If you believe that the only hours for human beings to work are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, you’re in for a shock:
“The United States is moving steadily toward a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week economy,” said Dr. HarrietB. Presser, professor of sociology and director of the Center on Population, Gender and Social Inequality at the University of Maryland in College Park. “Soon, there will be no such thing as `standard’ work hours but a diversity of work schedules.”
Presser, who has a doctorate in sociology and demography from the University of California at Berkeley, is internationally known for studies of hours worked and their effects on family and personal lives.
It is clear, she says, that non-traditional hours are being created to meet the needs of industry, not of workers.
And, according to Presser’s intensive and ongoing research, the growing demand by employers for workers at night and weekends is “a revolution.”
Driving the revolution, she says, is the growth of the service industry, a global marketplace, the influx of women into the labor market who need evening and weekend services and an aging population in need of services around the clock, particularly in health care.
Using the most recent data, collected in 1991, from the federal government’s Current Population Survey, Presser has analyzed the work habits and lifestyles of some 8,000 people who work “non-standard” hours.
“In 1991, less than one-third of all employed Americans age 18 and over regularly worked a standard work week–daytime employment, 35 to 40 hours a week, Monday through Friday,” Presser said.
Viewed from another perspective, She says only 55 percent of U.S. workers are employed full time during the day–“barely a majority.”
And most telling is that more than half who work nights and weekends said the only reason they did so was because the job required it. The common belief was the people worked non-traditional hours for more money from night differentials or to solve child-care problems.
She found that only 5.1 percent of all people who work non-standard hours do so because of child care responsibilities.
Presser sees no end to non-standard hours because job growth to 2005 is projected to be “in occupations with high numbers of people working evenings, nights and weekends, such as sales clerks, nurses and food service.” Many of these occupations are female-dominated, she notes.
As a demographer, Presser can present a picture of the proliferation of night and weekend work. As a sociologist, Presser is concerned about the impact of night and weekend work.
“Home life is changing,” Presser said. “What I’m looking at is the extent to which families still eat dinner together, which I regard as the central most important daily ritual that keeps families together.”
She also says that people who work non-standard hours have higher rates of marital instability and that these hours may affect fertility.
“We call it a revolution because it’s occuring, but we don’t as yet know what the consequences are,” Presser said.
Mitchell Fromstein, president of the Milwaukee-based Manpower Inc., an international temporary help firm, often is called on to supply workers for non-traditional hours.
“But I see it as an evolution, not a revolution,” Fromstein said. “The pressures of a global economy require that companies produce and deliver when a customer wants them to, often on short notice.” “The only way to do that is around-the-clock. And technology lets us do that.”
Europe, he points out, has three time zones; the U.S. has four. The solution: Staffing on short shifts and non-standard hours.
Fromstein acknowledges the impact on family life, but points out that in World War II, “People worked non-standard hours under the pressure of war time, and the country survived.
“We still look at work patterns as they’ve been for a long time, but they’re not like that anymore, nor will they be.”
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Carol Kleiman’s columns appear in the Tribune on Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday.
