This piece is cross-posted from the Breakthrough Journal Tumblr.

I read Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery's article, "All Work and No Pay: The Great Speedup," at midnight two days before we launched the Breakthrough Journal. I had just spent five hours with our Associate Editor sorting through photos, and I was tired. Little surprise that I found myself cheering Bauerlein and Jeffery on. "I am overworked! I am overstressed! I want to go to bed!"

The next morning it became clear that I wasn't the only overstressed person who had identified with the piece. Many of us feel like our technology owns us instead of vice versa; many of us struggle with life-work balance. But in the days following Breakthrough Journal's launch, I realized that in our sleeplessness and stress, we were conflating disparate trends and obfuscating the real issues at stake.

Is there a speedup?

To start with, there's this issue of "speedup" which is defined both in the article as well as in Webster's as "an employer's demand for accelerated output without increased pay." As Bauerlein and Jeffery note, it was traditionally used to talk about an increase in the speed of a factory line (recall the infamous I Love Lucy episode in which Lucy and Ethel work frantically to wrap chocolates.) Speedup was thus used to describe a phenomenon in which blue-collar factory workers were expected to work faster for no extra pay.

Except that's not exactly the phenomenon Bauerlein and Jeffery describe. What they observe are employees working longer hours for no increase in pay. In which case we are talking, not about blue-collar workers who are paid by the hour, but about salaried, knowledge workers.

Contrary to their assertion that "what's happening to hotel maids and sales clerks is also happening to project managers, engineers, and doctors," the situations are entirely different. For hotel maids, sales clerks, and Wal-Mart workers, employers face clear penalties for working employees longer than 40 hours per week. Wal-Mart is typically criticized, not for overworking employees, but for underworking them and hiring more workers part time so as to avoid paying out benefits. In fact, recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics contradicts Bauerlein and Jeffery's claim that we're all working extremely long hours. According to the BLS, the average full-time worker still works an eight-hour day.

On the other hand, according to Breakthrough Journal contributor Dalton Conley in his book Elsewhere, U.S.A., there is a longer-term trend of knowledge workers working increased hours. Thus, while some of these knowledge workers may be working more hours for no increase in pay as Bauerlein and Jeffery contest, this is far from a universal trend.

So, point one, the purported speedup, which isn't really a speedup in the classical sense, can really only be affecting salaried workers (which to be fair, is something that is made clear in one of the charts accompanying the article if not in the article itself).

Is productivity bad?

Second, there's the issue of productivity which Bauerlein and Jeffery never get clear on in their piece. Initially, they define productivity as "economic output per hour worked," which is the typical measurement of productivity according to the BLS. But then they go on to imply that it is employees working longer hours that has allowed America to increase its productivity in the past few years which isn't consistent with their own definition. If people are producing more output simply through an increase in hours, there's no growth in productivity.

Although productivity is treated as something insidious to be worried about, the reality is that increases in productivity are good for employees, growth, and society. Generally speaking, productivity increases are produced through technological innovation, like the Internet or the iPhone, which allow us to work (and play) more efficiently. After all, do any of us really want to go back to the days of standing around for fifteen minutes waiting for the fax machine?

And as Rob Atkinson writes in this issue of Breakthrough Journal, "sustained increases in rates of innovation and productivity growth likely represent the only long-term path to equitable growth and a sustained social welfare state in an increasingly competitive and globalized economy." Indeed, as a report by Atkinson's Information Technology and Innovation Foundation notes, the vast majority of studies demonstrate that increases in productivity result in increases in employment.

Increased productivity also produces benefits for society at large. For example, Barnes Jewish Hospital in St. Louis recently imported the idea of "lean manufacturing" from Toyota plants and applied them to health care. As a result, the hospital has been able to cut down ER wait times significantly: the average visit for a stomachache now takes two hours where it used to take three.

Why are knowledge workers working more?

So the speedup Bauerlein and Jeffery describe cannot be affecting wage workers, nor can we attribute gains in productivity to increased hours of work. Meanwhile, knowledge workers are working longer hours, which may or may not be something we should be concerned about. If salaried workers are working longer hours for no increase in pay because they worry that if they don't work those hours, they'll be fired, that's a big problem. But we don't have any real evidence of that.

From my own perspective, I worked long hours before the Breakthrough Journal launch, not because anyone was holding a gun to my head and not because I'm brainwashed, but because I cared about the quality of my own work. I suspect that staffers at Mother Jones feel similarly. Though we may wish the weeks before deadlines were less crazy, at the end of the day, we take ownership of our work. We don't work more to produce more profits for our corporate overlords (in fact Breakthrough Journal and Mother Jones are both not-for-profit so there are no profiteering overlords), we work more because it produces satisfaction. And that's not a bad thing.

So what should we worry about?

To be clear, Bauerlein and Jeffery do touch on some pervasive problems in American society; many of us could benefit from greater work-life balance. And many of us need to learn how to manage our technologies better. A lot of us need to learn better time-management strategies; we waste valued hours during the day checking Facebook or watching a YouTube video or obsessively checking our Twitter feed and then wonder why we have work to do at 10:00 pm.

And many American companies could stand to offer better vacation policies, and managers need to encourage their employees to take those holidays. Companies can also increase quality of life by allowing employees to work flexible hours and telecommute (as Jonathan Haidt notes, shorter commutes can increase happiness). While Mother Jones praises Mule Design Studio, whose employees keep a strict 9:00 am - 6:00 pm schedule, plenty of people prefer more flexible schedules that allow them to attend teacher conferences, coach soccer teams, and get their teeth cleaned without being penalized.

We can enact better policies as well. We should have paid parental leave, and both mothers and fathers should take time off following the birth of a child. If there really are a number of salaried employees working eighty-hour weeks for no increases in pay, states may need to tighten the definition of salaried workers. And the overreliance on unpaid interns, especially in the non-profit sector, is definitely something we should be concerned about. But none of this has anything to do with financial regulation or campaign finance reform as Bauerlein and Jeffery suggest, worthy as those causes may be.

As the Great Recession lingers on, the problems we face are not too much work and too much productivity. There has been no great speedup, but a slow down. The problems we face are too little productivity, too little innovation, too little growth, too little demand, and too little work. Instead of blaming productivity for lack of jobs, we should work to spur productivity and innovation. Instead of simply castigating corporations for stagnating wages, we should work to tamp down on health care costs, which have soared tremendously, negatively affecting wages.

And, instead of focusing on the plight of overworked salaried workers, perhaps we should be more focused on the plight of underworked hourly workers. As Dalton Conley argues in this issue of Breakthrough Journal, our current New Deal social contract is failing these workers. In order to increase social mobility, we must provide equal access to quality education and health care, and in order to do those things, a new social contract is required.

And maybe, if we can create such a new contract, the children of an underworked Wal-Mart worker will grow up to become salaried knowledge workers who may, at times, work long hours because, like me, and probably like Bauerlein and Jeffery, they really love and value their work.