The Social Costs of the Elite’s Work Hours: An Egalitarian Case for Universal Work Time Regulations
Highly-paid, well-educated professionals in the contemporary United States often work long hours and report that they would prefer to work less. Should work time regulations apply universally, protecting those in more and less advantaged occupational positions alike from excessive, anti-social, and unpredictable work hours? Recent arguments in political philosophy defend a view I call ‘exempt the elite.’ This position holds that egalitarian commitments do not support universal work hours regulations. Instead, the elite’s long hours are acceptable, even desirable, because if work time regulations applied universally, the result would be diminished tax revenue to redistribute to the less advantaged. I here take up the question of how egalitarians should regard the elite’s long hours work culture, and I grant that the elite may not have claims of justice to shorter work hours. Still, I challenge the position that the elite’s long hours should be welcomed by showing how their long hours work culture generates a range of inegalitarian social costs. Given a choice between public policies that aim to compress income inequality while regulating work hours universally or exempting the elite from work hours regulations, egalitarians must consider not only the tax revenue effects but the broader social effects. If the elite’s long hours are more detrimental than beneficial to the realization of broadly egalitarian commitments, there is an egalitarian argument for not exempting the elite from work time regulations.
Julie Rose is an Associate Professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College. Her primary area of research and teaching is contemporary political philosophy, with a focus on questions of economic justice.
Her research addresses the ethical dimensions of our collective economic choices. She is interested in issues of distributive and social justice, justice and work, environmental ethics, and gender and family justice.
In her first book Free Time (Princeton University Press), she argues that all citizens are entitled, as a matter of justice, to fair shares of free time. Her current research includes a series of papers about issues of work, leisure, and economic growth.
From 2024-2028, she is serving as Associate Editor of the American Political Science Review.
From July 1, 2025-2029, she is serving as the Hans ’80 and Kate Morris Director of the Ethics Institute at Dartmouth.
She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University. Prior to joining Dartmouth’s Government Department, she was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Brown University’s Political Theory Project and a Postdoctoral Fellow with Stanford University’s Center for Ethics in Society. Since then, she has been a Fellow-in-Residence at the Edmond J. Safra Center at Harvard University and an Academic Visitor (non-stipendiary) at Nuffield College, Oxford University.
At Dartmouth, she teaches courses on Ethics and Public Policy, the Ethics of the Family, Ethics, Economics, and the Environment, and Justice and Work.