Working 9 to 5 a foreign concept for many Canadians, says study

TORONTO (CP) - Dolly Parton may have bemoaned the fact that working 9 to 5 was a heck of a way to make a living, but it seems that for most Canadians, having such regular hours would be a luxury. In fact, a five-year survey by Statistics Canada suggests that only one in three Canadians aged 25 to 54 have jobs that fall into the category of "standard" full-time work.

For all the rest - those who were underemployed, overworked or fluctuated from one extreme to the other - having abnormal on-the-job hours led to many singing the blues about high stress and poor health.

"We found that just one-third of workers are between 1,750 and 2,400 hours every year in all of the five years," said survey co-author Sebastien Larochelle-Cote. "If you're working between these two, this means you're working between about 34 and 46 hours a week, 52 weeks a year.

"That is the standard, the normal full-time, full-year - the thing that everybody thinks that everybody does," he said Wednesday. "But that's not necessarily the case."

The 1997-2001 survey found that 15 per cent of Canadians surveyed worked a short work year: under 1,750 hours, or the equivalent of fewer than 34 hours a week. Over the five-year period, about one in five workers were on the job for more than 2,400 hours during any given year, or 46-plus hours a week.

"But only one per cent of workers consistently work above the 46-hour, 52-weeks-a-year mark in all five years," said Larochelle-Cote of the stress-inducing schedule. "That means that being overworked on a consistent basis is extremely rare, even though many people experience that situation at least once."

Then there are those whose work hours fluctuate from year to year, whom Larochelle-Cote calls the "high-low people."

"These are the people who had a significant amount of work in one year and then shifted to a much smaller category of work hours the year after. If you take the average number of hours per year that these people worked, they work as many hours on average over the five years as a standard individual working the same hours all of the years.

"So they put in the same work effort, but it comes with a cost, because these people reported feeling more stressed and had a higher incidence of bad health than people working always the same hours."

The survey found that Canadians with unstable work hours tend to have non-unionized, lower-paying and less-satisfying jobs without retirement pension plans. These jobs also tend to occur in small companies rather than large firms.

"People being able to count on paid work that is consistent and standard are the people who are the least likely to experience stress or health problems and a greater quality of life," said Doug Saunders, a clinical psychologist at the University of Toronto.

But those who can't find a well-paying, full-time job often feel emotionally overwhelmed because they are unable to plan for the future.

"Financially, it has a huge impact on them because from year to year they don't know what kind of income they can count on in terms of things like RRSPs, educational savings plans, buying homes or (putting) downpayments on cars," Saunders said.

"It can play havoc with those kind of things, all of which are part of what people see as being an important part of security, of progress and overall life satisfaction."

Not having the 9-to-5 job and the stability that goes with it can lead to a wide range of psychological and physical health problems, from anxiety and depression to sleep disorders and digestive problems, he said. It can also lead in some cases to marital and family conflict as well as substance abuse.

Half of those considered high-low workers in the survey of 8,000 Canadians described themselves as "being very stressed" and 20 per cent reported that their health had suffered, Larochelle-Cote said. That compares with adverse health reports from 16 per cent of workers with standard hours and 21 per cent with too short hours per year (the underemployed).

"That means that it's not only the number of hours that matter for stress, but also whether we are able to secure a stable number of hours year after year," he said. "People in the high-low situation share the bad health characteristics of the underemployed and the stress characteristics of the overworked."

© The Canadian Press, 2006