Publication type
Journal Article
Author
Publication date
July 2, 2021
Summary:
On any given weekend, over a fifth of the UK labour force is at work, while more than half of working adults report working at the weekend at least some of the time. This is despite the fact that weekends are conventionally set aside as rest days. The question that this paper addresses is: does this matter? This paper adds to the literature by using two large panel datasets to analyse the effects of weekend working on eight different measures of subjective well-being in the UK. I find that weekend working has a significant impact on how satisfied people are with the amount of leisure time they have, with the results suggesting that avoiding weekend working is equivalent to working six fewer hours per week. Moreover, people working at the weekend report significantly lower happiness yesterday than non-weekend workers. While weekend workers also experience lower levels of life satisfaction than non-weekend workers, this difference disappears when controlling for unobserved heterogeneity between individuals. This suggests that there is no evidence that weekend working causes people to be worse off overall.
Published in
The Manchester School
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1111/manc.12375
ISSN
14636786
Subjects
Notes
Open Access
© 2021 The Authors. 'The Manchester School' published by The University of Manchester and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.
Online Early
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