Atypical working hours and their impacts on leisure – an unofficial Swiss time use study

Abstract

The study questions how spreading working hours through the day (night) and week might affect how people use their time and participate in leisure and social activities. We make use of closed two‐daystime‐use‐diaries and questionnaires asked employees of the Swiss railway (sample size of 1,400 diarydays), to access the implications of atypical forms of working hours on the workers’ leisure time as well as the time arrangements of the employees’ partners and children. The empirical investigation revealed that people who work shifts are less likely to live in households made up of several persons (an average of 13.6 per cent compared, with 18.8 per cent among people who do not work shifts). Shift workers who live together with others in a household are more likely to share a household with a partner who also works shifts: 30.6 per cent of partners/spouses also work shifts, compared with 14.4 per cent of partners/spouses of non‐shift workers. Subdividing households according to single‐ or multiple‐person households shows that shift workers achieve a slightly longer period of social time than non‐shift workers. On the one hand, this points to a social environment which adapts to the irregular and asynchronous working hours of the person concerned. On the other hand, comparison with sociological theory literature and other time‐budget studies brings out that the social framework conditions and the extent to which working hours can be planned exert a definite influence on a functioning social environment. The Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) tries – and manages – to take this into account, as the survey results clearly show. Thus, it is not possible to draw the conclusion that shift workers are in principle at greater risk from social isolation. In fact, it should be pointed out that the negative consequences of asynchronous working hours can be compensated for by individual adjustments. However, in this regard, certain operational and social framework conditions are a prerequisite for the success of these individual efforts.

Citation

Müller, H. and Wyss, U. (2007), "Atypical working hours and their impacts on leisure – an unofficial Swiss time use study", Tourism Review, Vol. 62 No. 1, pp. 14-24. https://doi.org/10.1108/16605370780000158