs. All of our jobs are in the process of getting moved overseas to less skilled technicians that can’t even speak English. Right now, heads of large companies would like you to believe that they can’t find skilled labor her ein the USA because labor is cheaper overseas for the time being. the reason I say for the time being is that the people overseas will soon realize their income potential and want raises, etc. Basically this will turn the US economy into a economy of consumerists and we will all be working at WalMart.

Like so many others, I think this is a question of productivity, not hours in the office. The expectation of always being available, especially when working on a team that has members in every time zone, means that I am often checking email from home late at night. At the same time, I usually leave before 5 in order to hit the gym, grab an early dinner or something non-work related. Do I feel guilty? No, because I make up for it later. My boss’s philosophy is as long as the work gets done and done well, the hours worked aren’t that important.

Americans work less hours because their wathing the clock so they can beat rush hour which in chicago starts at 230 and goes to 700. they have kids they are in multiple activities and at different locations. then theirs dinner, homework, housework. Yada Yada Yada. This guy must be single or employ a maid, chef, nanny and chauffer!!!!!!!!!

Just a month ago, I read an AP newspaper story about how Americans work much more than the rest of the world, per week, and have less vacation time than European countries. It had “facts” and “statistics” too.

I wonder if this kind of story is meant to support upper management and big corportations. Yes, that may sound cliche, but almost all of the people I know are hard workers by any standard, both poor and middle class. This doesn’t even include housework, volunteer work, raising kids, etc.

Lastly, hasn’t anyone noticed the studies about productivity? For 3 or 4 weeks, a 50 hour workweek boasts one’s productivity greatly. However after this time, productivity drops below the productivity of a 40 hour workweek.

I think when we look at the nation as a whole, this article is probably a pretty good reflection. Unfortunately,this does not apply to those of us who are actually out there working. We must remember that our welfare brother n are also included in this survey. Take their lack of ability to even help themselves after a hurricane and the rest of the Americans who think they deserve a handout for doing nothing and our performance is pretty sad compared to the rest of the world. Yet people who support socialized systems are happily pushing us right into the welfare state where no one will work but yet everyone will have everything. Wait that didn’t work in the USSR why do we think it will work here. To those of us who work, most likely the ones reading such articles, keep up the good work. To those who are at home sitting on their butts get out and get a job and stop asking everyone for a handout. After all if everyone asked for a hand out who will be the people who be giving them? China, France, who would want to support the lazy Americans?

I work 8am to 4:30pm with a 30 minute lunchtime. I work hard and would gladly put in more hours but we are told we can’t work overtime (no money to pay us overtime wages) and no comp time. I also get one vacation day and one sick day a month. If you go to a doctor’s appointment there goes your one sick day a month and one vacation day a month equals to 12 days off a year. I’m not lazy by any means, just have the wrong type of job maybe!

I have learned to treat anything the media says on labor issues with a great deal of skepticism. Let’s not forget that the same media that brings us this report has been telling the American people for years that “Better educational programs in the sciences and math are needed in the United States to prepare our students for careers in the science and engineering fields.” (paraphrased). As a biomedical scientist myself, I can tell you that there is currently a mssive oversupply of trained scientists and engineers in this country. Many of the technology companies who used to employ scientists and engineers in this country have moved their operations overseas, and the few positions that remain here being filled by foreign-born and educated scientists and engineers who do not have the massive college debts that their U.S. counterparts have (and can thus afford to accept lower wages). We have the federal government to thank for that, handing out work visas indiscriminately at the cost of U.S. workers.

The result is that professionals in this country, assuming they are lucky enough to obtain a professional position, have had to work longer hours and be more productive than their predecessors had to be, and they earn such low wages that the benchmarks of the U.S. middle class, buying a home and raising a family, are no longer financially possible. My advice to the people who who conduct these polls is this: Examine your data carefully – is it possible that the average time spent working is so low is because you are only averaging the results of people who had the time to respond to your survey? Do you think people consistently working 11 – 14 hours per day have time to answer your survey?

Mr. Colvin says that U.S. workers are in a competitive global labor market, and we need to do what is necessary in order to compete. But how can we compete for wages when we are not allowed to compete for housing, which is more expensive in the United States than almost anywhere else in the world, and yet, builders refuse to construct smaller, more affordable homes? How can we compete when our medical costs are more than any other nation’s in the world, despite the fact that our quality of medical care is only average? How can we compete when U.S. college students are expected to take on the cost of their education as debt, while students in our top competing nations (India and China) have their education costs covered by the state? How can we compete when hundreds of billions of our tax dollars go to fund illegitimate wars?

In response to your article, Mr. Colvin, I think U.S. workers are already doing everything possible to compete in the global labor market. The question is, why is our government not?

Americans are lazy now becasue we celebrate mediocrity. The people the young workforce looks up to (especially in California) isn’t up to par. We are our own worst enemies!

This is ridiculous!! I work 6:30am – 5:30pm and then conference calls with Asia 9pm – 11pm nearly EVERY NIGHT. It is absurd that anyone needs to work like that.

I’m fed up with this treadmill and idiots that think this is a good thing. Who are you to write this crap!

Lies, Seduction, and more Lies. George Orwell are you watching?

I don’t see how this story can possibly be right. That’s not the America I live in. I’m sure it depends on what group you are looking at, but the people I know and work with work longer hours and take far less vacation time than my parents and their friends. Sure there are lazy Americans, but with a few exceptions, lazy folks remain corporate nobodies and aren’t rewarded for their laziness. Also, basically no wives/mothers worked in prior generations so now you have two members working in most households and both members combining for the household chores as well, so you would have to combine their times to compare to the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s work generation. Did this research take that into account?

I find it difficult to believe that the US has more vacation than anywhere else. American workers are lucky to get two weeks of vacation time a year. In Europe, the average is four weeks. Plus, there are far more public holidays there than in the US.
I’ve worked all over the world, and I’m far more concerned with the lack of efficiency in American businesses and incompetence of American upper management. People here think it’s a miracle when projects get done on time, and within budget. There are far too many long, meaningless meetings that accomplish nothing other than tiring the attendees.
There is such a discrepancy between management and workers salaries that people are also no longer fully vested in their work. They decide that goofing off is one way to obtain some sort of parity.

Yeah right who is doing this study. The US is 44th on the list in time off, each nation listed as more productive gets more time off. The life exepctancy is also dropping in the US, so we are not retiring as well as other countries. It all boils down to working more not less, so what gives with these guys. It is cheaper in other countries but I do not believe they work harder.

Americans are not lazy. They are educated, efficent and very productive. The time on the job is not a measurement of productivity. An educated person can operate far more sophisticated equipment at higher production rates and higher quality levels, then an uneducated 3rd world work force.
I’d like to suggest the recent longevety statistics released may be a result of Job stress in the US.
Working smart is far more valuable then working long.

We as Americans are lazy. We want our cake and eat to, but do not want to do anything for it. A little hard work has only killed the generation in the last 20 years. But the problem is not just working hard, but wanting coporations to take care of us. We want everything for nothing.

A number of Americans are not only lazy but many have a much smaller work-load then they’d like you to think. Lots of people make it sound as if they haven’t got a minute in the day to help anyone else, but along comes a ‘party’ or ‘holiday celebration’ in the office and these people are the first ones in and the last ones out of the event. Never fails.

On the other hand, many Americans do spend a lot of time just trying to get to and from work. I have co-workers who take 3 to 4 hours a day, back and forth, going from home to the office. That’s something totally different, though.

Geoffrey Immelt has been quoted as saying he has worked consistent 100-hour weeks for 20 years. Is that his idea of work-life balance?

People aren’t really working solely for themselves. They are also working for the quarterly profits of their employers such as General Electric.

By the way, most people I know with 6-figure incomes work 50+ hours a week. Even if they’re not on-site, they are accessible by PDAs and work in the evenings and early mornings. This leaves me uncertain about the validity of the figures or the perception of laziness.

I have one word for everyone to consider when comparing today’s leisure time to that of 1965…computers! They do EVRYTHING! Your job probably never requires you to get up from your desk if you really wanted to I bet. All files are elctronically stored. No clerk is required to go to the basement and pull file, with a two hour delay tillit gets back to your desk. You push a button and it comes up! Cars are faster, you can work more efficiently than ever, you don’t have to spend 3 hours of your workweek licking envelopes and typing out a business letter…you type it in WORD and e-mail it. The recipient doesn’t have to wait for it to arrive via USPS, Fed Ex overnights it the original, or you get it in an e-mail document. We work MORE than before, just less hours are required. Please also note how many Americans are also on anxirty medications since 1965 for all the stress from this pace.

Americans have been the most productive for decades. And the most generous. The notable exceptions are CEOs, CFOs and other bloated plutocrats whose salaries exceed the actual value they impute to the companies they run by a factor of 1000. When Fortune columnists start reporting annual incomes within a standard deviation of the national mean income, I might give a toot about their notion of work effort and fair compensation.

I am a young attorney, and I work 55-60 hour weeks. That’s on the low end of the scale. I do not make six figures. I believe the author of this article is simply muckraking; no one can be so earnestly ignorant and offensive.

I think that work to to long is very bad idea for people but is good for stingy company owners.

In 1 hour, how much work can a guy in 1965 complete vs. a guy in 2007? Our tools and approach to work is significantly better due to improved process and methodology. We’ve got experience in lots of areas, vastly superior tools like computers, phones, email, web conferencing. These are huge productivity boosters over Mr. 1965. The amount of work Mr. 2007 can accomplish over Mr. 1965 is easily 10x greater. I know with my access to technology, I have been much more productive in getting projects going, and problems solved a hundred times faster than if I lived in 1965. Of course if I’m so much more efficient, there’s bound to be some slack time when things slow down.

Lazy?? Give me a break. Productivity is up and wages are down. The same can’t be said for CEO salaries that reduce shareholder equity. Fotune has a lot of nerve producing such a one-sided article. Never see anything from Fortune regarding underperforming CEO’s laughing all the way to bank with their Golden parachute compliments of the very workers you’re calling lazy.

Funny how he doesn’t mention vacation time in his article. If you subtract the additional vacation days/weeks that other nations receive, how would our total hours worked in a year compare?

I notice the UN study cites a decline in “working hours.” I’d be interested in know how “working hours” is defined. I struggle to believe that Americans in professional settings are working fewer hours. With the advent of wireless technologies we have created a society of workaholics. I find myself doing my job at home – on my laptop or BlackBerry – late into the evening, while on vacation, while watching my son’s soccer match, while at Church (yes, it’s a sin!) and anyplace else I can connect to the internet. I say with high confidence that my experience is not unique. The number of peers and strangers that I see working as I do is quite high. Respectfully, until you all expand on the research that is the basis of this article, I say the proposition that Americans are lazy and getting lazier is a bunch of bunk!

Your article celebrates the fact that our country has been led down the path of globalistic destruction.Rather than rejoice at the sight of Chinese working seven days a week, and imply that we should do the same so we can compete, you should be talking about the days when we still had good jobs and a middle class compliments of tariffs and protectionism.Your article illustrates exactly what everyone in the media dismissed as conspiracy theories when people protested against nafta, wto, and globalism. We shouldn’t have to work like slaves and wouldn’t if our government wasn’t filled with economic traitors.The loss of jobs and lower standard of living is what many people predicted as a result of globalism and “free trade”.I dare you gutless traitors to print this. I won’t hold my breath.

I was angered by the headline since I felt accused of being Lazy. Who wouldn’t? I saw a comment about Gen Y and realized that in the current environment what company makes it worth your while to really work hard? Companies let people go to improve their balance sheets. And work hard to get ahead – that’s a joke?

In my 20 years working I rarely saw a ‘hard worker’ [defined by # of hours worked] get ahead or promoted. If you put in 45 hrs, then they expect 50; if you put in 60 hrs then expectations are 65 hrs. Then when promotion time comes they find an ‘outsider’ with a “new perspective”.

Getting Americans, especially young ones, to work hard (harder) will be a challenge.

Please don’t forget that Americans have much of their wages reduced by hefty taxes, hence less disposable income. There is less incentive to work extra hours or jobs to increase one’s income only to have it taken away in the form of taxes.

Still, I do believe Americans are less motivated to work than previous generations or other nations. There is an attitude of entitlement among many Americans, and they believe this even though they may not have contributed to the greater wealth, savings, tax base, or productivity of this country.

I have always worked two jobs, obtained multiple degrees, raised a family, started businesses, and volunteered at many local charities. It’s what my grandparents did and also my parents. I don’t know any other way to “get ahead” and contribute to society than to work more – it’s an timeless adage. It is the only way a nation remains competitive and can support a decent standard of living, not only for themselves, but for the generations that follow.

Why do the upcoming generations think it will or should) be different for them?

WE ARE SUCH A MESS!,GETTING FATTER,SHRINKING ,NOW WE ARE LAZY…RIGHT, GO TO EUROPE WHERE I DO NOT KNOW HOW ANYTHING GETS DONE! EVERYONE IS ON HOLIDAY OR FESTIVAL

If this was during the 80’s I would agreed with the article. But today I think Americans understand the term, “Work Hard, Play Hard” mentality. Now if you aggregate it to hours, perhaps the article may have a point. But I think Americans work hard when need to. Also, based on Country GDP, we are still the most properous country in the world. What American’s bring to the table is innovation. I believe that there is no price tag and hours wasted when it comes to being creative and thinking on the best innovation that will revolutionize the world.

The writer forgot that China shuts down for two weeks or more for Lunar New Year. He should try to get things done during that time.

I work for General Motors and I can assure you Americans don’t need to work harder,they need management personel who know what their job is and who hold up their end of the job instead of passing it on to the workers. Most of the management people in GM are “dead weight” and add a lot of extra cost to the “cost of doing business” in America. General Motors hires many temporary supervisors who don’t have the knowledge to do the job and have no idea what it takes to complete a job in an efficient manner. Too much time is spent on “making numbers look good” regardless of what is really happening on the shop floor.

I put in close to 14 to 22 hour days for my job. I have 439 vacation hours that are unused. I have Quadruple the number of accounts that my co-workers. When they ask me what the secret of my success is. It’s easy – hard work.

Quick question with your research. When you say we’re working less are you comparing comparable job functions? If not your whole argument is pretty pointless.

No mention of businesses only offering part-time work to avoid having to pay for vacations and extend benefits to all their workers?
I worked retail and most retail chains like Target, Walmart and fast-growing hospitality places – Starbucks and fast food outlets who are doing the most hiring in this economy have increasing armies of part time workers. So if they only want you for 25 – 30 hours a week that makes you lazy?
I thnk the statistics quoted show that US business is happy to have “lazy” part-time workers so they can avoid the vacation pay, sick pay, and other benefits i.e. health coverage that European companies do pay.

Another garbage statisitc!

I wouldn’t say lazy, I would say we are bored out of our minds. It begins with the education system especially between 6th and 12th grades. We are falling behind the rest of the world. Its all about test taking not learning or using your mind. We are horrible when it comes to math and sciences. But we do know what all the celebrities are up too and whom they are dating. I don’t blame the teachers either. It’s the State’s who have restricted their ability to teach properly and decide what the curriculum will be. I don’t think American’s want to be robots to these Multi National Corporations either. They are screaming to be more creative and inventive.

This is an absolutely ridiculous conclusion to make. Certainly, American’s over all may work fewer hours that years past, but this fails to include volunteer activities as well as time spent on education, etc. So in comparison to 1965, we are getting only 7 more leisure hours per week given that a small proportion of women held jobs outside the home then. It looks to me like we are working more. This truly is a poorly thought through story.

I believe the survey is correct, and results from several things.

Most workers see outlandish deltas between compensation for corporate executives verses “common” workers, while at the same time executives consist more of fluff than substance. Remember, these mega-multi-millionaire executives typically took the easiest college curriculums available – Business Admin.

Secondly, baby-boomers are nearing the end of their careers. Although they typically worked mega-hours during the early and mid times of their career, they are now substantially max’d out for promotions, while at the same time max’ing out in their personal financial positions – resulting in their unwillingness to work beyond 40 hours per week.

Thirdly, the younger workers (generation X and Y) do not put the work place above family and personal time. They typically will not work FREE overtime like the baby-boomers have done during their careers – they just go home and leave ongoing jobs in limbo. What do you think goes through their minds when extremely highly paid corporate executives ask them to work extra hours for free, while these executives typically receive salaries 100 times that of the regular employee?