Thirty-five years ago, Boston-based labor economist Juliet Schor published a best-selling book called The Overworked American. In timely fashion, she helped rebut the then-prevailing neoliberal notion that the United States was not competitive in the global economy because hourly workers here were not toiling as hard as hundreds of millions of their counterparts abroad.

Believe it or not, a multimillionaire US senator from Massachusetts named John Kerry was such a fervent promoter of this myth that he would even lecture his blue-collar constituents in the Bay State about their need to work harder and smarter. (Members of our own union were one such captive audience at a union conference held during that era.)

Contrary to Kerry’s claims, Schor revealed how the eight-hour day/forty-hour workweek — won in the United States during the 1930s after a century-long struggle for shorter hours — had become a thing of the past by 1992. When The Overworked American was written, Americans were, on average, working about 164 more hours every year than they were in the early 1970s. In addition, they were spending more time on the job than workers in most other advanced industrialized countries.