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2015-07-21 07:34:26
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.