“极端工作”迫使雇员另谋出路

　　“Extreme Jobs” Force Employees to Make Choices

　　By Margot Adler 尹晶 译

　　Two million professionals are working in “extreme jobs”. These are jobs that require more than 60 hours a week of work, often involve extensive travel, tight deadlines and round-the-clock availability to clients. A study that looks at these jobs finds that most who have them love them. Still, many workers, particularly women, find the hours impossible.

　　有200万人正在从事着所谓的“极端工作”。这些工作要求员工每周投入60多个小时的时间，还¾¬常要四处奔波，日程安排十分紧密，而且还要24小时都能让顾客找得到。一项研究发现，大多数做这种工作的人都乐此不疲。然而，也有很多人——尤其是女性——觉得工作时间太长了，她们无法忍受。

　　Debbie Watkins, a software consultant in upstate New York, traveled all over for 20 years, but two of those years were the worst. Seventy-five hour workweeks, extensive travel, only a day and a half with family each week; it was the hassle of modern air travel that finally did her in1.

　　“One day I realized that I actually could take an oozy in the airport. I walked in my house and I told my husband I quit.”

　　She still works hard, perhaps sixty hours a week. But now she’s cut out the travel, so she actually knows the names of the streets in her town and says her greatest achievement was keeping her marriage together through those years. There’s something about working in what experts now call “extreme jobs” that mirror extreme sports. Alexander Southwell is a federal prosecutor in New York.

　　“I often think of trials as basically a marathon at a full out sprint pace. So if you can imagine trying to run a marathon while you’re sprinting, that’s what a trial feels like.”

　　During the heat of a trial, he says he can work ninety hour weeks subsisting on…

　　“…coffee and Diet Cokes, sometimes I won’t eat all day.”

　　Or take Eric Kaye, a managing director in mergers and acquisitions at the global investment bank UBS. He says he often doesn’t put the Blackberry down until eleven or twelve at night.

　　“Ya know for us, our competition is negotiating against another bank and you really have to feel like that’s your game day. And what you see in our business is if that’s a negative stress for people, they get out.”

　　The study looked at professionals who worked more than 60 hours a week and often did extensive travel and had tight deadlines. The study found two million people in the US falling into this category, an elite yes, but not a tiny upper crust2. And of those two million, only four percent were women. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, the president of the Center for Work Life Policies, says women told them the long hours in these jobs made them impossible. Many had childcare and eldercare responsibilities. What’s distressing, says Hewlett, is that women have flooded into many professions and done very well…

　　“…and just when they were getting real traction in the upper reaches, uh, we redefined what it took to do a top job.”

　　Doing significant work, being a player, having stimulating colleagues, these are the top reasons men and women love these jobs. But the risk is burnout and threats to family life and relationships and since companies want to retain good workers, they are trying to find ways to make these jobs more sustainable. And they’re experimenting. Mona Lau, Global Head of Diversity for UBS, says that twenty percent of their female workers at their headquarters in Switzerland are on flex time. High performers, men and women, can customize their workload.

　　“What we call ‘customized intensity’, ya know, while the deal is going on, you work very, very, very long hours, and then you get a block of time off. So you can address other issues in your personal life.”

　　While more women than men have been leaving these high pressure jobs, most executives say this is not just about women. In the same way people play professional sports for a limited time, eventually most people, young, old, men, women, don’t want to work this intensely all the time. So companies are slowing coming up with new models to accommodate at least some of them.