Let's Expand -- Not Cut -- Overtime Protections
From Jerry Jacobs and Kathleen Gerson
Released September 5, 2005

When the Fair Labor Standards Act established the 40 hour work week in 1938, most workers were sole male hourly wage workers who could count on a wife at home. It hardly seemed important that the law exempted most professional and managerial employees, since they made up only 15 percent of the workforce in 1940. Since then, however, the college-educated labor force in these occupations has doubled to over 30 percent.

American families have undergone an equally dramatic transformation. As workers shifted from wages to salaries, most households came to have either two earners or one parent. Indeed, two earner families today are more prevalent than male-breadwinner families were in 1970. The typical American couple now works over 80 hours per week, with each partner putting in 40 hours or more of paid labor. In the case of single parents, they must do demanding jobs without benefit of a support system at home.

To make matters worse, most salaried workers in positions that are not covered by overtime rules are working longer hours. Nearly two-fifths of all American men with college degrees work 50 or more hours per week, as do nearly one-fifth of college-educated women. Close to 15 percent of all American couples now put in over 100 combined hours on the job far more than in most other industrial democracies. As cell phones, fax machines, e-mail, and other technologies make it hard for salaried workers to distance themselves from their jobs, this group is likely to grow. For increasing numbers of Americans, the 40 hour work week seems like a utopian fantasy.

It is probably no accident that these time-demanding jobs are not covered by overtime protections. The absence of this protection has fueled a growing occupational divide between overworked and under-worked Americans. While fewer people are working the once-average 40 hour week, more workers are putting in very long work weeks and more are also unable to find enough work to meet their families' needs. Yet whether they are putting in fifty hours a week or twenty, most Americans prefer to work about thirty-five to forty hours a week so that they can balance hard work with the rest of life.

After 60 years of steady social shifts, the distinction between exempt salaried and non-exempt wage workers seems increasingly arbitrary and calls out for change, but not by eroding protections on excessive demands from the workplace. Instead, time-pressed American families need help in keeping the demands of work under control and finding time to be together. The American economy needs time for leisure and consumption as well as production. And American civic life needs participants who are not too rushed to volunteer or vote. In response to the irreversible social transformations in the nature of jobs and the organization of family life, we need to expand the limits on overtime, and other workplace protections, to all but the most senior ranks.

Jerry A. Jacobs, Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, and Kathleen Gerson, Professor of Sociology at New York University, are co-authors of The Time Divide: Work, Family, and Gender Inequality (Harvard University Press, 2004).