Bring it On - We're not Such Fragile Blossoms After All

By Mark Wooden

The Weekend Australian Financial Review,
23-24 June 2007, p. 63

Survey data repeatedly confirm that many Australians work what most of us would consider very long hours. According to the most recent Labour Force Survey data for May this year, almost 1.8 million Australians regularly work 50 or more hours each week. Not surprisingly, most of these long hours workers (almost 80%) are men.

Routine exposure to such lengthy work schedules is widely assumed to be harmful to the individuals involved. Numerous research studies, for example, have uncovered associations between long working hours and adverse health outcomes, such as mental illness and cardiovascular problems. Similarly, other studies have found clear evidence that, in some occupations, excessive working hours are a contributor to workplace accidents.

Many critics, however, go much further, arguing that the harmful effects of long working hours are not restricted to health and safety. Much of the current debate about the need for workers to strike a more appropriate work-life balance, for example, takes as a given that long working hours damage personal relationships, especially within the family. In this line of argument, long working hours reduce both the amount of time workers spend with their families and the quality of that time, leading to strained personal relationships, poor parenting behaviours, and ultimately to family breakdown.

Objective evidence for such causal connections, however, is lacking. While attitudinal studies have consistently found that people believe that long working hours are detrimental for personal relationships, there are few, if any studies, that have established clear causal links between long work weeks and subsequent marital separation or divorce.

In Australia, however, we now have a data set the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (or HILDA) Survey that makes identifying such links possible. Funded by the Australian Government, this study has been following around 14,000 Australians through time, collecting data about their family relationships, working arrangements and economic situation.

With five years of data it is now possible to draw at least some tentative conclusions about the links between working hours patterns and marital separation, and even the most cursory inspection of these data suggests that the hypothesis that long work hours cause marriages to fail is in trouble. Annual separation rates for couples where the man works 50 hours or more are no different than for couples where the man works a more traditional length work week. For both groups the estimated separation rate per year is 1.7%.

There are, however, many other factors that we know are associated with the probability of separation, such as the duration of marriage, the age at which people are married, whether been married previously, and household income, which might be masking the true relationship between hours worked and risk of separation. We thus next estimated statistical relationships after taking into account the potential influence of these intervening factors. While duration of marriage, age at marriage, and income were all found to have predictable effects, we could find no evidence that couples where the man reported working 50 or more hours were at greater risk of separation in the year ahead.

A slight digression, but we expected people who had been in a previous marriage to be more likely to separate again. In the HILDA data this result was found to only hold true for women. Apparently men are not any more likely to separate time having done it once before.

Finally, and again counter to expectations, we found that separation risks were much higher (close to double) in unions where the man worked part-time hours. It thus seems that marriages are at greatest risk where the man has too much time on his hands rather than too little!

Mark Wooden is Acting Director of the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research and Director of the HILDA Survey project. He will be speaking on this topic at public forums being conducted in Canberra on 26 th June and in Melbourne on the 28th June. For details, call 03 8344 2100.