How has the stock market boom of the past few years contributed to making our work lives worse?
During the ’90s, many people explicitly believed that there couldn’t be anything wrong with this system because the stock market was so incredibly strong. They bought into the idea that rising stock prices would more than compensate them for a whole range of different job-related sacrifices and tradeoffs, through stock options — if you were lucky enough to have them — or through your stock portfolio or your 401K plan. Somehow you were going to share in the goodies. People made what they thought of as short-term sacrifices, which became accepted as the way American business has to be in order to be competitive in the global marketplace. And then we didn’t have any choice anymore. Weekend getaways are replacing two-week vacations and Fed Ex now delivers on Sunday. How did we lose the idea of private time vs. work time? As recently as the ’70s, people really did believe that new technology would help us all actually work less. We would put in fewer hours at the office, maybe even fewer
