I agree that Americans tend to be overworked. It really does come down to company culture though. I have worked in a bunch of companies and some of them its strictly 8-5 and others the schedule is more flexible but you may end up working more. It is a really interesting dynamic, while so many people are overworked and trying to do more with less we have all these other people who are unemployed. It seems to me that as a country we are very honest about how much it really costs to employ people and how much work each person is actually capable of doing. And a lot of this has been a result of technology improvements over the years which is supposed to improve our productivity.