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Jul 21st 2015, 8:00 by C.W. | LONDON
IT IS well known that in America, "extreme" working hours (slogging for more
than fifty a week) have been getting more widespread in recent decades. In a
famous paper from 2005, Peter Kuhn and Fernando Lozano showed that the share of
employed, 25-to-64-year-old men who usually work 50 or more hours per week on
their main job rose from 14.7% in 1980 to 18.5% in 2001. But much less is known
about people in Europe. New research from Anna Burger, of the Central European
University, presents some interesting findings.
The first chart in her paper clearly shows that, especially for the
highly-educated, extreme working hours have been getting more popular since the
1980s. For instance, in the Netherlands, often seen as a haven of sensible
working practices, the proportion of full-time workers who slog for more than
50 hours has been rising in recent decades (see chart at bottom).
But as the chart at the bottom shows, the move towards longer working hours is
not straightforward. What factors affect the likelihood of long hours? Ms
Burger has many hypotheses; but after conducting a series of regressions she
finds two things to be the most important. The first is what she calls
"labour-market regulation". This is an index for labour-market regulation
(comprised of things like how difficult it is to fire people and how rigid
working-hour rules are). In her regressions she calculates that weak
labour-market regulation has a consistently positive effect on extreme hours.
Her hypothesis, which seems reasonably plausible, is that when workers have
fewer rights, bosses find it easier to pressure people into staying late.
The second really important thing, she suggests, is how much part-time
employment is about. With more, she calculates, the prevalence of extreme
working hours drops. To understand how that operates, you need to take it in
stages. The idea is that part-time employment only gains ground thanks to state
intervention; in the Netherlands, for instance, in 2000 the right for women and
men to ask for a job to be part-time was written into Dutch law. All that
encourages gender equality, which means it becomes less acceptable for one
member of a couple to remain at work for many hours per week. Thus it becomes
less acceptable to work extreme hours.
The one thing that Ms Burger does not discuss is the "Veblenian" explanation
for long working hours, which I rather like. The Veblenian argument says that
as jobs have generally become more knowledge-intensive, they have become more
interesting. There are more whizzy things like computer-programming around
these days, and fewer really dull jobs, like elevator-operators. As a result,
people (especially the well-educated ones, who can find those cool jobs) quite
like being at work: hence longer hours (for a proper explanation of this, see
our Free exchange column). Nonetheless, despite the woeful quality of the
time-use data with which she has to contend, Ms Burger's paper is a pretty good
attempt to explain what is going on.