Free time for workers grows significantly

Endless work days with no free time are a common complaint from workers but research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston showed that leisure time has actually grown sharply over the past 30 years.

Americans across the board have significantly more free time, according to surveys taken between 1965 and 2003, with men and women on average seeing as much as eight more hours of time away from work per week, said Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst, authors of the study which was published on Monday.

Added up that amounts to an additional seven to nine more weeks of vacation a year, assuming a 40-hour work week, they said.

Poorer U.S. workers actually enjoy more free time than their wealthier, better-educated counterparts, the study found.

In what was described as an “empirical puzzle”, Aguiar and Hurst said the least-educated households had the largest gains in leisure time.

“In the eighties and nineties there was growing wage inequality favoring college-educated households over high school-educated households,” said Aguiar, a senior economist at the Boston Fed. “What we show is that in terms of leisure, it’s the reverse.”

The study also found that both men and women gained more leisure time since 1965, but in different ways. Men spent less time at work to have more free time, while women worked more but spent less time doing housework.

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The research differentiated between leisure time -- a broad category that included everything from television watching, sleeping and “direct utility” activities such as having sex --and time spent on household chores and health care.

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While the study did not focus on how Americans were able to increase their free time, Aguiar said technological innovations such as microwaves and prepared foods have likely made more leisure time possible.

The current research on leisure time expands the common definition of work to include time spent doing household chores as well as time at the workplace, said Aguiar.

“Looking at one without looking at the other might give us a misleading picture of what is actually going on in the economy,” he said.