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Comment by lwb | Hacker News Reader

Something felt fishy about their claim that number of hours worked has been climbing in the United States so I checked their source. It turns out that "average annual hours worked" has changed from 1,780 in 2011 to 1,786 last year. This seems like barely a rounding error...

On the other hand, if you look at the FRED website it shows that average annual hours worked has massively decreased in the last 50 years: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG

1951, for example, shows 2,030 hours worked on average. That's the equivalent of more than six additional weeks of full time work.

I would say that Keynes's prediction that economic growth could get to the point where we would only need to work 15 hours a week (750 hours per year, assuming 2 weeks vacation) is ... trending towards becoming true? At current trends, it will take another ~280 years.

(Obviously this is a silly prediction but, an interesting thought experiment.)

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The overall average per person has declined (though not really since the 80s). However, in the same time frame, the proportion of women in formal work went from 35% to 60% [1]. So the story for men and women looks very different. Note also that for women this is a shift from domestic labor to formal labor, so it's probably not much of an increase in hours worked even though it looks like that on paper. However, in the same time frame, I believe men spend a bit more time on housework than they used to, which is not included in formal hours worked.

The point of all this is simply that it is difficult to make conclusions about labor market trends from average annual hours worked.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300002

Certainly, the data is inconclusive enough that you can make strong arguments either way. My issue is with NPR making a generalization and citing a source that doesn’t really back that up.

There's more too - an apparent rise in unpaid 'off the books' overtime [0], the rise of mobile and email creating expectations of evening/weekend work, and increasing travel times to work.

[0] An average of 4.6 hours per week in Australia across all industries according to this https://www.tai.org.au/sites/default/files/GHOTD%202019%20Fi...

I was curious for context on this, and honestly didn't find much in my brief search, but apparently it's thought that for professionals, the hours worked has gone up, while for the working class, it has gone down. I didn't research it, but I wonder if part of the explanation is that working class people tend to be under-employed, and/or government policies that kick in at say, 30 hours / week (like the ACA, for example) push the numbers down. Professionals of course tend to be salaried, so you really want to squeeze out as much as you can.

I don't think it is possible to compare hours worked 100 years ago and now.

Now, especially for developers and office workers, work is almost indistinguishable from life.

For example there is barely any time while I am awake that I am not thinking about work. (sometimes even my dreams are about work related tech topics)

Not to mention that modern management techniques are deeply psychological, and sophisticated propaganda.

TBH I dont think more work is being done, I just think the corporation organism consumes as much as it can.

> Something felt fishy about their claim that number of hours worked has been climbing in the United States so I checked their source. It turns out that "average annual hours worked" has changed from 1,780 in 2011 to 1,786 last year. This seems like barely a rounding error...

This is a classic case of statistics being used to prove a different point. Perhaps the average annual hours worked is pretty much the same, but the way work happens has changed and it may be harder to quantify. For example, what if there are more part time jobs and people have 2-3 part time jobs? Or how are the hours worked by the flexible hours folks at Starbucks (flexible to be picked by someone else I mean, usually only at peak times). Anecdotally, there's a guy I know who holds a full time job selling insurance, then works afternoons for UPS for the health benefits. How is that reported in 'average annual hours worked' thing?

It's the same as saying that unemployment went down and being happy about it. Because there are so many jobs, some people have 3 in order to pay rent.

I believe the FRED data I cited is per person, not per job.

Does this include part-time workers? If so, the slight increase since 2011 could just be a reflection of the lower unemployment and underemployment.

Actually even if it's only considering full-time employees, it could still be related to unemployment, since a tighter labor market would leave more positions unfilled, which would mean more overtime.

these numbers are across all industries, right? a 40 hour union job has certain parameters such that the work hours aren't going to shift much without larger political shifts within those orgs.

But I suspect the number of hours a non-union knowledge worker works per year has gone up in the same time frame.

> these numbers are across all industries, right?

I think so. The way these sources gather data is somewhat opaque to me but there's nothing to suggest that it's filtered out by industry.

> I suspect the number of hours a non-union knowledge worker works per year has gone up in the same time frame

Huh... I don't see that data anywhere on FRED but it would be interesting to know. You can search for yourself here: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/searchresults/?st=hours%20worked

Anecdotally, I have swapped stories with my father in law who started his career as a finance worker for a large corporation in the 1980s and he worked significantly more hours than I have at any of my current or previous jobs. 10+ hours 5 days a week was the expectation, plus an hour commute both ways... hard to say if that generalizes in any meaningful way though.

Are you forgetting overtime back in 51 I suspect there may well have been more OT worked and there would have been more factories back then

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