Lights out for long hours?

As far as Tom McMakin is concerned, even one extra hour worked beyond a 40-hour workweek means employees - and the quality of their labor - begin to wilt.

Mr. McMakin, the former chief operating officer of the Great Harvest Bread Co., was largely responsible for ushering in a period of significant growth for the company in the 1990s.

Today, with 138 franchises in 35 states, Great Harvest is the nation's leading fresh-bread store chain.

But McMakin didn't achieve that success by putting in long days at the office. And neither did his employees.

"We've lost in our culture this sense that business and work in general should be in service to our lives," explains McMakin, who is now looking into buying another firm. "You can't balance 70-hour workweeks with a good home life."

Indeed, America's hard-working habits - and its drive for technological innovation and economic achievement - seem to have spawned a host of side effects. Workplace activists blame long work hours for weakening family ties while increasing the likelihood of work-related accidents, job burnout, and employee resentment.

A study released in May by the New York-based Families and Work Institute found that more than half of employees surveyed felt overworked at least some of the time in the previous three months. Of employees who admitted to experiencing high levels of overwork, 43 percent said they often felt angry toward their employers.

Today, more than 25 million Americans work more than 49 hours each week. Of that number, 11 million spend 60 hours or more at work each week, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The sheer number of hours put in by Americans has already earned the US the dubious distinction of being the most overworked nation in the industrialized world.

"I don't think [Americans] know how bad it's gotten because it's happened gradually, and gotten to be the norm," says Joe Robinson, who founded the Los Angeles-based Work to Live campaign, a nationwide, grass-roots movement that is calling on Congress to amend the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act so that every American who works at a job for at least a year would get three weeks of paid leave.

"We really have turned the concept of the work ethic into an overwork ethic," Mr. Robinson adds. "The fact is that many of us don't have another identity other than our job title.... We're defining ourselves through our labor, and it's only gotten more extreme."

The current economic recession and rising unemployment have not helped the situation, say workplace experts. "Downsizing has created more work for people who haven't been laid off, and many people are doing what's being called defensive overworking to try to save their jobs. We've taken our work ethic to the point where people are working around the clock and cannot stop," says Robinson.

But the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, adds Robinson, have led many American workers to reprioritize the place work has in their lives. "I think, more than ever, people are open to this message that there's something more to life than work."

"In the 9/11 era, there's more introspection taking place," says Nancy Snow, an adjunct associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California and associate director of the Center for Communications and Community at UCLA. "We're reexamining ourselves as a people, and a nation, and even reassessing where we should be going with our careers."

The idea that Americans are working themselves too hard - and for all the wrong reasons - has particularly resonated among workers between the ages of 16 and 25 - members of so-called 'Generation Y,' explains Snow.

"Young people are generally not as driven to overwork," she says. "Many of them are choosing to travel, and work less. There's the sense that they're not as defined by what they do for a living ... and they're getting their sense of belonging and identity from their social networks, not from their workplaces."

Younger workers seem most insistent about their need for extra vacation time.

A survey conducted this year by Hilton Hotels Corp. found that three-fourths of Generation Y and X workers said that they were in need of a long vacation. Generation Y workers, the survey revealed, were only earning about 10 vacation days per year.

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