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Statistics Canada has published a research paper written by Andrew Heisz and Sébastien LaRochelle on Work Hours Instability in Canada.
The traditional model where people work the same hours year after year applies to a relatively small share of workers. Only 20% of men and 15% of women worked the exact same hours in each year from 1997 and 2001.
The remaining men and women had some annual hours instability. In some cases this instability was quite large. The study defined a worker as having highly unstable work years if he worked more than 2,400 hours in at least one year between 1997 and 2001 and at least another one with fewer than 1,750 hours.
About 1 in 12, or 7.8% of workers had highly unstable work years. Most of these workers combined periods of long work with periods of short work to achieve the equivalent of a standard work year over a five-year average.
Those with unstable work years are more commonly found in lower quality jobs. For example, 9.2% of workers with no pension plan and 9.7% of workers working in small firms had highly unstable work years.
Workers with unstable work years felt more stress and reported poorer health than those with more stable work years. The study finds that 51% of workers in the high instability group reported having a high level of stress. This compares to a lower rate of 38% among those who always worked standard work years.
Moreover, 20% of those working unstable hours reported being in fair or poor health compared to 16% among those who always work standard hours.
These differences hold even among workers who were not stressed and were in good health at the beginning of the period. This suggests that variable work hours are related to an increase in feeling stressed and reporting bad health. These results remain after controlling for other background characteristics.
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