Second, it's become even harder to measure hours. The one thing we do know about productivity is that the hours we work have ballooned. In Europe there's a work council with a stopwatch over every workplace. Here in America, we know that we work, at a minimum, even longer now than the Japanese. As we might say after the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, it should be reasonable to monitor labor standards with the size of our work force.
More people work off the clock.
We know this because, when they make a point of it, union officials from, say, the United Food and Commercial Workers, can go into places virtually at random and find huge wage and hour violations. Worse, people are being pulled out of hourly and into salaried jobs, and then there is no limit to their hours. Again, this is unlike Europe. In effect, people all across this country are working for free. One big way for an economy to grow is just a little bit of free labor, at the margin.