Rating: 
Summary: Trouble In Our Worker's Paradise!
Review: America is the fabled land of plenty, and according to Juliet Schor, most of us seem to be lining up for more than our share of work hours. In our unabated obsession to get more than our fair share of the virtual cornucopia of goods and services out there in the marketplace, we seem to have become collectively addicted to working more and more hours in a devil's bargain with our employers. This book is a wonderful overview of this long-term trend toward overwork, where the average American now works the equivalent of an extra month a year. Since it is cheaper to pay someone overtime than it is to hire new workers and pay the associated benefits, corporations gladly ante up to pay for our increasing presence at work. Yet this mysterious and unexpected contemporary American addiction to being on the job has its associated costs (as well as causes).Harvard professor Juliet Schor spins a convincing and disturbing tale regarding the increasing numbers of hours we spend each week at work rather than leisure. This is a historical surprise, since most baby boomers emerged from the colleges and universities convinced we would have more leisure time and better ways to pursue our many avocational interests than any generation in the past. In this entertaining, topical, and quite readable book, the author surveys a plethora of reasons for the surprising trend toward overwork. The principal dynamic she pinpoints in influencing this trend is an economy that literally demands extra effort and time from its employees, an economy which until quite recently had a chronic shortage of available jobs and "surplus" labor pool of potential workers. Under such circumstances, anyone lacking the requisite willingness to work extra hours was indeed dispensable. Thus one becomes a careerist in an effort to survive. She also details how our culturally conditioned goal-oriented attitude toward time as a resource to be used effectively and efficiently rather than as a precious resource to be used to increase the quality of our own lives plays into the situation. For Schor, we are on a treadmill, if not to oblivion, then to an impoverished cultural life where we are what we do occupationally rather than what we do and what we become in our leisure hours pursuing our avocations and our personal lives with family and friends. This is an important and path breaking book, one that we should find especially relevant given the fact that many of the jobs we are so seemingly addicted to will soon fade away in the new markets and new economies of the so-called "Third Wave". Anyone who has experienced "downsizing" at the hands of a large and impersonal corporation can tell you how quickly all those sacrifices and long hours are disregarded and forgotten by your employer. The emotional and economic impacts of such events can be devastating to the individual and his or her family. As a friend said to me recently, anyone who is what they do really isn't very much at all. Read and heed.
Rating:
Summary: easier said than done
Review: I disagree with the reviewer who blasts Schor's accusations against corporate America. "Get a job you like and live within your means," he advises. Trouble is, there's something very peculiar about the way the job market is set up. As a bachelor's degreed worker, looking for a moderate way job, I've found full-time (PLUS - emphasis on the plus) jobs at $50K and full-time jobs at $25K, but where the heck are the half-time jobs at $25K? No where to be found. "Face-time" requirements and inflexibility on the part of most companies thwart the moderation strategy.
Rating:
Summary: easier said than done
Review: I disagree with the reviewer who blasts Schor's accusations against corporate America. "Get a job you like and live within your means," he advises. Trouble is, there's something very peculiar about the way the job market is set up. As a bachelor's degreed worker, looking for a moderate way job, I've found full-time (PLUS - emphasis on the plus) jobs at $50K and full-time jobs at $25K, but where the heck are the half-time jobs at $25K? No where to be found. "Face-time" requirements and inflexibility on the part of most companies thwart the moderation strategy.
Rating:
Summary: Caught up in a cycle of "Work and Spend"
Review: Juliet Schor makes a variety of intersting points. Her main argument is that people today are working an average of 163 extra hours of paid employment each year. She talks about the paradox where employed people are forced to work overtime, while the underemployed can't find enough work. She speculates why people are working more, especially with the "cycle of work and spend" that most of us are in. She is describing the trends that have creeped up on us, wherby work has become all consuming, and people don't know how to relax or recreate anymore. She even writes about the new American Pastime, mall shopping. My initial thought was that the book seemed hurried, and very random in its writing. But it did force me to realize why I am working more, and the fact that I have forgotten how to relax.
Rating: 
Summary: True, Yet Contrary to the American Mentality
Review: Juliet Schor presents many balanced and interesting facts, stats, and trends in the past and present individual and collective work environment in the United States. Do most Americans realize this or even think about it?....I've met only a few who do. Since World War II worker productivity per capita has more than doubled. And, the hours worked has increased so steadily that work hours will be at the levels of what they were in the 1920s. The average American takes 12 days off per year, which is the lowest in the industrialized world. Yet Americans are in more personal debt than at any time at our history. Most today, will work into their 70s as the thing called retirement is not possible for most. Question: is it worth it? The Puritanical work-consume-work-consume-die mentality is being questioned by some Americans, now that their investments, pensions, and 401-Ks have lost the principal to allow them to live and do what they have always been wanting to do. This book may seem contrary to the way most Americans have been raised and advised throughout their lives. Do Americans have time to reflect, think, relax, and pursue anything to their liking? The answer depends on who you are, so ask yourself that question. This is a relevant book for a very relevant topic.
Rating:
Summary: True, Yet Contrary to the American Mentality
Review: Juliet Schor presents many balanced and interesting facts, stats, and trends in the past and present individual and collective work environment in the United States. Do most Americans realize this or even think about it?....I've met only a few who do. Since World War II worker productivity per capita has more than doubled. And, the hours worked has increased so steadily that work hours will be at the levels of what they were in the 1920s. The average American takes 12 days off per year, which is the lowest in the industrialized world. Yet Americans are in more personal debt than at any time at our history. Most today, will work into their 70s as the thing called retirement is not possible for most. Question: is it worth it? The Puritanical work-consume-work-consume-die mentality is being questioned by some Americans, now that their investments, pensions, and 401-Ks have lost the principal to allow them to live and do what they have always been wanting to do. This book may seem contrary to the way most Americans have been raised and advised throughout their lives. Do Americans have time to reflect, think, relax, and pursue anything to their liking? The answer depends on who you are, so ask yourself that question. This is a relevant book for a very relevant topic.
Rating: 
Summary: More Liberal Claptrap From The Ivy League
Review: Juliet Schor tries to make the argument that Americans work too hard and do not have enough leisure time. Yet try to get a table at a good restaurant in any major city or decent tickets to a popular show, concert or sporting event. If Americans are overworked, millions of them still somehow find time to spend hours watching insipid sitcoms and dramas on television. Perhaps there are so many entertainment options to fill your leisure time that people have the impression that they are "stressed" and overworked. Schor's socialistic bent permeates this book. Under her plan, we would turn into a welfare state in 10 years, working just six months a year (or 4 hours a day all year). And who will pay for all this time off? Schor does not seem to realize that when employers are forced by law to reduce working hours (and adding on employees to cover the increased absences), that the increased costs will simply be passed on to the consumer. Thus Americans will not only be compensated less (for working shorter hours) but they will have a much higher cost of living. This book is highly flawed (not to mention ponderous to get through) as it is written by an Ivy League liberal who apparently has limited experience in the real world and little comprehension of how the free market system works. The real solution here is for Americans to simply find a job they like doing and live within their means. Then work really won't seem like "work" at all and life is much less stressful when you don't have to keep two jobs just so you can pay down the credit cards you ran up trying to "keep up with the Jones." But Schor apparently does not believe in personal responsibility - she'd rather have the federal government set up yet more bureaucracies and force the "big, bad corporations" to take care of us instead.
Rating: 
Summary: Very Biased
Review: Schor gets her point across that people are spending too much time working, but her viewpoint seems to be very biased and difficult to harmonize with. For example, her definition of "work" is inflated to basically include everything that cannot be delineated as "non-work": including playing with children and helping them with homework, home improvement, etc. Reminds me too much of a politician!
Rating:
Summary: HARVARD'S JULIET SCHOR SAYS AMERICANS ARE OVERWORKED...TRUE!
Review: Ten years ago, then recently appointed Harvard sociology professor Juliet B. Schor wrote a disarmingly truthful book, titled THE OVERWORKED AMERICAN, about the dramatically lowered yet unpublicized quality of life in America. She claimed, accurately, that work in America is overdone and overemphasized, wheras leisure and "quality time" away from work is underdone. Her very worthwhile book became a New York Times listed best seller, then shot into obscurity with amazing, almost devastating rapidity. A decade later, following eight years of the Clinton administration's non-stop, machine gun style propaganda campaign advising America it "never had it so good" (quality of life-wise), Schor's book is almost forgotten, never discusssed seriously, and not regarded as what in fact it was and is, one of the great and important classic works by a scholar on the subject of labor in America at the close of the twentieth century. Schor has gone on to write other, far less impressive books. Her recent books lack the gusto and fervor of THE OVERWORKED AMERICAN (1991), and are not about subjects as important. She seems, de facto, to have joined the people who nay-sayed the importance of her 1991 book. That's a shame, because the book was good, she was right to write it, and deserved/deserves far more acclaim and gratitude than she got when, it seems, she stuck her then young neck out and told the truth about a painful and politically incorrect subject, the brutal yet undiscussed and mostly unchallenged bad conditions which face American workers. Her book, THE OVERWORKED AMERICAN, had implications discussed only by Ralph Nadar among Presidential candidates in the 2000 elections, and only briefly and superficially by him. Do get a hard-back copy of this book (the paperback, which I haven't read, may well lack some of the good stuff included in the hard-back version....changes occur when hard back books appear in paper-back versions). ... if sold new today, and tells the truth about the American labor situation and quality of life situation not found elsewhere at any price. Sometimes, only old books tell the truth about important subjects. That's what classics, even ones not yet accorded "classic" status, are all about.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely The worst book I've ever read!
Review: This book, is the worst book i have ever read. The first chapter is unbearable yet gives some useful information. Unfortunately the rest of the chapters seem to be a review of the first. The most repeative, boring book. DO NOT BUY!
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