Work Is Better Than America

The theme of overemployment is a current problem in the United States. Americans are overworked. Workload has increased and society has experienced a loss of leisure. Overemployment and overworked can be defined as negative effects that occur when individuals are required to work more hours than they want to work. “Personal perceptions of workload are critical, as individuals have diverse reactions to the number of hours worked depending on their needs, lifestyle, expectations, and experiences. Individuals have different tolerances for demands and stress. While many, including professionals

Therefore, the work schedule of the majority of Americans is greatly time-consuming and restrictive in how their life is like. Employment is restrictive in the sense that it doesn’t allow for much free time for Americans to do things in their life how they would like. Hochschild states, “But without overstating the case, it seems true that capitalism is a cultural as well as an economic system and that the symbols and rituals of this cultural system compete with, however much they seem to serve, the symbols and rituals of community and family.” (Hochschild 187) Most Americans are employed around capitalistic ideas of efficiency. Employers require employees to commit long hours, days, and years of their life to working for them. Employers also seek maximum efficiency in the time that employees are working. This commitment that employees make to their employment takes away from things that they value as mentioned by Hochschild. Unfortunately, Americans are forced to deal with this because they want to establish economic stability for themselves. Furthermore, the work life of

Workers in Great Britian too said that their jobs were the source of their stress, however only 16% of them said this. This is about 10% percent less than American workers. This stress that consumes so many people leads to a lower quality of life. Stress is also the number one cause of mental and physical health problems. Even greater than stress, some people actually die from overwork, as there is also term coined for this known as Karōshi in Japanese.

The United States is commonly known as “No-Vacation Nation” (Thompson, 2012) because Americans typically prioritize work over studies and family. (1)Although people in America take fewer vacations than any nation in the world, socioeconomics may be a reason for why employees focus more on work than research and relationships in the American culture. "There is simply no evidence that working people to death gives you a competitive advantage" (Pawlowski, 2011). (2)As a citizen of the United States and one who has often fallen prey to these ideals, the trend to overwork has been an affliction to overcome. Family and scholarly efforts have been sacrificed, but over the past year or two, I have made a conscious effort to alter my “live to work”

Over the last two decades, American workers have been clocking more and more hours on the job, and they now work more hours than workers in any other industrialized country. Annual work hours are 4% higher than they were in 1980, amounting to an extra 1 hour and 30 minutes at work per week, on average (ILO 1999). Workers are also clocking more overtime hours. Almost one-third of the workforce regularly works more than the standard 40-hour week; one-fifth work more than 50 hours. The growth in overtime work, while helping to drive the healthy growth in output in the U.S., has unhealthy social costs. It is taking its toll not only on workers, but on their families, communities, and, ultimately in many cases, patients, customers, and

Although America is the greatest country in the world through the protected rights of all citizens and the gifted freedoms and liberties that come with it, we used to be really horrific.

I believe it is harder for youth in America to find work because of the thirty to fourty years olds are filling the less meaningful jobs like fast food or gerocery stores as a permanent job. This is no allowing the younger generation to work these jobs while in hogh school or even college. also believe that a large percentage of todays youth lack a strong work ethic and and want something for free. “Millennials are the worst generation. They’re lazy, unmotivated, disconnected and they want a trophy for every little thing they do.” Labor Force Participation Rate is defiend as “the percentage of the population that is either employed or unemployed that is, either working or actively seeking work. People with jobs are employed or People who are jobless, looking for a job, and available for work are unemployed. The labor force is made up of the employed and the unemployed. People who are neither employed nor unemployed are not in the labor force.”

Thirty-eight percent of Americans report some tension between their work and home lives. Today’s highly publicized work/life balance conflicts are multiple, and their nature differs significantly depending on the jobs individuals have and on their family situations. Tensions between work and family life clearly have implications for the well-being of individuals and their children and ramifications for society in general. Yet because the personal needs, desires, motivations, and economic circumstances of Americans are so varied, there appears to be no single way to resolve these tensions, no universal best practices with regard to work/life balance. For example,

The problem is that it only makes them feel better for a short while and eventually leaves them feeling empty. We are now said to be a “harried leisure class starved for time. Economic growth entails a general increase in the scarcity of time.” They say it is as simple as this: increased susceptibility to affluenza means increasing headaches from time pressure. The pace of work has seemed to increase dramatically and we are working much faster today than we were in the past. This contributes to our sense of being overworked, frenzied, harried, stressed out, and burned out by our jobs.

Work is not something anyone look forward to stress, back pains, and talking to people. Americans work an average nine to five shift. Five

The modern day American society hosts a broad spectrum of industries with various occupations and professions to engage today’s workforce. America, much like most first world countries is a service economy based on the exchange of knowledge and expertise rather than materials and products. People have a long history of work and work evolution that has ultimately brought America to a service economy producing both strengths and weaknesses within the society and its economy. As America has moved to a service economy, much of the manufacturing and production jobs have moved oversees to third world countries creating a reliance on other economies. This globalization of the workforce as well as unionization, and the

We spend much of daily lives working. In fact, Americans spend about eight-times as many hours working as they do eating and drinking (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2013). Approximately seven in ten Americans report that they experience symptoms of stress (Anderson, Belar, Breckler, Nordal, Ballard, Bufka, Bossolo & Bethune, 2013). Stress is elicited by a variety of psychological stimulus associated with our jobs, our residences, our social interactions, and the activities we engage in (p. 249, Franken, 2007). Many Americans live with the burden of an unsatisfying job as well as a stressful workplace. An online survey of 1,848 people in the United States, conducted by the American Psychological Association, found that 74 percent of

As a result of this new mindset consumers now want goods at faster rate, but with lower prices, which leads to a sped up of production in all areas of goods. This increased rate of production has led to corporations to seek out employees that will be flexible with their hours and be willing to work for low wages. These workers typically are immigrants or low-class and poor U.S. citizens, in the case of the U.S., or migrants, in the case of China. The increased speed of production has led to most of these workers having serious injuries due to repetitive motions. On top of that the oppressiveness of the routine of these jobs is mentally taxing (Striffler 205:127-130). Furthermore, these injuries effect the workers quality of life outside of their jobs because their ailments impact their relationships with their families. People are unable to do things that brought them joy and made life worth living so it causes their mental health to decrease as well. This can be seen in the agriculture industry, at meat processing plants and berry fields, and the technology sector, at factories in urban

According to WebMD (2012), Forty percent of U.S. workers admit to experiencing office stress, and one-quarter say work is the biggest source of stress in their lives.

Stress is a common issue that faces every human being in different times. Stress can be caused by many factors, but one of the main reasons is work which is called occupational stress or work-related stress. Job stress does not only affect the employees’ performance within an organization, but also it affects their general health. Stress has become a challenge for employers now because high level stress results in low productivity, increased absenteeism and other problems like alcoholism, drug abuse and hypertension (Ahmad, Mohamed. 2017). It became a major problem for employers especially in developing countries where they don’t realize the importance of work-life balance and the impact of stress on the productivity level and the job