Quality and quantity in work-home conflict: the nature and direction of effects of work on employees' personal relationships and partners.

• Author: Peetz, David
• Position: Invited Article

Abstract

Modern working patterns can directly and adversely affect family lives and personal relationships. Using quasi-longitudinal survey data from Queensland, this study confirms qualitative evidence that long hours of work, weekend work, irregular starting times, and high-pressure, long-hours cultures contribute to deteriorating home relationships and to dissatisfaction among partners. This study uniquely contrasts the quality impacts of work with the consequences of work quantity, indicating that the former is much more influential in modulating work-life conflict and satisfaction variables. Claims that long and increased working hours reflect the use of work as a refuge from home are shown to be unfounded.

Introduction

The Industrial Revolution gave rise to a parallel revolution in the home. Heavy infrastructure investment in the textile mills in the 18th and 19th centuries and the invention of the electric light began pushing factory working hours into the night and, simultaneously, financial pressure on the worker to take the 'day job' home started to spread across Europe. Labour reform in the 1890s may have resulted in prohibitions on overtime and night labour for women and children. But in Germany, for example, factory owners and factory workers alike subverted the laws. One Dusseldorf garment factory famously saw its staff through the gates to their home, under the full view of inspectors, at 8 p.m. and then secretly had the workers re-enter the factory gates at 9 p.m. to begin a second full shift. For their part, in order to circumvent laws that disallowed factory workers from taking work home, some workers undertook home work from neighbouring factories (Weitz 1997). Australia meanwhile was leading the vanguard on reforms to challenge lengthening work days, with stonemasons being the first to secure what was then a revolutionary concept--the eight-hour day (Love 2006).

Australia's revolution has not lasted, with working hours increasing to levels exceeding those of its OECD comparators (Townsend et al. 2011). The problem is particularly pronounced for Australian wage earners working on the margin of the minimum wage. National Institute of Labour Studies analysis of Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey data suggests that employees working on the margins or below the federal minimum wage are more likely to experience long working hours (generally benchmarked at 45 hours) (Healy and Richardson 2006).

A considerable amount of rhetoric from government, unions, employer associations, and some employers on the promotion of policies to balance work and family life better emerged in the 1990s, when a Work and Family Unit was established within the Commonwealth Department of Industrial Relations (similar units were later established in some state government departments). However, rhetoric did not sit easily with evidence of increasing work intensity (Reeder 1988; Allan 1997; Morehead et al. 1997; Wright and Lund 1998; Allan, O'Donnell and Peetz,1999) and increasing working hours (Campbell 2002; Pocock 2003; Watson et al. 2003). Data from the mid 1990s suggested increasing dissatisfaction with the balance between work and family life (Morehead et al. 1997, p.583; DIR 1995, p.227), with dissatisfaction being higher among employees whose weekly hours had increased. McDowell (2004) and Pocock (2008) spoke of an 'ethic of care' that needs to develop parallel to the ethic of work, and there is mounting evidence--to which this paper adds--to suggest that there is likely to be substantial danger for legislators if they ignore the warning signs.

Much of the debate about working-time reform has centred on the contention that new working arrangements are necessary in order to overcome the rigidities of the past that made it difficult to balance work and family responsibilities. But how much is this new flexible world helping people to balance their work and personal lives? One study suggests that opportunities to 'purchase' flexibility through shorter weeks lead only to women experiencing the consequent loss in income (Lewis and Humbert 2010), but this may be only one blemish on the picture of the flexible workplace. What are the factors that influence people's satisfaction with the balance in their work and personal lives? How are interpersonal relationships affected? How does work affect home life? And in particular, how does it affect employees' partners? Or is causality in the other direction: are people who work long hours doing so to avoid unhappy home lives? Prominent writer Arlie Hochschild (1997) argued that for many people work is a refuge from home, as home increasingly resembles a factory while the workplace increasingly resembles a family. Maume and Bellas (2001) tested Hochschild's claims in a survey of over one thousand Ohio families and found little support for the claim. They observed instead that work-related factors, such as supervisor demands, better predicted long hours. In psychology, the question has been addressed by attempting to measure, independently, the impact of work and family stressors on overall well-being (Burke and Greenglass 1987; Voydanoff 1988). In sociology, to complicate matters further, the possibility has been raised that the unhappy home lives from which workers may hypothetically be escaping are a function of the way work is now constructed. Pocock (2003) suggested--based on her extensive qualitative mapping of the Australian work landscape--that as the 20th century evolved, workplaces took on some functions of community while home became the dormitory, subsidiary to work.

There is a growing body of detailed qualitative evidence on the adverse impact of increasing working hours on personal lives, backed by aggregated statistics (for example Pocock 2003; Lingard et al. 2007; Lingard et al. 2008). This paper tackles the same issues, but from a more quantitative angle, and explores the perceptions of Australian employees and their matched partners in a wide variety of work contexts.

Research Design

Data were extracted from a survey undertaken in 2002 of employees from 15 organisations in Queensland. Table 1 contains a list of the organisations, their industry and size band, as well as the number of surveys returned and the response rates. The organisations comprised all but two of those that participated in a major qualitative and quantitative study of working-time arrangements in Queensland. They included two manufacturers, a mine, a construction company, a government department, a law-enforcement agency, a public utility, a bank, a theme park, a retailer, a law firm, a large vehicle-repair company, a trade union, a hospital, and an educational institution. The resultant participant matrix subsequently included a mixture of small, medium, and large organisations, skewed towards larger participants. There was a balance of strongly, weakly, and non-unionised workplaces and a blend of female-dominated, male-dominated, and mixed-gender workplaces. The parts of the organisations that were studied usually corresponded to either a whole workplace or to the entire organisation. In some cases it concerned a division of the organisation that encompassed more than one workplace, or particular occupational groups. In organisations where the study site included less than 200 employees, the entire workforce (excluding senior management) was exhaustively surveyed. In larger workplaces a sample of 200 employees was selected, using systematic random sampling; in all but one case, the sample was selected from a payroll list. Response rates varied substantially between organisations and were from 21 to 60 per cent. The median was 44 per cent, while the total average response rate was 42 per cent. Overall, 963 usable questionnaires were returned. The data are unweighted.

A separate partners' questionnaire was administered to canvas the effect of work-time changes upon employees' spouses and other family members. Data were obtained from 489 partners (husbands, wives, and de facto spouses) and were matched to the spouses in the employee survey. The employees in the survey who were 'matched' to participants in the partners' survey may have had slightly different characteristics to those who were not matched; however, generally speaking, this had no significant impact on the results. The partners' survey was much shorter and contained questions that, to varying degrees, pursued a number of salient issues and concepts that were also examined in the employee survey.

Work and Personal Lives and Tensions

What impact do working-time arrangements and other aspects of work have on the work-home balance? As shown in the left-hand data column of Table 2, employees who worked 45 hours or more per week were two and a half times more likely to be dissatisfied with the balance between their work and family lives than were those who worked less than 45 hours per week. Dissatisfaction with the balance was twice as high among those who reported increased hours compared to 12 months ago, and compared to those reporting the same or fewer hours (rows 1 and 2 of Table 2).

Women were less dissatisfied than men, but only among part-time employees--there were no gender differences in satisfaction among full-time employees (row 3). Increases over the past 12 months in reported job stress, how tired respondents felt at work, and how long it took for them to recover from work were associated with greater dissatisfaction with the work-life balance (rows 4 to 6).

We were interested in people's perceptions of whether their work-related level of fatigue had increased over the past year. We therefore combined the first three items to create an index of 'fatiguing', which had very good reliability (a = 0.83) (1). We used this index to assess employees' pressure-related responses to increases in work duration and (or) intensity to which we refer later. Some 49 per cent of our full-time...