Eric Umansky starts his workday just as most people are switching off the evening news and heading for bed. The New York journalist, who capsulizes the news reports of America’s major newspapers for Slate.com’s “Today’s Papers” column, begins his job at 10:30 p.m. He goes to bed at 5 a.m.
Staying awake–not to mention, alert–poses a challenge at times, Umansky admits.
“There is no doubt that my cognitive abilities take a turn for the worse,” Umansky said. “I’ve found myself putting my milk in the freezer or picking up my razor to brush my teeth. It’s kind of scary. These are bizarre things for a person to be doing who’s not in assisted living.”
For Umansky, working the night shift is the price he pays for doing a job he loves. But for Stephen E. Pollard, a production technician for IBM Manufacturing in East Fishkill, N.Y., it’s a lifestyle choice. He joined the night shift a year ago to avoid putting his children into day care.
“We have a 3-year-old and a 2-year-old and my wife works a day shift,” Pollard explained. “We decided this was the best solution.”
Pollard spends his days watching his children–a grueling schedule that leaves little time for a regular eight-hour sleep schedule.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics says that one in five workers is an extended-hours employee, and more businesses are moving to operating around the clock–Circadian Technologies Inc., a Lexington, Mass., consulting firm, says odd-hour jobs have grown 140 percent in the past decade.
On paper the strategy seems to be an efficient use of resources, but a growing number of companies are experiencing the downsides of alternative shift work. Among them: lower productivity, more accidents and illness, higher turnover and absenteeism, according to a Circadian Technologies study.
Such negative effects lead businesses to spend $206 billion annually–or an additional $8,600 per extended hours employee, the Circadian study claimed.
The study calculated the incremental costs associated with extended-hours operations as $79.4 billion for lost productivity, $50.4 billion for absenteeism, $39.1 billion for turnover, $28.2 billion for health-care costs and $8.5 billion for accidents.
Those costs, despite the high numbers, often remain hidden from employers, says Dr. Alex Kerin, who co-authored the study for Circadian. One reason: Managers don’t necessarily break out their operations data on a per-shift basis, he says.
“An HR director won’t know that extended operations has a problem with absenteeism because he sees the general numbers,” Kerin explained.
Immediate supervisors, however, are more likely to recognize the downsides but find the rewards outweigh the costs. Janie O’Connor, president of Shiftworker.com, has worked since 1984 with managers who run these shifts.
“I have shared similar data [to the Circadian study] with managers and supervisors,” said O’Connor. “[They] say that accidents and injuries and inattentive errors might very well be true, but there are instances where the midnight shift will outperform the other shifts.”
Running 24/7 operations has obvious appeal to companies. For those that produce goods, it allows them to maximize assets, increase production capacity and remain competitive. In the service industry, it allows businesses to better serve the increasingly demanding consumer: If your DSL dies at midnight, you can call tech support to troubleshoot it on the spot.
Although the public’s perception of night-shift workers still may be that of factory laborers, they’re as likely to be service specialists staffing a 24-hour call centers or health-care facilities, Kerin says.
“There has been a move away from blue collars in shift work,” he explained. “These workers are very highly trained in computers and technologies and are that much more removed from the shop floor. Fifty percent could be considered white collar, and that has been slowly rising over the last decade.”
Although many workers like the flexibility and freedom that extended hours allow them, researchers say the health concerns are real. A 1997 study by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), for instance, found that alternative work schedules disrupt the bodies’ circadian rhythms, leading to sleep loss and problems such as decreased concentration, increased injuries and accidents and digestive, heart and stress-related health problems. And when fatigue-related accidents do occur on the job, employers often are held legally accountable–a cost that the Circadian study does not include.
The penalties can be stiff. Last year, a 1988 railroad accident related to a sleep-deprived worker controlling a train resulted in a $52 million judgment in a New Jersey court against Conrail. And a $5.95 million judgment was awarded in Texas civil suit against Nabors Drilling in 2001. In that case, one of its employees fell asleep while driving home after working extended hours and caused a fatal car crash.
A pivotal factor to high performance on an alternative shift, O’Connor says, is whether working the shift is the employee’s choice. A shift composed of people who want to work the night shift and are suited to it physiologically won’t have the productivity issues of a shift where people are compelled to work it for other reasons.
Many workers say there are more lifestyle pros than cons to working the night shift. For seven years, Roger Layton has worked the 4:30 p.m.-to-midnight shift as a word processor for a Chicago law firm.
“My social life is impacted somewhat, but I don’t have to wear a suit and tie,” Layton said. “There are fewer dry cleaning expenses too. The other upside is that you miss rush hour coming and going. I’m never stuck in traffic, and it is easier to find a place to park.”
Workers, too, say they’re just as productive as their daytime counterparts. Registered nurse Kerry Mirto works three 12-hour shifts per week in the cardio-thoracic intensive-care unit at a New Haven, Conn., hospital.
“I don’t think in my field [productivity] is an issue,” Mirto said. “It’s fast-paced. We don’t really slow down because we work in an intensive-care unit.”
Pollard, the IBM technician, concurs. “At IBM, it’s a high-tech environment. We’re constantly moving around. We don’t have time to not be productive.”
Mirto says some people are simply better suited to night-shift work than others. “I honestly think it takes a certain kind of person to work the night shift,” she said. “There are people, like me, who’ve done it their whole career, but I’ve also seen some nurses throwing up at 4 a.m. because their bodies can’t handle the change in schedule. The night shift is a different breed.”
