Hours Constraints

Abstract

During the 1990s, however, researchers observed that although average hours worked changed little, the manner in which the economy distributed working time was being transformed.Hours were becoming more polarized; some workers were working more hours, others fewer.This held implications for earnings inequality, unemployment and underemployment (for some), and overwork (for others).Many began to wonder what had happened to the promise of increased leisure.Paradoxically, within the context of high unemployment in Canada and Europe, many analysts were concerned about overwork and increased time-stress among a significant portion of the population.Work sharing or short-time compensation was seen as one response to the unemployment problem in Europe and Canada.Issues regarding hours of work among women in particular also materialized.Often related to the conflict between work and family responsibilities, these concerns led to research on "flexible hours," job sharing, and other ways of providing increased flexibility in hours.The impact on worker performance and firm productivity of this potentially increased working-time flexibility also came to the fore.These and other events refocused the limelight on working time and resulted in the conference from which chapters in these volumes were selected.The conference was international in coverage, in recognition that the same economic trends leading to pressures for changing employment relationships were present in Canada, the United States, and other industrialized countries.Noted researchers such as Richard Freeman have identified this issue to be of central importance in understanding how labor markets are evolving.The International Labor Organization (ILO) also recognized the transformations taking place in Michael White's Working Hours: Assessing the Potential for Reduction . 1 A more recent and more provocative piece in the U.S. literature is Jeremy Rifkin's The End of Work . 2 The purpose of this book and the companion volume is to describe and place this transformation in a comparative and historical perspective, as well as to examine some of the new research and policy issues that have emerged in its wake.Most of the chapters in these volumes examine the situation in Canada or the United States, though some also look at working-time issues in western Europe and Australia.The essays in this volume present no central thesis, although there are

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