Lessons from Old Europe

If you’ve made it this far, it’s obvious what you and Tom Friedman must be thinking. With people in India and China seemingly working 35 hours a day, how can anyone talking of working 35 hours a week? Isn’t this precisely the wrong moment to be kicking back? What is this, France?

Consider the facts. While every red-blooded American knows that the U.S. has the most productive economy in the world, in 2002 it was less productive per hour worked that countries that are supposed to be slackers: Belgium, France, Germany, Norway and the Netherlands. True, the U.S. had more output per person, but that’s only because a bigger share of Americans worked, and many Americans work longer hours.

This is not to suggest that America should emulate Europe’s economic policies – for one thing, job growth there is abysmally slow. But the rough parity of Europe’s productivity with America’s own, despite the absence of a macho work culture, should give Americans pause. The moral: Americans don’t have to work like the Indians and Chinese any more than they have to work like 19^th- century factory hands, when hours were far longer than today. “There is probably not a productivity penalty to shortening hours in the U.S., and there may even be a benefit,” says Martin Baily, who chaired President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers.

Leslie Perlow of the Harvard Business School makes an equally tempting microeconomic case. An ethnographer, she studies teams of software engineers in different countries. These teams had been identified as equally productive doing similar kinds of work by their joint venture partner, a large U.S Tech company. But Perlow found the teams had different ways of organizing their work, with vastly different impacts on workers’ lives.

In India the engineers, mostly specialists, reached out directly to other team specialists when they had problems. Their sense of mutual commitment led to very long hours, since everyone felt they had to be available to their colleagues. In China the engineers never spoke to one another, all requests for help went through the project leader. That made everyone highly dependant on him and locked them to his hours. In Hungary, when one engineer had a problem, he’d go to whoever happened to be free. As a result many people were able to help each other and it was less important for everyone to be at the office all the time. All three teams, says Perlow, were “convinced that there was no other way to do it” and that they were merely doing what the global marketplace required. Yet the Indian team’s approach was a formula to burnout, and the Chinese team was at the whim of its boss, only the Hungarian team’s approach allowed life.

If you still can’t visualize how jobs might reorganized, remember that humanizing top-level work isn’t something really hard, like finding a cure for cancer. The idea seems farfetched only to those who don’t recall history. People ‘knew’ a century ago, for example, that a “weekend” or a “minimum wage” would spell the nation’s ruin. In the not-too distant future the idea that CEOs once thought it effective to work 24/7 will seem equally preposterous.