Pity the Poor Trial Attorneys Working 70-Hour Weeks!

ABC's "World News" last night aired a story based on some numbers crunched by a left-leaning think tank about nearly 2 million Americans in "extreme" jobs that cause them to burn the candle at both ends. Of course most of them are very well-compensated and have loads of responsibility on their shoulders. And then some are trial attorneys.

Guess which of those two categories Betsy Stark chose from to flesh out the plight of the overworked in America. Yeah, you guessed right.

Here's but a taste (click here for the full article):

American laborers are “going to extremes” working in jobs “where 60 hours a week can be considered part-time, and overtime is an understatement.”

That’s how ABC anchor Charles Gibson teased a story in the opening credits of the November 27 “World News.” Yet for all the hype, fewer than one percent of Americans hold these type of “extreme” jobs, and most are well-compensated.

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In a nation of roughly 300 million people, that’s only 0.67 percent of the country’s population, although Stark’s report made “extreme” work sound like a pandemic.

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Stark chose a Florida lawyer as a textbook case of the “extreme” worker. The correspondent profiled 35-year old David Shontz, a “man who rarely vacations,” who is “a trial lawyer hoping to make partner at his firm” where “punishing hours are the price of admission.”

“The kind of success I want, I don’t see any other way to do it,” Shontz, a father of three, shrugged.

Rather than question whether Shontz’s sacrifice of family time for work commitments was worth it, Stark presented Shontz as a victim of modernity and/or an impersonal deterministic obsession with the “extreme.”