Abstract
We study how work a schedule flexibility (flextime) affects happiness. We use a US General Social Survey (GSS) pooled dataset containing the Quality of Worklife and Work Orientations modules for 1998, 2002, 2006, 2010, and 2014. We retain only respondents who are either full-time or part-time employees on payrolls. For flextime to be associated with greater happiness, it has to be more than just sometimes flexible or slight input into one’s work schedule, that is, little flextime does not increase happiness. But substantial flextime has a large effect on happiness–the size effect is about as large as that of household income, or about as large as a one-step increase in self-reported health, such as up from good to excellent health. Our findings provide support for both public and organizational policies that would promote greater work schedule flexibility or control for employees.
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Notes
Moen et al. (2016) differ from our study considerably and while not strictly comparable, their similar results using a stronger life-course longitudinal research design, indirectly instill confidence in our cross-sectional findings.
If the comparison strikes you as far-fetched or unfounded let us provide anecdotal evidence. “It is basically slave labor” said one discontented Brit, whose opinion is more or less representative of large class of people–strikingly, 60% of Brits identify themselves as working class (Higgins 2016). Being an assistant professor (AOK) I only make about a median wage, and I caught myself calling my rich corporate friends “slaves”: they are rich, but not free: they have to do as capitalist pleases. I, on the other hand, can write whatever I like and whenever I want (I only have to be at work twice a week for three hours to teach). Though, Marx himself makes a distinction between wage-labor and slave-labor ([1867] 2010).
Measures of decommodification tend to focus on welfare programs: pensions, sickness benefits, and unemployment compensation. For instance, one such measure “encompasses three primary dimensions of the underlying concept: the ease of access to welfare benefits, their income-replacement values, and the expansiveness of coverage across different statuses and circumstances”. Pacek and Radcliff (2008b, p. 183). We think that not only welfare programs, but also job characteristics, such as flextime, affect degree of commodification of labor.
This question has been used in multitude of happiness studies (e.g., Blanchflower and Oswald 2003; Oishi et al. 2011; Okulicz-Kozaryn 2016; Berry and Okulicz-Kozaryn 2011). For more see http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=happiness+general+social+survey
German SOEP and British HPS may have the required data for Europe. American PSID has started happiness question only recently, and AddHealth contains mostly data about adolescents, but as more waves become available, PSID and AddHealth could be potentially used to replicate and extend the present study.
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Appendix
Appendix
Finally, let’s compare effects in terms of effect sizes in Table 5, which repeats columns 3 and 4 from the tables in the body of the paper but reports beta (standardized) coefficients. They all have similar value ≈.05 in full specification (original column 4), except the highest category on not hard to take time off, ‘not at all hard’ (v ‘very hard’) is about twice as big at .12. Perhaps, this is the key feature of schedule flexibility that workers need: they are happy to have more or less fixed schedules as long as it is very easy to take time off.
Comparing these values to income reveals that they are about as big as income or larger, and about as statistically significant or more significant. Again, one caveat to keep in mind is that this study uses household income, not personal income. Still, the size effect is quite striking. Again, as argued in the body of the paper, the schedule flexibility effect is about fourth of health effect, and considering health as one of the strongest, if not the strongest predictors of happiness, it is again a large effect.
Standardizing dummy variables results in somewhat meaningless quantities (e.g., Jacoby 2005; Williams 2016). Hence we use schedule flexibility measures as ordinal in Table 6 and standardize them. Results are substantively the same except in case of who set working hours, which became insignificant.
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Okulicz-Kozaryn, A., Golden, L. Happiness is Flextime. Applied Research Quality Life 13, 355–369 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-017-9525-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11482-017-9525-8