Dangerously Sleepy: Overworked Americans and the Cult of Manly Wakefulness

214 Pages·2013·1.45 MB·English

by  Alan Derickson

Dangerously Sleepy
Overworked Americans and the Cult of Manly
Wakefulness
ALAN DERICKSON
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS
PHILADELPHIA
Copyright © 2014 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for
purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means
without written permission from the publisher.
Published by
University of Pennsylvania Press
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112
www.upenn.edu/pennpress
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Derickson, Alan.
Dangerously sleepy : overworked Americans and the cult of manly wakefulness / Alan Derickson. —1st
ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8122-4553-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Hours of labor—United States—History. 2. Shift
systems—United States—History. 3. Men—Employment—United States. 4. Men—United States—
Attitudes. 5. Sleep deprivation—Health aspects—United States. 6. Sleep deprivation—Social aspects—
United States. I. Title.
HD5124.D36 2014
331.25'60973—dc23 2013011243
For Margaret Ellen
Contents
Preface
1. Sleep Is for Sissies: Elite Males as Paragons of Wakefulness
2. In a Drowsy State: The Underregulation of Overwork
3. The Long Turn: Steelworkers and Shift Rotation
4. Asleep and Awake at the Same Time: Pullman Porters on Call
5. Six Days on the Road: Long-Haul Truckers Fighting Drowsiness
Conclusion: The Employers' Dreams
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
Preface
One thing is absolutely certain in America: the quality and quantity of sleep obtained is
substantially less than the quality and quantity that are needed. Over the past century, we
have reduced our average nightly total sleep time by more than 20 percent. Today, cultural
and economic forces combine to create a 24-hour society in which millions of Americans—
either chronically or intermittently—obtain insufficient sleep as a result of workplace and
lifestyle determinants. A convincing body of scientific evidence and witness testimony
indicates that many Americans are severely sleep deprived and, therefore, dangerously
sleepy.
—National Commission on Sleep Disorders Research, 1993
American society harbored many dangerously sleepy people long before the
landmark report of the National Commission on Sleep Disorders Research. This
book explores the making of a restless nation by concentrating on the fraught
historical relationship between sleep and work—the two biggest time
commitments of most adults throughout the modern era. Indeed, America's well-
known pattern of overwork sets it apart from all other advanced, affluent
societies. While employees in other prosperous nations saw their working time
decline in the late twentieth century, the average worker in the United States saw
his or her time on the job increase by over 160 hours per year. This trend
reduced the time left for sleeping and other forms of rest. In the 1990s, 24
percent of American workers slept six hours or less a day. By 2007, 30 percent
of the workforce fell into that short-sleep category, with employees in the
manufacturing and transportation sectors exceeding the overall average. Almost
half the nation's night-shift workers get by on a sleep allowance of six hours or
less. This book seeks to uncover some of the damage inflicted by inadequate
recuperative rest due to working time.1
The sheer duration of time at work is one of two critical temporal factors in
workers’ sleep loss. The arrangement of time also takes a toll. The spread of
nonstandard work schedules—night work, rotating shifts, split shifts, weekend
assignments, and other disruptive arrangements—has had a powerful impact on
the quality and quantity of unconscious rest. The acceleration of globalization
and the growth of a 24/7 economy in the twentieth century have put more
Americans to work at all times of the day and week. At present, about one in five
full-time employees juggles working, sleeping, and other activities under one of
many alternatives to the customary, but ever-less-standard, daytime weekday
schedule. The balancing act for several million members of the workforce
involves holding more than one job. In addition, a growing number of workers
have contingent employment in consulting, contracting, or other temporary
placements more likely to involve unpredictable and demanding nonstandard
hours. This book digs up many of the roots of these diverse plans and makes
clear that their deleterious effects have been present and, to a limited degree,
evident from the outset.2
Focusing on work-induced sleep loss illuminates a fundamental cultural
influence that has operated to extend wakefulness excessively, particularly
among men. Wakefulness as a measure of masculinity is a facet of the history of
gender in America that has received no attention at all. Recent gender studies
have pursued many facets of male experience and identity, often fixing on
dramatic expressions such as extreme muscularity and myriad forms of
aggression. But mundane manly stamina, as displayed by persevering through
long days or nights on the job, has thus far gained little notice. Fulfilling the
familiar male breadwinner role entailed a daily dedication to struggle to maintain
consciousness as a basic test of strength. For many American men, winning
bread meant losing sleep.3
Men erected standards of sleepless commitment to work that they have often
found difficult to meet. But it appears that the difficulties have been much
steeper for a sizable share of the women who have entered the paid workforce in
large numbers since the mid-twentieth century. Although male customs and
values of overwork and wakefulness presumed little or no responsibility for
household maintenance, employers and domestic partners have seldom made
accommodations for employed women's second shift of tasks at home.
Employed mothers, along with other women workers, continue to face a
predicament set up long ago by men functioning under the very different
circumstances of the breadwinner-homemaker model. Commenting on the
spread of extreme jobs, Sylvia Hewlett, founder of the Center for Work-Life
Policy, observed, “If an older generation of working mothers had difficulty
coping with fifty-hour workweeks, surely their younger peers are having an even
more difficult time managing sixty-plus-hour workweeks along with a slew of
additional performance pressures.” Unreasonable expectations about their ability
to forego sleep indefinitely have served to reinforce barriers to opportunity for
many women. Although this study focuses on men's overwork, it does aim to
help place the plight of working women in contemporary America in historical
context. Work-and-family scholar Joan Williams recently argued that her
colleagues should be “focusing attention not on women's differences but on the
masculine norms that make those differences seem so important.” Noting that
“workplaces are gender factories where men forge and enact their masculinity,”
Williams pointed specifically to norms of overwork and sleep deprivation widely
promoted as ideals of manliness.4
This book contributes to our understanding of American history in two
significant ways. First, it expands the horizons of historical scholarship on the
impact of work on health. The literature on occupational safety and health in the
United States up to this point has centered on toxins like lead, asbestos, and
silica, as well as on other hazards like radiation and threats of traumatic injury,
which tend to be confined to the workplace proper. This project builds on recent
work on less strictly occupational risks like fatigue and work-related
tuberculosis. My purpose is to introduce temporal terms of employment like
scheduling and cumulative hours spent on the job into the discussion of the
history of workers’ health, expanding the domain beyond the hazardous
conditions caused by chemical, physical, and biological agents of disease.5
Second, this is the first full-length study to make the history of sleep and
wakefulness practices in America its principal subject. Thus far, only a handful
of works have delved into any aspect of the history of unconscious rest.
Admittedly, my foray into an expanse of virtually unexplored territory has
severe limitations. I seek only to illuminate the sleep practices related to a few
kinds of male-dominated work that exhibited exceptional levels of sleep
deprivation: the result is neither comprehensive nor representative.6
More than mere inconvenience or minor discomfort is at stake here. Workers
forced to do without enough sleep over an extended period of time
disproportionately suffer serious ill effects, some of which were unrecognized or
vastly underrecognized until quite recently. The vulnerability of the drowsy or
unconscious worker to accidents on the job or on the way home stands out as the
best-understood risk. Overextended employees with diminished vigilance and
sluggish reactions incur traumatic injuries at an elevated rate. Leading sleep
scientist David Dinges concluded that “fatigue has contributed to serious
incidents and accidents in industrial operations, nuclear power plants, and in
virtually all modes of transportation…. Many of these accidents involved human
errors by personnel who often had inadequate sleep and/or were working the
night shift.” Such catastrophic events as the Three Mile Island accident and the
grounding of the Exxon Valdez have demonstrated the potential for disaster
when employees attempt to function while deprived of sleep.7
Although not as self-evident as the link between somnolence and accidents,
the role of sleep loss in producing chronic disease has been established by
researchers for numerous disorders. These include ulcers and other
gastrointestinal ailments, depression and other psychiatric conditions, heart
attacks and other forms of cardiovascular disease, and diabetes and other
metabolic disturbances. Some evidence links short sleep to elevated rates of
cancer. In addition, biomedical science has demonstrated that existing in a
prolonged state of either drowsiness during the daytime or insomnia at night due
to nonstandard working time is, in itself, a work-related disease, commonly
called shift work sleep disorder. According to the American Sleep Disorders
Association, the sleep of shift workers tends to be unrefreshing, largely because
it is curtailed by one to four hours per day. The experiential result is commonly a
persistent foggy state of consciousness that generates irritability, damaged social
relationships, impaired work performance, and an overall reduction in alertness
to one's surroundings. Although the prevalence of this condition is not known
with any precision, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine has estimated that
its victims number in the millions. This book attempts to capture some moments
of the dawning awareness of this disorder over the course of the past century.
This exploratory study primarily aims to suggest that sleep deprivation in the
American workforce has constituted a significant health problem for the past
century, even though the full breadth and depth of that phenomenon have been
and still are quite imperfectly understood.8
Public and private authorities in America have denied or minimized the
deleterious effects of short sleep and have defined dangerous sleepiness in the
narrowest terms. The first section of the book examines the broad cultural and
political forces that have shaped values and practices related to sleeplessness.
Prominent elite men, especially celebrity entrepreneurs from Thomas Edison to
Donald Trump, have aggressively propounded the notion that sleep is not only a
waste of valuable time but a sign of unmanly weakness. The evolution of public
policy has reflected changing gender roles, with supposedly weak female
employees initially meriting the solicitude of the state and then joining their
male counterparts in the freedom to work endlessly. Accordingly, regulations
setting real limits on hours affect only a very small number of occupations
whose practitioners may pose a danger to the general public. Woven together,
these cultural and political influences have fostered the general disposition that
real men need little sleep, and certainly do not need the government to tuck them
into bed.
The second section of Dangerously Sleepy offers case studies of male-
dominated occupations plagued by sleep difficulties. These cases of working-
class consciousness under duress come from abiding sites of endemic (and in all
probability, atypically extreme) deprivation—transportation and manufacturing.
Today, over a third of employees in those sectors get less than six hours’ sleep a
day. At the turn of the twentieth century, steelworkers faced a weekly rotation
from a twelve-hour day shift to a twelve-hour night shift, with the wrenching
transition of a twenty-four-hour stint called the “long turn.” At the same time,
Pullman porters toiled up to four hundred hours a month, always at the beck and
call of rail passengers. Since the 1920s, most long-haul truckers have faced long
and irregular hours on the road, often with no fixed schedule. All three groups
found themselves trying to gain respite in inhospitable places, putting up with
what I term discommodations. All three dealt with variants of the misery known
as flexploitation, as employers demanded not just machine-like regularity of
work behavior but, beyond that, a superhuman adaptability. Each group tried in
its own way to alleviate onerous terms of employment, adopting strategies that
mixed individualism and collectivism, self-reliance and alliance building,
accommodation and resistance. The volume concludes by pondering the
possibilities for reforms that would promote a more healthful relationship
between work and sleep, changes that might grant employees in America the
same entitlement to limited working time now bestowed on horses, mules, and
oxen in parts of this country, if not the same rights enjoyed by citizens of most
other prosperous societies.9