Unusual and unsocial? Effects of shift work and other unusual working times on social participation

Abstract

Unusual working hours, such as shift work and work on evenings or weekends, are highly prevalent in the 24/7 economy. Adverse psychosocial effects of shift work are well-known and include poor work-life balance, decreased opportunities for social participation, family problems and negative effects on partners and children. This chapter describes the social impact of different components of working times-separating the effects of shift work and work on evenings, Saturdays, and Sundays. An overview of several studies shows that each of these categories of working hours has a separate negative effect on self-reports of employee work-life balance and social participation. Worker control over working times may buffer the negative effects of unusual work hours to a certain degree, but it does not and cannot balance them out completely. An approach is demonstrated to quantify the individual effects by calculating the time off required to achieve comparable social participation as under “usual” working times.