What Do You Earn?

  While most people don't like to discuss openly what they earn for a year's work, think about how little people are paid for a 2000-hour work year, yes 2000 hours every year, or 100,000 hours over a 50-year period.

  Parade Magazine (the Sunday Supplement in many American newspapers) recently profiled what Americans earn and we earn less here in Britain. If you skip the celebrities, politicians and athletes, you have a base of 124 worker groups. Only 33% of this group earn $50,000(£30,000) a year or more and only 22% earn more than $60,000(£35,000)!!

A study several years ago indicated the average franchisee earns over $120,000(£65,000)!

  The author of a book entitled "White-Collar Sweatshop" suggests that most employees' pay raises have just barely kept pace with inflation during the past decade. In addition, according to the book, companies downsize indiscriminately and the workers left behind must then cover tasks of their former co-workers. This book paints a grim picture of the corporate workplace

Extracts;

  Currently, over 15 million British work more than forty-nine hours each week, some a good bit more. Here's how those numbers break down: Nearly 12 percent of the workforce, about 15 million people, report spending forty-nine to fifty-nine hours weekly at the office; another 11 million, or 8.5 percent, say they spend sixty hours or more there. Most of these people are white-collar professionals: among them, corporate managers, marketing staffers, investment bankers, office administrators, software designers, lawyers, editors, engineers, accountants, business consultants, and the secretaries, word processors, computer programmers, and back-office clerks who support their activities

  Two paychecks means twice as much potential for overwork and exhaustion, with just that much less time left over for child-rearing and other priorities. One recent study of multi-decade work patterns among two-career couples concluded, in the words of Matin Clarkberg, a Cornell University sociologist, "People are working longer hours, and it's not because they want to." Among the study's findings: 43 percent of husbands and 34 percent of wives reported working more hours than they would like.

  Remember lunch hours? The very term has become an anachronism for many inhabitants of the corporate world. Thirty-nine percent of workers surveyed by the National Restaurant Association report that they are too busy to take a lunch break ... they just work through it. Another 45 percent complain that they have less time for lunch than they used to have. While it's tough to tell exactly how much less—two recent surveys concluded that the sixty-minute lunch break has shrunk to either thirty-six or twenty-nine minutes—one conclusion is clear: we're gulping down our sandwiches quicker so that we can speed our way back to work.

  The daily commute has also changed. For many men and women, the hours they spend in their cars or on trains getting to and from their offices used to include precious and uninterrupted moments of quiet which they now use, not for personal relaxation, but to return work-related phone calls they were too busy to respond to during the workday. When they get a free moment, or maybe get stalled in traffic, they check voice mail back at the office for new messages. Odds are, they don't even think of this activity as work; for many, it's just catch-up time. They might even blame themselves for being too disorganized or inefficient at the office to get done everything they need to do.

  People try to minimize the disruption of their home life by playing their own equivalent of the commuter "catch-up" game: they tell themselves that by working at home during the evening, they're making their lives "easier" at the office tomorrow. Of course, they need to tell themselves the same thing when faced with tomorrow's job spill. Or, they can try not to think too much about it; after all, that's just "the way things are."

  Job spill also seeps into the weekend. Although there always were some people—mainly go-getters on the rise and plain old workaholics—who brought office work home with them to do on Saturday and Sunday, the weekend has typically been an inviolate private space, a chance to unwind and get together with relatives or friends or simply relax. As Witold Rybczynski put it in Waiting for the Weekend, "It's a time apart from the world of mundane problems and mundane concerns, from the world of making a living. On weekends time stands still, and not only because we take off our watches."

  In The Overworked American, Juliet Schor concluded that during the 1980s "U.S. workers have gotten less time off—on the order of three and a half fewer days each year of vacation time, holidays, sick pay, and other paid absences." She added, "This decline is even more striking in that it reverses thirty years of progress in terms of paid time off." Symptomatic of the corporate trend was DuPont's decision to reduce the highest-paid vacation level for employees from seven to four weeks, while also eliminating three companywide holidays from its annual calendar.

  People are working longer and harder, the kind of hours one once might have expected to see logged in only by chief executives or would-be CEOs (or sweatshop workers!). There may be no greater testament to this reality than the best-selling success of Juliet Schor's The Overworked American, which argued, "If present trends continue, by the end of the century Americans will be spending as much time at their jobs as they did back in the nineteen twenties."