In the 1950s, the promise of new technologies and skyrocketing productivity led many academics to predict that by the year 2000 we would have a 20-hour workweek. More vacations! More books to read! More time to spend with family and friends! Writers in the 1950s and ’60s regularly imagined such a world, speculating about the massive social adjustments that would be required to accommodate the anticipated explosion in free time.
Instead, in a cruel irony, leisure time is shrinking for many people, and work hours are expanding. Even weekends, once a refuge for many, have been invaded by work. Statistics Canada data confirm that Canadians who work full-time use the weekend to do even more work, both paid and unpaid. Between 1991 and 1999 alone, the proportion of Canadian workers regularly working on weekends jumped from 11 per cent to 18.5 per cent.
In medium and large-sized Canadian firms and organizations, 58 per cent of workers now report work/life conflict and ‘role overload’ – defined simply as “having too much to do in a given amount of time.” This is up sharply from 47 per cent in 1991. Half of Canadian mothers with full-time jobs and one in three fathers with full-time jobs say they are too busy to have any fun. Time use surveys also show that people are sleeping less.
Work interfering with family life
In the U.S. and Japan the situation is similar. American and Japanese workers now work longer hours than workers in any other industrialized country. And a recent U.K. survey revealed that more than half of British full-time workers are so tired they would prefer sleep to more sex, and would happily swap a pay raise for a shorter workweek. In that country, 42 per cent of full-time workers have a workweek longer than 48 hours – a higher proportion than any other country in the European Union. About one third of those surveyed reported that work was interfering with family responsibilities. A century ago, a typical Canadian couple with children worked an average of 111 hours per week of paid and unpaid work. By 2000, that number had risen to 137 hours. Couples with full-time jobs and children work even more: nearly 145 hours a week, when both paid and unpaid work are counted.
Leisure time declines with marriage and with raising children. On average, married people have less free time in a day than single people, and married people with young children have the least amount of free time. In addition, parents are spending more hours at work. Between 1992 and 1998 – the most recent time-use data available – married men and women each clocked an extra two hours per week of paid work.
For this segment of workers, the decline in leisure time has been the direct result of more hours spent on the job. The situation is even graver for single mothers with full-time jobs. According to Statistics Canada, they work an average 75-hour workweek, when paid and unpaid work are combined – more than any other group.
Canada lags behind Europe in vacation time, leisure time
Comparative time-use studies show that Canadians have less free time than most Western Europeans.
The average Danish citizen, for example, has 11 more hours free time each week than the average Canadian. In addition, European workers enjoy up to three times more vacation time. Based on the amount of vacation time provided in relation to years of service, Canadian workers would have to work, on average, 15 years before receiving the vacation time mandated by some European countries after just one year of work.
Long-term Unemployment on the Rise
Canada’s official unemployment rate is just over seven per cent. But this number excludes a growing number of ‘hidden’ unemployed such as involuntary part-timers and ‘discouraged’ workers – those who want work but have given up looking for it. In 2001, for instance, the official unemployment rate in Canada was 7.2 per cent.
Add discouraged workers and the underemployed portion of involuntary part-time work, and the number rises to just above 10 per cent.
In addition, the official figures disguise the fact that long-term unemployment is on the rise. In Canada the proportion of people unemployed for a year or longer has more than doubled over the past 25 years.
Between 1980 and 2001, the average disposable income of couples with children and full-time jobs increased by just over eight per cent. But In 2000, Canadian parents were actually working 206 more hours per year for pay – equal to 26 more eight-hour work days – than they did in 1981.