Taking these, and other, factors into account, Robert Gordon (2010) estimates that only one-third of the diference in work hours between the United States and Western Europe can be attributed to diferent preferences for leisure. The remainder Gordon considers to be “involuntary leisure,” forced on European workers by conditions beyond their control.51 This would suggest that those who have used diferences in work hours between Europe and the United States as evidence of cultural diferences in attitudes to work and free time have been overstating their case.
Moreover, while there are certainly diferences between the work time regimes in Western Europe and the United States, the trend in both places is similar: increasing productivity has predominantly been used to increase output rather than to reduce work time. Although Western Europeans in the late twentieth century on average worked fewer hours than Americans, the diference between the two, relative to the huge increase in productivity in both regions, is not great. European productivity improved at roughly the same rate as American productivity in the postwar period, yet even taking length of vacations into account, the working week in Western Europe was longer than in the United States until at least the mid-1970s. In 1970, average hours in the fifteen countries that made up the European Union before its eastward expansion in 2004 were actually marginally higher than they were in the United States (Blanchard 2004).52 In the mid-1970s, work hours were between 10 and 15 percent longer in Britain, France, and Germany than they were in America (Prescott 2004). It is true that by 1987, hours were 15 percent shorter in Europe than in the United States, and by 2000, the gap had increased to 23 percent (Maddison 1991; Blanchard 2004).53 Yet since hours of work are calculated by dividing total hours worked by number of workers, the greater prevalence of part-time work in Europe distorts the picture.54 Some of the diference in work hours toward the end of the century can be accounted for by underemployment in the EU—a consequence of the dual labor market structure created by European corporatism, which secures stable employment for some, while consigning others to permanent casual, part-time labor. Recent data from Eurostat (2017) indicate that full-time hours per week have been very similar in Europe and in the United States since 2006—around forty-one hours in Europe and forty-two hours in the United States. Furthermore, according to one study, once hours of domestic labor are taken into account, work hours in a sample of three European countries (Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands) between 1985 and 2003 were at most only 12 percent lower (at the end of that period) than in the United States (Burda, Hammermesh, and Weil 2006). Americans spent more time working in the market than Europeans, and Europeans put more time into domestic labor, while the total time Americans and Europeans gave to labor (market plus domestic) was not that diferent.55 Some of the diference in market work hours between Europe and America thus reflects the tendency for domestic labor to be done in-house in Europe, while it tends to be outsourced through the market in the United States.56
Empirical Pattern in the United States
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