The Overworked American is a well-researched, but dense economic history of the our struggle with the tradeoff between time and money. What really makes this book shine is the data in the latter chapters of the book that discuss the implications of the recent research that shows the broad preference for Americans to receive more free time rather than more money as part of their compensation rise. I also found her framing of the conflict between the labor movement of the early 20th century and businesses of that time in terms of leisure time to be interesting. Finally, her indictment of American materialism contains some gems.

This book is quite dated, which was not a problem, except that now I'm fascinated to understand how the incredible rise in income inequality during the 00s and the American cognitive surplus interplay with the trends that Dr. Schor discusses. It shouldn't be long until a second edition would be warranted.
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This book now 20 years old seems especially timely in the current depression era that seems to have no end. In addition to the lack of leisure are the facts of unemployment and the well known now statistic that adjusting for inflation, wages have fallen in the past 2 decades. The relation between work and consumer goods is especially good. ( )

Interesting reading, but would be more so if there were not burdened down with so many statistics.
Being a bestseller, one would think this would have been a "call-to-arms" to bring the unions back, bud sadly over fifteen years later the lack of time off has decreased even more. I know at my job it is less than one day then even last year, & that they wanted to take Independence day away from us this year (& already have it on the agenda to so do next year). Is this what our country has come to---that we cannot even have the holiday off that was to celebrate this nation's freedom???