Pressed, Stressed and Blessed: Work Hour Mismatch Cross-Nationally

• In Event: 161 - Section on Organizations, Occupation and Work Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 04. Inequality in the Workplace II

Abstract

Workers’ ability to work desired hours is an important indicator of worker well-being. Yet, work hour mismatch is structured by broader institutional constraints, notably economic inequality and work hour policy. In this study, we build on a growing body of cross-national multi-level research to identify the impact of policy, inequality and work norms on workers’ reports of work hour mismatch. We apply multi-level modeling to a unique data set pairing the 2005 International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) data (n=25,092) for respondents in 31 nations with measures of economic inequality (GINI), and work structure. We investigate the impact of work norms on workers’ experiences by weighing the impact of mean weekly work hours, maximum legislated work hours and the difference between these two. Our results show that these work hour measure have distinct effects for those reporting work hour stress (preferences for more work time and money), pressed (preferences for less work time and money) and the blessed (preferences for no change in work time). First, we find legislated work hours had no impact on any of these measures. Second, we find longer mean weekly work hours are positively associated with work time stress yet negatively associated with work time balance. Further, we find the gap in legislated and mean weekly work hours is negatively associated with pressure yet positively associated with stress. Finally, we assess whether respondents in long work hour countries report working in higher quality jobs. Our results identify important gender differences across these measures.

Authors

• Matt L. Huffman, University of California-Irvine

• Leah Ruppanner, University of Melbourne