|
Work–life balance is having enough time for work and enough to have a life, thus the work life balance. Related, though broader, terms include "lifestyle balance" and "life balance". ==United States history== The first enforceable hours' law in the United States was in 1874 when Massachusetts enacted a law which limited the amount of time that women and children could work each week.〔http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/whaples.work.hours.us〕 This limit was set at sixty hours per week. Similar laws were later adopted by about half of the country's states. Only men in exceptionally hazardous jobs were covered in early legislation and most had no limit to the number of hours their employers could have them work. Ten-hour workdays were accepted in the agriculture industry during certain seasons and six-day workweeks were not unheard of. Bakers did not win the right to work less than ten hours per day until 1905 with the court case of ''Lochner v. New York''. The general presumption during this period was that the courts would allow regulation of labor concerning women and children, who were thought to be incapable of bargaining on an equal footing with employers and in special need of protection. Men were allowed freedom of contract unless it could be proven that regulating their hours served a higher good for the population at large.〔 During the turn of the twentieth century, the push for an eight-hour workday was geared primarily toward raising the hourly wage. The idea was that by maintaining the current weekly pay while lowering working hours, a fairer rate of pay would result. The slogan, "Whether you work by the piece or work by the day, decreasing the hours increases the pay," seemed to carry the mood of the day.〔 The early twentieth century laid the groundwork for the idea of work-life balance. Advancements in social sciences would move the focus towards the impact of long hours on the physical and mental health of the employee. At this time, however, the new information was used to enhance productivity for the company. The shorter hours movement began to focus on the fact that an overworked employee is more prone to injury or mistake and becomes less productive. Josephine Goldmark wrote a book in 1912 detailing this fact and the Federal Public Works Act was passed the same year. This new act required a 40-hour workweek for employees of government contracted firms. Over the next ten years, the government passed legislation requiring a 40-hour work week for individual industries nearly every time the issue arose in court.〔 When the employees of the steel industry failed to obtain a reduction from their 84-hour work week in 1919, the industry soon allowed their employees an eight-hour workday, a four-hour-per-day reduction—a move brought about by much "arm-twisting" on the part of President Harding.〔 By the 1920s, the average work week was fifty hours and was considered a great stride and well-earned award for America's working man. (Whaples) The push for fewer hours had come to a close, but they had one more hurdle to overcome. The new concentration was on the ability to work half a day on Saturdays or have the day off completely. The ability to have two days of rest was unprecedented, but was considered vital to finalize an ethical work schedule. Pressure was put on businesses to make the change, especially in industries and cities with a large number of Jewish workers (since the Jewish Sabbath is on Saturday), and they finally achieved this goal by the end of the decade. Where only thirty-two firms had a five-day workweek in 1920, nearly half had adopted the practice by 1927.〔 Their success was short-lived. In the 1920s, the workers were coaxed into believing that they wanted to work longer hours and that they would be harmed by measures that limited how many hours they were allowed to work. Social scientists would later name this force the "gospel of consumption." Beginning in the 1920s, advertisers persuaded Americans that happiness would not come from leisure time, but from purchasing commodities, and he concluded that this made it easier for managers to "allow" workers to make more money by working longer hours.〔 Social scientists would conclude that a new work ethic began as Americans left the psychology of scarcity and adopted one of abundance. Some argue that this mentality of consumption or "consumerism" persists to this day.〔 During the twentieth century, the average workweek has changed drastically. In 1900, the average workweek in manufacturing was approximately fifty-three hours. However, the workweek is responsive to business conditions. During the Great Depression, the average number of hours for production workers in manufacturing dropped to 34.6 each week. During World War II, hours worked rose to forty-five each week. The normal range of hours worked during the four decades after World War II was thirty-nine to forty-one hours; (Whaples) however, starting in the 1990s, factory workweek hours began to exceed forty-one hours. As previously mentioned, Americans work approximately 47.1 hours each week; some employees work up to seventy hours. Therefore, it is safe to state that the average number of hours Americans presently work each week is the highest it has been in nearly seventy-five years. In 1900, only nineteen percent of women of working age were in the labor force. In 1999 sixty percent of women worked outside the home. Even if the hours worked were slightly higher at the turn of the century, most households were supported by one paycheck. "In 1900, eighty percent of American children had a working father and a stay-at-home mother; however, by 1999, that figure was only twenty-four percent."〔http://www.bls.gov/opub/cwc/〕 During the Great Depression, working hours were reduced. By 1932, approximately fifty percent of Americans were working a shortened work week. Instead of reducing wages, employers decided to lay off many workers and attempted to protect the employees that remained by encouraging them to job share. President Hoover's Commission for Work Sharing pushed voluntary hours reductions, and it is estimated that nearly three to five million jobs had been saved. (Whaples) Companies such as Sears, General Motors, and Standard Oil reduced the number of days worked each week, and Akron began a six-hour workday. The AFL began to call for a federally mandated 30-hour workweek.〔 By 1933, some experts were predicting that the "thirty-hour workweek was within a month of becoming federal law."〔 Congress began hearings on mandating the 30-hour workweek, and the Senate even passed the bill (which was written by Hugo Black and sponsored in the House by William Connery) fifty-three to thirty. Newly elected President, Franklin Roosevelt initially supported the bill, but had second thoughts when he realized that the bill had a provision to forbid importation of goods produced by workers who worked longer than thirty hours a week. Instead, Roosevelt began to support the National Industrial Recovery Act. Labor leaders were encouraged to support the NIRA instead of the Black-Connery Thirty-Hour Bill with a guarantee of union organization and collective bargaining. With the threat of a mandated 30-hour work week, businesses "fell into line."〔 When specifics codes for the NIRA were drawn up, shorter hours were no longer a genuine concern.〔 After the Great Depression ended, the average weekly hours worked began to rise. (According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 1934 the average hours worked each week was approximately thirty-four hours). During World War II, hours increased by approximately ten hours a week but, in the aftermath of the war, weekly work hours averaged forty hours.〔 With automation of the workplace in "full swing" by the 1970s, large numbers of women began entering the work force and an "awareness of stress rose to the forefront".〔 In the publication ''Type A Behavior and Your Heart'', cardiologists Meyer Friedman and Ray H. Rosenman wrote about the "hurry sickness" common to "workaholics"—people who had no friends and who "never relaxed or went to museums".〔http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqresrre1995080400&PHPSESSID=9shh40qo0hl1u1vteqkm9jid83〕 In the late 1970s, Professor Robert Karasek of the University of Lowell (now known as University of Massachusetts Lowell) developed a method for analyzing stress-producing factors in the workplace. It has been widely employed to examine workplace pressures and their relationship with research data on coronary heart disease, musculoskeletal illnesses, psychological strain and absenteeism. Karasek explains, "In situations where an individual has high demands on him and low control, the undesirable stress of work and other situations becomes problematic."〔 The 1980s brought new complaints of work-life balance related stress. This time period was given such names as "the ME generation," "the age of narcissism" and "the pursuit of loneliness."〔 The number of cases of emotional depression in the United States was believed to have doubled between 1970 and 1990. "What you do is what you are" was the common and unhealthy assumption. According to 'The Workaholic Syndrome', written by Judith K. Sprankle and Henry Ebel, "By their sheer numbers and the consequently narrowing opportunities at every upward run of the organizational ladder, the baby-boomers have been compelled to do more, to move faster, to compete harder. They, in turn, have set the pace for other age groups. The signs of increased stress are legion and have been intensified by an economic climate that mandates that if we marry at all, we marry a working spouse."〔 In the late 1980s, the "computer revolution" was not only responsible for corporate downsizing, but also increased the demand of employee output. Social critic Jeremy Rifkin states, "Back in the agriculture-based society, people were more attuned to generatively,〔 and middle-stress disorders and diseases of affluence were not part of life. They weren't triggered until the Industrial Age, and now the Information Age has worsened them. Nowadays, instead of seconds, it's nanoseconds. We have moved from designing a schedule that real people can execute in whatever time it takes them, to a program which people can monitor but can't affect."〔 In the 1980s, the number of workers' compensation claims for "gradual mental stress" began to rise. Claims rose from 1,844 cases in 1981 to 15,688 in 1999 in the state of California alone. Because of the large number of cases as well as evidence of numerous cases of fraud, efforts were made in the early 1990s to reform the workers compensation program. Led by Republican Governor of California Pete Wilson and Democratic Party State assembly Speaker Willie Brown, the new law stated that claimants had to prove that stress was at least 51 percent of the reason for their illness.〔 Unfortunately, because of these reforms some feel that it is now extremely difficult to be approved for workers compensation. John Burton, dean of the school of management and labor relations at Rutgers University feels that part of the reason for the decline is that "a number of states made it difficult to get stress into the system. So even if the stress is out there, it's not showing up (in the compensation statistics). Some of it shows up in the rising violence, which is a crude proxy for the stress out there."〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Work–life balance (United States)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|