LOOK HOW HAPPY THE SLACKER FRENCH ARE :

Why Americans Should Rest (JULIET SCHOR, September 2, 2002, NY Times)

In the last decade an annual Labor Day ritual has emerged: bemoaning the national workload. The story has a thousand angles. The United States surpasses workaholic Japan in average hours. Dot-commers go 24/7. The family dinner has disappeared. The working poor are holding three and four jobs just to make ends meet. Neither the renewed commitment to family and community after Sept. 11 nor the presence of a committed leisure enthusiast in the White House seems to have had an impact. Worker overload has felt like an intransigent problem.

But this year might be different. More free time might just be the silver lining in the clouds of a depressed economy, corporate scandals and the hangover from the 1990's consumer binge. [...]

In the end, even more than work schedules, incomes and employment are at stake: our choices affect the rest of the world. For the last half century, America's tendency has been to consume more, rather than work less. This propensity to work is central to why the United States is among the world's wealthiest nations as well as the unrivaled leader in resource depletion, carbon-dioxide emissions and environmental impact. By next Labor Day, perhaps, the message will be that we're slowing down, sharing the work and consuming a little less.

Of course people should leave as much time as possible for their families, but it is also the case that no people anywhere at any time in human history have ever needed to do less work to supply their basic needs than we do. That we work so hard anyway is a testimony to the kind of people that we are, not a statement about how tough it is to make ends meet. Ms Schor is surely one of the few people you'll meet who envies the French and Germans their economic stagnation. Posted by Orrin Judd at September 2, 2002 11:12 AM