Guardian, UK

So long, American work culture

In his last dispatch from Washington Martin Kettle reflects on the one thing he won't miss - America's love affair with 24/7.

Friday August 3, 2001

The President of the United States is a man who enjoys a light work load and who likes to get his sleep. But in this, as in a surprisingly large number of other respects, George Bush is out of touch with his nation.

Indeed if you could select one phrase to describe modern America it might be the one that is heard more and more often on the airwaves and in conversation these days. The phrase? 24/7.

America's well-rested president presides over an increasingly sleepless society. Americans no longer have to travel all the way to Manhattan to find a place that stays up all night. All they need to do is to go down to the local supermarket, or the local fast food restaurant, or even to the nearest local fitness centre. They're all there, 24/7.

"24/7 isn't just an expression. It's a cultural earthquake that is changing the way we live," wrote Bruce Horowitz in a highly informative survey of the spread of the "we never close" culture in USA Today this week.

Twenty-four hours a day factory production is nothing new. Henry Ford did it, big time, nearly a century ago. Small shops frequently never sleep either.

Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's sometime friend and labour secretary, tells a story about getting up in the middle of the night in a New York hotel once and looking across the street at a tailoring shop where the lights still burned to see employees running - running - back and forth from their benches to the supervisor's office at four in the morning.

Sweatshops may have been like that for decades. But what is new is the spread of round the clock work and play into so many other areas of the American economy and of American life. You want to drive a golf ball or lift weights at 4am? Easy. One gym in San Luis Obispo, California, reckons to be busier at that hour than at four in the afternoon. In Pittsburgh even child care is available at all hours.

The idea that a place still open late at night is some melancholy oasis for lonely people is history in the age of 24/7. Horowitz reveals that 237 Home Depot stores are open around the clock across the US, along with 1,298 Wal-Marts and thousands of 7-Eleven and Safeway food supermarkets from San Diego up to Maine.

Here in Washington there is a bookshop, Kramerbooks, that opens 24hours a day at weekends. "I never thought that someone would think to buy War and Peace at 2am on Saturday," the manager told Horowitz. "But they do."

Why is it that Americans insist on driving themselves so ferociously? Right now, at the height of a hot summer, you might think that Americans would be ready to wind down and enjoy a few relaxing weeks vacation. But summer time for most Americans is a time for work and more work.

The average American worker gets only two weeks paid holiday a year. As a result, he or she works around 350 hours more each year than the average European. But that's just the average. In many jobs, there is even less time off. Thirty per cent of all American workers never take a lunch break. In many jobs, days off for sickness are sometimes deducted from holiday entitelement.

Like the US there are a few countries in the world where work is regarded as an end in itself rather than as a means to an end. Singapore, for instance. Certainly there is no major economic nation in which the obsession with being there is more deeply ingrained.

Last week, apparently in all seriousness, the Washington Post ran an article weighing the difficulties which face American over-achievers in weighing whether to take vacations at all. In the today's rat-race, it seems, taking a vacation is often regarded as a sign of weakness. "As some of the nation's largest firms announce fresh layoffs, workers may be more nervous than ever about asking to use their vacation time," the Post reported.

There is a kind of collective mania going on here. When Americans say that they're available 24/7, they say it with pride and with a breezy confidence that it's exactly the sort of thing that you ought to be glad to hear. But the more often I hear the phrase the more I think there is madness afoot. To me, 24/7 is a shorthand way of describing a living hell.

Maybe that's why I'm off to the beach for a full two weeks.

• This will be Martin Kettle's last dispatch from Washington

-- Anonymous, August 03, 2001

Answers

Vacation? What's that?

-- Anonymous, August 04, 2001

When you are a wife and mother...there is not such thing as VACATION!!!!! the only thing we know is .....24/7!!!!!

-- Anonymous, August 04, 2001