From trends in quitting to surveys of public sentiment, it’s become abundantly clear that employee disengagement in the United States is on the rise. American workers are unhappy at work, but more often than not they take a personal approach to addressing what is actually a structural problem.
Recent Gallup surveys show that after a long period of trending up, employee engagement in the U.S. saw its first decline in a decade in 2021 and 2022. Phrases like “quiet quitting” and “Great Resignation” have grabbed headlines. While the COVID-19 pandemic certainly contributed, these trends represent a broader backlash against the endless cycle of striving for more without reliable rewards and the toll that cycle takes on one’s family relationships and personal well-being.
Everyone — employers and employees — has gotten so used to doing more with less that they are struggling to recognize what is happening.
Employers squeeze every bit of effort and time out of their employees that they can get away with because the rules of the game are set up to allow it. Employees often play a willing role in the process because hustling to do and be better is the only way they know how to hedge their bets in a system that often feels like a game of chance. Economic insecurity is widespread — among more and less educated workers alike — and it benefits a mostly absent, invisible owner class whose wealth has skyrocketed over the last decade.
This drag on shared growth and prosperity is rooted in largely forgotten — yet profoundly impactful — policy choices that create the conditions for employee disengagement today. For salaried workers, whose take-home pay isn’t directly tied to their number of hours on the job, the key problem is overwork.
In 1926, Ford Motor Company adopted a five-day 40-hour workweek following decades of union organizing for change and the recognition that longer hours do not always yield greater productivity. It was a time of rapacious industrialization, followed by a historic crash that left American workers in ruins, prompting Congress in 1938 to pass the main employment law that governs pay and working conditions in the United States, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The FLSA established the length of a standard workweek and set parameters for overtime pay and basic minimum wage and subminimum wage rates. In 1940, an amendment to the FLSA set the American workweek at 40 hours. The statute also included an array of exemptions from overtime pay for the relatively small number of workers in professional and managerial roles at that time.
Fast forward, and in 2021, the average American worker who works full-time worked roughly 44 hours per week with more than 40 percent working 45 hours a week or more, according to a Gallup survey. The 40-hour workweek is often a 50-hour workweek (or more) because full-time employees are routinely asked to stay late or take work home without being paid for their time.
As indicated by recent labor market research and the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Helix Energy Solutions Group, Inc. v. Hewitt in February, large numbers of American workers are being mislabeled as managers and denied overtime pay. In 1975, more than 60 percent of salaried workers were automatically eligible for overtime pay, compared with less than 7 percent today.
Without the right to overtime pay, white-collar workers have little recourse when their job security demands that they toe the line for long hours. As a result, Americans are overworked and underpaid and their mental health is suffering due to workplace-related stress.
Employers have benefited from this end-run around employment rights in the short term because many workers, according to our research, hold a deep reverence for hard work. Well-educated yet economically insecure, the middle-aged workers we spoke with are deeply invested in the idea that hard work is a sign of moral worth. Yet they express profound distress that their efforts have not yielded stable employment and are deeply anxious about their economic futures.
In the long run, the burnout that comes from piling extra work onto employees within the structure of a 40-hour workweek left unchecked by overtime pay protections backfires. Overwork can dampen productivity through employee disengagement and through poor health deriving from the effects of stress on the body. And that’s what we’re seeing in the labor market today.
The only solution is to update the rules that govern employment relationships. Legislation to codify a 32-hour workweek was recently considered in the state of Maryland, though legislators pulled the bill in March. Inspired by recent research hailing the benefits of a shorter workweek, the Maryland bill would have established a four-day workweek pilot program offering income tax incentives to public and private employers who adopt a 32-hour workweek without reductions in pay or benefits. Other state legislatures should follow Maryland’s lead, and not wait for a divided Congress to pass the Thirty-Two Hour Workweek Act to amend the FLSA. Those in this business community can also demonstrate leadership by voluntarily adopting a four-day, 32-hour workweek for their salaried employees.
Such measures will only work, however, if the Department of Labor follows through on its plan to update overtime regulations so that routine requests to stay late and take work home don’t undermine the goals of a shorter workweek.
Employee disengagement is not a crisis of belief in hard work, it is a crisis of belief that hard work will be rewarded. Employees want their hard work and skill to be recognized and fairly compensated, but they also want the space and flexibility of a sustainable workweek. They want a workweek that prioritizes worker productivity as much as worker well-being.
Enobong Hannah Branch is the senior vice president for equity and a professor of sociology at Rutgers University. Caroline Hanley is an associate professor at William & Mary specializing in social stratification, work, and economic sociology.
Editor’s note: This piece was updated on April 3 and April 4 to correct the authors’ titles and amend a date related to legislation being pulled.