Several weeks ago, the English Department at Masaryk University was honored to host a public reading by Douglas Pressman, Ph.D. A lecturer in the Central European Studies Program at the Center for Economics Research and Graduate Education (CERGE) in Prague, Dr. Pressman came to Brno to present his paper, Quality of Life? The Emergent Critique of America's Work-centered Culture, which was published in the July 2003 issue of the famous American current affairs magazine, Vital Speeches of the Day.

Pressman's paper deals with sociological research over the past fifteen years that demonstrates a time shortage in modern American life. Despite the glamorous images beamed across the Atlantic by Hollywood films and American television and pop culture, research increasingly documents that most Americans are working longer hours for less money and fewer benefits, that they are sleeping less, and that their stress levels are increasing. Pressman's paper cites The Overworked American, a 1992 book by Harvard economist Juliet Schor. He quotes the following statistics:

• The average employed American was on the job an additional month each year compared to twenty years earlier.
• American manufacturing workers were on the job 320 hours more per year than comparable workers in Germany or France.
• Between 1980 and 1990, American workers' yearly paid vacation and leave time decreased by an average three and a half days.
• A majority of Americans were getting 60 to 90 minutes less sleep per night than recommended.
• As many as one-third of American children were caring for themselves by the end of the 1980s, meaning that they had no care. Help hotlines reported being inundated with calls from children asking questions about taking care of toddlers.

Pressman's paper cites several other sources, each of which paints an equally grim picture about various aspects of modern American life. The overwhelming conclusion to be drawn from research on several distinct fronts is that the quality of life enjoyed by most Americans seems to be on a downward spiral. Not only is leisure time decreasing, but the real wages of hourly-paid workers have been decreasing since 1973. "I cannot quote you the source of the following statistic off the top of my head," said Pressman in an interview, "but I have been told reliably that 80% of American workers are today making 50% of what their parents earned, in constant dollars. This is another major force driving the time deficit: People are working harder to make up for lost income. In Canada, on the other hand, personal income has remained flat; the current generation is earning about the same as their parents did."

The paper mentions a 1999 Luxembourg Income Study that unearthed a surprising fact: In Pressman's words, "among first world nations, the U.S. now has the smallest middle class as a percentage of total population, and the largest population of poor. . . . The class structure of the United States in 1999 was essentially identical to that of Russia, which had been in social and economic collapse for a decade. (Left Business Observer, #89, April 1999)."

In the interview, Dr. Pressman illustrated some of these trends with stories from his own experience, stories that sound too familiar to many Americans. "Where I grew up, in Billings, Montana, there was a vital middle class, a class made up largely of merchants, whose shops filled the center of town. The center of Billings, Montana now is almost exclusively espresso bars and boutiques run by doctors' wives, and the real commerce is done on the outskirts of the town in what are called 'big box' stores: Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and so on. They continue to spring up like mushrooms.

"The difference between working at a big box store and running your own store, even in the same industry, is profound. Increasingly, job tasks are able to be programmed and simplified. That's the phenomenon called 'de-skilling'. Now a training manual tells you exactly how to serve your function within the big box division of labor. The key to a McDonald's franchise, for example, is a series of notebooks telling you how to run a McDonald's. The result is a routinization of the economy and of the skill set.

"As a result, there are fewer and fewer people who are actually able to operate with a large scope of skills. This means that fewer and fewer people are able to command high wages. At the same time, a majority of people are equally passive in their consumption. So they're following a McDonald's manual at work, and they're following the television manual, the marketing manual, at home, and that's actually dictating what they do with their personal time. And the 'manual' approach to life is becoming adopted widely."

Research does show that Americans' television watching has been increasing for years. Pressman's paper mentions one study indicating that the average American now spends 40% of his or her free time in front of a television, and he quotes a 2003 book by Michael Dawson (The Consumer Trap: Big Business Marketing in American Life) to discuss the effects of 'the manual approach to life': "The sheer number of hours Americans spend watching television advertisements that they would rather not see, opening and discarding junk mail, answering telemarketing calls, deleting spam, sitting in traffic, calming and restraining, and negotiating with marketing-addled children, and so forth, is a major deduction from the limited energy supplies all people have to spend during their earthly days."

Since technology has so efficiently shrunk the world market, Americans are not the only people who feel this kind of pressure; it is becoming a problem for people in all industrialized countries. In the end, Dr. Pressman suggests that the increasingly prominent role of big business and advertising in everyday life is one of the primary causes of the time crisis specifically, and of the deteriorating quality of life in general. Again citing Dawson's book, Pressman's paper states that "during the past century, marketing became the prime organizing force of American industry, and sales-costs the leading cost of doing business. Shaping culture in the interests of profitability thus became an essential and self-conscious objective of big business, which has utilized sophisticated behavioral science to design its campaigns. The net result, to cut to the chase, has been a society premised on consumerism, installment purchasing, credit card debt, and an entertainment culture."

And his predictions for the future? The paper states that "the final destination of the new time-aware critique of American society seems to be . . . that our time poverty is no historical anomaly, but is deeply rooted in institutions which Americans did not consciously choose and which are largely outside public control. . . . Time therefore may eventually become a major political battle ground, and not only in the USA." In the interview, he put it a bit more straightforwardly: "It is becoming increasingly clear that the 20th century involved a kind of refeudalization of society, but at a high level of technological complexity. We increasingly evolved social structures which blatantly control and manipulate from the top, via mass media. One sign of how far this has come is that we have a world in which people increasingly work nineteenth-century-style hours. How far this can be taken before society begins to suffer badly is going to be one of the more interesting questions to be answered in the next decade or so."

Such harsh criticisms of the practices of big business may come as a surprise to a country of people who can finally embrace capitalism after so many years. But the paper again quotes Dawson to give statistics that capture the magnitude of the forces that have quietly been amassed in the name of selling more things to more people: "Big businesses in the United States now spend well over a trillion dollars a year on marketing. This is double Americans' combined annual spending on all public and private education, from kindergarten through graduate schools. It also works out to around four thousand dollars a year for each man, woman, and child in the country. Four thousand dollars, in turn, is triple the annual per capita Gross Domestic Product of the so-called low- and medium-income countries, where 85% of the world's people now live."

Unfortunately, Dr. Pressman says that he sees some of the same symptoms emerging here in the Czech Republic. "When I first came to Prague six years ago, you saw people on public transportation reading serious literature--Dostoevsky, and the like. Now it's fashion magazines. And now you see women and men on public transportation at 9:30 at night carrying their laptops, and you know that they're probably going to do a little more work when they get home. This was not the case six years ago when I arrived." An American of course has no right to judge how Czechs choose to spend their time or their money, but this American would consider it a real shame if the Czechs, in their eagerness to make up for lost time, fell victim in twenty years to the same diseases of modern life that took a hundred or more years to spread across America and western Europe.