BROKEN PROMISES

The American Demographic report validates the suspicion that corporatist employers are taking advantage of new technologies and of workers' anxieties to demand longer hours and increased productivity - the very things new technologies were supposed to liberate people from.

Although there are no known studies relating to college students and their work hours, it seems they are also bound to their desks and dorms by environments in which faculty, friends and other members of the college community increasingly do their work online. Studies of time spent on instant messaging services would probably show staggering use. And research possibilities online are boundless.

Few of us manage to buck this trend, apart from some neo-Luddites. Half of all Americans now own a cell phone, and more than 46 per cent of pleasure travelers take their phones with them when they go away, reports the Travel Industry Association. More than 18 per cent take their pagers and 6 per cent their laptops, while 10 per cent check e-mail on vacation. Younger Americans are living in a hyperactive information culture.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 40 per cent of men worked more than 40 hours a week in l998, an increase of 5 percentage points in the last two decades. As for women, 22 per cent worked more than 40 hours a week, compared with just 14 per cent in 1979.

So it's not surprising that a l998 General Social Survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago found that more than 40 per cent of American workers say they come home from work exhausted, up from 36 per cent in l989. Young married couples report that they work an average 26 per cent more hours each year than they did 30 years ago.

Aside from long hours, the nature of work has changed. Economist and author Richard Sennett (The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism) and Joanne B. Ciulla (The Working Life: The Promise and Betrayal of Modern Work), point out changes in the nature of work itself.

"Flexible" work projects, the growing number of part-time workers, and a culture that embraces and even celebrates continuous layoffs, downsizings and re-engineerings have rendered almost everyone's work life stressful and unstable. Workers work harder and longer, move more often, change their work tasks more frequently, and are nevertheless constantly subject to dismissal or its threat.

NEW TECHNOLOGIES, FROM GENETIC RESEARCH TO THE NET, OFFER ALL SORTS OF BENEFITS AND OPPORTUNITIES. BUT WHEN NEW TOOLS MAKE LIFE MORE DIFFICULT AND STRESSFUL RATHER THAN EASIER AND MORE MEANINGFUL - AND WE ARE, AS A SOCIETY, BARELY CONSCIOUS OF IT - THEN SOMETHING HAS GONE SERIOUSLY AWRY, BOTH WITH OUR EXPECTATIONS FOR TECHNOLOGY AND OUR UNDERSTANDING OF HOW IT WORKS.