Dangerously Sleepy
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Dangerously Sleepy 13474_Dangerously_Sleepy_Derickson_F1.indd 1 7/1/13 2:24 PM Dangerously Sleepy Overworked Americans and the Cult of Manly Wakefulness ALAN DERICKSON university of pennsylvania press philadelphia 13474_Dangerously_Sleepy_Derickson_F1.indd 3 7/1/13 2:24 PM 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 13474_Dangerously_Sleepy_Derickson_F1.indd 4 7/1/13 2:24 PM For Margaret Ellen 13474_Dangerously_Sleepy_Derickson_F1.indd 5 7/1/13 2:24 PM Contents Preface ix 1. Sleep Is for Sissies: Elite Males as Paragons of Wakefulness 1 2. In a Drowsy State: The Underregulation of Overwork 27 3. The Long Turn: Steelworkers and Shift Rotation 53 4. Asleep and Awake at the Same Time: Pullman Porters on Call 84 5. Six Days on the Road: Long-Haul Truckers Fighting Drowsiness 108 Conclusion: The Employers’ Dreams 142 Notes 147 Index 213 Acknowledgments 223 13474_Dangerously_Sleepy_Derickson_F1.indd 7 7/1/13 2:24 PM 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, afflu- ent 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 in- adequate recuperative rest due to working time.1 The sheer duration of time at work is one of two critical temporal factors 13474_Dangerously_Sleepy_Derickson_F1.indd 9 7/1/13 2:24 PM x Preface in workers’ sleep loss. The arrangement of time also takes a toll. The spread of nonstandard work schedules—night work, rotating shifts, split shifts, week- end 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, con- tracting, 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 stud- ies have pursued many facets of male experience and identity, often fixing on dramatic expressions such as extreme muscularity and myriad forms of ag- gression. 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 re- sponsibility 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, con- tinue to face a predicament set up long ago by men functioning under the very different circumstances of the breadwinner-homemaker model. Com- menting on the spread of extreme jobs, Sylvia Hewlett, founder of the Center for Work-Life Policy, observed, “If an older generation of working mothers 13474_Dangerously_Sleepy_Derickson_F1.indd 10 7/1/13 2:24 PM Preface xi 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 expec- tations 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 dif- ferences 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 be- yond the hazardous conditions caused by chemical, physical, and biologi- cal 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 un- explored territory has severe limitations. I seek only to illuminate the sleep practices related to a few kinds of male-dominated work that exhibited ex- ceptional 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 -un recognized 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 13474_Dangerously_Sleepy_Derickson_F1.indd 11 7/1/13 2:24 PM xii Preface diminished