To the Editor:

It isn’t enough that Americans are now routinely working 14-hour days, that no one cooks a real dinner anymore, that kids and parents stand around eating takeout in the kitchen at 10 p.m., that dinnertime conversation is dead, that the two-week family vacation is a thing of the past? Now we have to do this to the French?

If they have spent any time thinking at all, they’ll conclude that a life of ever more fancy gadgets and bigger houses to clean but no leisure time is a poor exchange. We could learn a few things from them. Vive le 35-hour workweek!

Carolyn Ziegler
Pine Mountain Club, Calif.
Oct. 18, 2007

Note from KBJ: Anyone who wishes to have a 35-hour workweek is welcome to it. Is there a law that requires people to work 40 or more hours? Take me, for example. I could have practiced law for a living and earned a hell of a lot more money than I earn as a professor. I chose the relaxed life. That’s how things are done in a free society. Has the letter writer lost sight of the distinction—it’s pretty basic—between allowing people to do X and coercing them into doing X? Is she suggesting that nobody be allowed to work more than 35 hours per week? Can you say “totalitarianism”? By the way, how likely is it that people who work 14-hour days to buy “fancy gadgets and bigger houses” are going to cook real dinners, talk to one another, take family vacations, and enjoy leisure time if their workweek is reduced to 35 hours? Will these things be mandated by law? Isn’t it just as likely that they’ll spend their evenings in the nearest pub, drinking themselves into oblivion, wondering where their freedom went?