The 'harried leisure class' revisited: Dutch and Canadian trends in the use of time from the 1970s to the 1990s

Abstract

Data from five national time use surveys in the Netherlands (1975 to 1995), and three time use surveys in Canada (1981 to 1992) are examined in an attempt to answer two questions: (1) Have people living in industrial societies gained or lost free time during the last two decades? (2) To what extent are the combined pressures of work and domestic obligations, alluded to in the literature as 'time pressure' or 'time squeeze' (Linder, 1970; Rifkin, 1987; Robinson, 1990; Schor, 1991), distributed evenly across different life cycle groups and social strata. The article concludes that, during the observed period, the combined workloads of paid and unpaid work have risen, and the amounts of free time have declined or remained static, for the employed populations in both countries. The analyses in the article lend considerable support to the thesis of life cycle and social status polarization of people's access to time. The workloads of life cycle groups operating under combined pressures of multiple work and family roles have risen at the same rate or faster than the workloads of life cycle groups with fewer role commitments. Compared with the amount of words and analytical time used to study leisure markets, leisure facilities, leisure motivations and leisure policies, measuring leisure time appears to be a 'cinderella' topic. (Martin and Mason, 1994)