Hours.

During the 1990s, Americans became the workaholics of the world. Between 1977 and 1997 the average workweek among salaried employees working at least twenty hours lengthened from forty-three to forty-seven hours. During that same twenty-year period, according to James T. Bond, vice president of the Families and Work Institute, the number of workers putting in fifty or more hours per week increased from 24 percent to 37 percent. Americans who once viewed the work habits of the Japanese with horrified awe became the people working the longest hours in the industrial world. The average American worked the equivalent of eight weeks a year longer than the average Western European. In Norway and Sweden, for example, workers commonly receive between four and six weeks of vacation and up to a year of paid parental leave. In France, a maximum workweek of no more than thirty-five...