Friday April 2 12:14 PM ET

Americans obsessed with work

By Ann Quigley

NEW YORK, Apr 02 (Reuters Health) -- Despite technological improvements designed to lessen their workload, Americans work more at the century's end than its beginning, in part because they have developed a religious-like attachment to work, according to one researcher.

``We think not of progress in terms of transcending the workplace and work, but we think more about work as an end in itself. And leisure is not the goal of progress anymore, as it certainly was in the 19th and early 20th centuries,'' Dr. Benjamin Hunnicutt of the University of Iowa told Reuters Health.

Americans identify with their work more than ever before, and tend to answer traditionally religious questions like ``How do I find meaning in life?'' in terms of work, according to Hunnicutt.

Hunnicutt presented his views in mid-March at ``Work, Stress, and Health '99,'' a conference sponsored by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and the American Psychological Association, in Baltimore, Maryland.

Work hours steadily decreased through the 19th and early 20th centuries, and writers like George Bernard Shaw and Julian Huxley predicted a 2-hour workday by the century's end. But by the early 1990s, the average workweek had increased to 48.8 hours, up from 40.6 hours in 1973, according to a Louis Harris poll cited by Hunnicutt.

Industry, government, and social values all contributed to the dissipation of the 19th century dream that the 20th century would be the century of leisure, according to Hunnicutt. Industry, threatened by the gradual reduction in working hours as basic needs were met, invented a ``new economic gospel of consumption,'' which manufactured need by advertising, market research, new product invention, and the example of the consumption patterns of the wealthy.

``The ultimate luxury can be made to seem like the everyday necessity by process of advertising and social forces,'' Hunnicutt told Reuters Health. Thus, ``consumerism is born in the 1920s as a deliberate response to keep people at work, taking luxuries rather than leisure and seeing not leisure but higher and higher standards of living, in what some critics call a 'squirrel cage of progress.'''

Government also came to support consumerism under the Roosevelt administration, by supporting employment policies that stimulated the economy by deficit spending whenever it slowed down, according to the University of Iowa researcher.

And finally, Americans ``changed their minds'' about work and leisure, according to Hunnicutt. ``In the 19th century, work was seen as a means to an end,'' he told Reuters Health. Then, the ideal work scenario wasn't full-time work for everyone at 40 hours, ``but putting work in its place, 6 hours a day, or 4 hours a day.''

``People would then be able to center their lives not at work and in buying things but in life outside of work,'' said Hunnicutt.

What has happened instead is that ``people tend to see leisure and time outside of the work and the marketplace of buying things and consuming as unknown territory. We are not sure what the hell to do. Watching TV is perhaps what we've come up with.''

As such, Hunnicutt concludes, ``time is flowing ever more away from the family, away from communities, away from the institutions of communities and ever more to work. We notice it but I don't think we are really serious about wanting to do anything about it.''