Flexible Working and Unpaid Overtime in the UK: The Role of Gender, Parental and Occupational Status
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Flexible Working and Unpaid Overtime in the UK: The Role of Gender, Parental and Occupational Status Heejung Chung1 · Mariska van der Horst2 Accepted: 7 November 2018 © The Author(s) 2018
Abstract Recent studies have shown that flexible boundaries between work and family may make employees work harder and longer. Yet most studies were not able to show whether there are differences across different types of flexible working arrangements, and whether this relationship may only hold for certain groups of workers. We examine how three different types of flexible working arrangements, that is schedule control, flexitime, and teleworking, are associated with an increase in unpaid overtime hours of workers in the UK using the Understanding Society data from 2010 to 2015 and fixed effects panel regression models. Results show that the flexible arrangements that were introduced primarily for work-life balance purposes, i.e., flexitime and teleworking, do not necessarily increase unpaid overtime hours significantly. On the other hand, workers’ control over their schedule, mainly introduced as a part of high-performance strategies, leads to increased unpaid overtime hours. This is especially true for professional men, and women without children, especially those working full-time, and surprisingly part-time working mothers. The results of this study point to the importance of distinguishing between different groups of workers as well as between different types of arrangements when examining outcomes of flexible working. Furthermore, the results of the study contribute to the argument that performance enhancing flexible working arrangements can potentially exacerbate gender inequalities in the labour market by enabling men to commit more time to their jobs, while for women, especially full-time working mothers, this may be less possible. Keywords Flexible working · Schedule control · Flexitime · Teleworking · Working hours · Overtime · Gender · UK · Fixed effects panel regression
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1120 5-018-2028-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Heejung Chung [email protected] Mariska van der Horst [email protected] 1
School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, Faculty of Social Science, University of Kent, Room 106, Cornwallis Northeast, Canterbury CT2 7NF, UK
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Department of Sociology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
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H. Chung, M. van der Horst
1 Introduction Increasing numbers of companies and governments are introducing flexible working, that is giving workers control over when and where they work, as a less costly option to help working families manage work and family demands compared to, for example, paid leaves (Eurofound 2015; Chung 2017b). According to the work-family border theory (Clark 2000), and based on the work resources theory (Voydanoff 2004) providing workers with the flexibility and control over the temp
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