(Newswire.net — August 30, 2014) — Just 42 percent of full-time employees work 40 hours a week, the traditional total based on five 9 am-to-5 pm weekdays, Gallup said of findings it released ahead of the Labor Day weekend.
“The 40-hour workweek is widely regarded as the standard for full-time employment, and many federal employment laws — including the Affordable Care Act, or ‘Obamacare’ — use this threshold to define what a full-time employee is,” Gallup said.
“However, barely four in 10 full-time workers in the US indicate they work precisely this much,” Gallup said.
All over US, millions of hard working men and women are slowly being worn down by jobs that are sucking the life out of them. Working way too many hours for an extended period of time can have dramatic consequences for health, family and just about every other area of life.
A New Jersey woman who worked multiple jobs, who sometimes “wouldn’t sleep for five days” according to a co-worker, died a week ago, while napping between shifts.
Maria Fernandes, 32, who allegedly worked four jobs to support herself, died Monday while snatching a few minutes of sleep in her car.
She succumbed to a deadly combination of carbon monoxide and fumes from an overturned gas container that she kept in her 2001 Kia Sportage, police said.
Americans are spending more time at work than ever before, said Galup. In fact, US workers spend more time at work than anyone else in the world. But it was not always this way. Back in 1970, the average work week for an American worker was about 35 hours. Today, it is up to 46 hours.
Salaried employees work an average of 49 hours a week, compared with 44 hours for people paid by the hour. A quarter of salaried workers said they spend 60 or more hours a week on the job.
The overall 47-hour average workweek has held roughly steady for 14 years, Gallup said.
The term Workaholic indeed was invented in the US, but for some Americans, there is simply no other choice. There are millions of Americans that live on the edge of financial disaster these days.
According to one recent survey, 77 percent of all Americans live paycheck-to-paycheck at least some of the time, and, in recent years, the middle class in the United States has been shrinking at a very steady pace.