Believe it or not, your analogy would be much closer the other way around. People from the eastern bloc in general didn't work anywhere near as hard as even in the western Europe, let alone America (the running joke was "We pretend that we work and they pretend that they pay us.")
I remember reading an article by Jerzy Urban (a propaganda minister in the soviet-appointed government in Poland, famous for his vicious defense of socialism) in which he argued that while it's true that people in the western countries have a bit more political freedoms, for an average person that matters very little. An average person spends most of their time at work, where people in capitalist countries have vastly less freedom than in socialist countries (he actually mentioned that in western countries, getting drunk at work is a firing offense, whereas in the People's Republic of Poland it was pretty common practice; I'm not making this up.) Therefore, according to Jerzy Urban, people in the socialist countries in reality had at least as much if not more freedom overall.
I remember reading an article by Jerzy Urban (a propaganda minister in the soviet-appointed government in Poland, famous for his vicious defense of socialism) in which he argued that while it's true that people in the western countries have a bit more political freedoms, for an average person that matters very little. An average person spends most of their time at work, where people in capitalist countries have vastly less freedom than in socialist countries (he actually mentioned that in western countries, getting drunk at work is a firing offense, whereas in the People's Republic of Poland it was pretty common practice; I'm not making this up.) Therefore, according to Jerzy Urban, people in the socialist countries in reality had at least as much if not more freedom overall.