Who values good working hours the most?
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A couple of decades ago, less educated Europeans were more likely to say that "good working hours" were important in a job. But that pattern has almost completely reversed.
What makes for a good job? The European Values Study (EVS) has repeatedly asked survey respondents to say which job features they feel are most important. Among options such as "good pay," "opportunities to use initiative," or "generous holidays," there is a particularly prosaic one: “good working hours.”
The question does not specify what “good” working hours mean. It can mean shorter hours, predictable schedules, avoiding nights or weekends, or simply having working times that fit well with one's personal life. But whatever respondents may have in mind, one of the most interesting changes over the past decades concerns who is most likely to regard good hours as important.
By the end of the 1990s, people with lower levels of education were generally more likely to select "good working hours" than those with tertiary education. Across the Atlas countries for which we can make a consistent comparison, the median difference between respondents who had completed college and those who had not completed upper-secondary education in mentions of "good working hours" was 7 percentage points, in favor of the least educated.
One decade later, the gap had narrowed to about 4 percentage points. And by the latest EVS wave, the gap had reversed. People with tertiary education were now 7 percentage points more likely to say that good hours mattered. In almost all countries, this was the prevalent pattern.
Portugal provides a particularly good example. In 1999, 46% of respondents with less than upper-secondary education regarded good hours as important, compared with only 27% of those with tertiary education: a gap of about 19 percentage points in favour of the least educated. Two decades later, good hours had become much more important to both groups, but the increase was especially dramatic among college graduates: 92% of the tertiary educated now selected good hours, against 78% of the least educated. The education gap had reversed from about −19 to +14 percentage points.
Portugal is not unique. In Poland, the education gap changed from about −18 to +17 points; in the Czech Republic, from −7 to +20; and in Romania, from −16 to +11. The levels differ, but the direction of change is the same.
Why?
The Atlas cannot establish why this occurred, but one possibility is related to changes in how work is organised. Rather than avoiding long or inconvenient schedules, "good hours" may increasingly mean having control over when, how, and where one works. Research shows that this kind of control is especially common in professional and highly educated occupations. Other studies show that access to schedule flexibility is itself strongly stratified by education: computerisation has reinforced the advantage of college graduates in terms of schedule control. However, greater flexibility can also blur the boundary between work and private life: greater schedule control also often means working more from home and receiving work demands outside normal hours. This combination of greater schedule control and greater permeability between work and private life may help explain why “good hours” have become especially important to the highly educated.
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