Atypical working hours in Italy: an analysis based on Istat�s survey on the use of time

Recent years have seen an expansion of new ways of organizing working time that call into question the normal alternation between working time and free time. This trend, ascribable to the growth of the service sector and to a general reorganization of the modes of production, alters the normal schedule of social and family life, with more and more workers forced to rethink the relationship between working time and free time. This paper, based on an Istat survey of the use of time, sketches a profile of Italians� working day and a portrait of the workers with non-traditional schedules. It identifies their typical traits, the categories that are most constrained in the use of time and those instead in a position to avoid the most undesirable shifts. The paper shows that workers with less formal education are more likely to have atypical working hours, prevalently in the service sector. Self-employed individuals, whose average working hours are longer, are more likely to perform evening or weekend work. Among married women, whose labour-force participation rate is lower than that of other women, those who do work are less likely to have undesirable hours, while a higher-than-average proportion of them work only in the morning, mostly in general government employment and other services.