Part of that is workers attempting to reduce risk. When unemployment was low and it was more difficult to find new workers with particular skillsets (without paying a ton of money), employees could work their normal hours and, if work didn’t get done, they’d say “I am doing all I can with my normal week, we need more people” and would not get fired for saying so.
For the last 6 years or so, though, telling employers that you couldn’t get all the work they assigned to you done was a great way to get laid off, so employees figured that if the choice was between working an extra 5 or 10 hours in order to negate the risk of work not being done, they would rather work more than be out of a job.
Unsurprisingly, once you have workers that accept the extra hours, it’s difficult to turn it around. It’s also hard for the employees to go back to fewer hours because if you do less work, it can stand out pretty sharply. That all being said, I believe this also has a strong vocation element. Some professions have always worked extra hours, and many are still straight 9-5 (or 8-4 in the midwest) jobs.
All that said, I think connectedness has more impact on this than anything else. High-paying jobs tend to not be manual labor and an employee on vacation can spend 30 minutes catching up on an important project. It may “take away” from the vacation but not everyone is bothered by it.
