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TGIF?
That’s how many of us refer to the people who work on Saturdays and Sundays — the days when most Triangle residents take time off to catch up with personal responsibilities, hang out with our families and even have some fun. But for weekend workers worldwide, Friday often is only the beginning of three more days of work. Working weekends isn’t always a hardship: Both part-time and full-time workers often find those two days fit with their schedules and their lifestyles. And there’s a strong possibility that more people, particularly women, would work weekends if only they could find child care. While the trend for women to work Saturday and Sunday has remained steady in the U.S. over the past decade, reflecting women’s participation in the paid labor market — about half of the weekend warriors are female — it’s a different story in the rest of the world. The global picture of weekend workers increasingly is female. In fact, Harriet B. Presser, professor of sociology at the University of Maryland in College Park, calls it “the feminization of weekend employment.” In the first study of this phenomenon, Presser and co-author Janet C. Gornick, associate professor of political science at Baruch College of the City University of New York, researched workers ages 25 to 64 in 15 European countries and in the United States. Their findings are in a report titled “The Female Share of Weekend Employment: A Study of 16 Countries.” Presser, who has a doctorate in sociology and is known for her research on gender, work and family, sees both positives and negatives about working non-traditional days. “People rarely work weekends out of preference,” says the sociologist, author of “Working in a 24/7 Economy: Challenges for American Families.” “I think it’s harder because most people don’t work weekends and you’re out of sync. If you have preschool children, it’s difficult. There virtually is no formal child care on weekends.” Presser also discounts the notion that weekend workers in the United States make more money. “If you take the top occupations in which people work on weekends — cashiers, cooks, waiters, waitresses, nurses and janitors — the difference in their median hourly earnings, except for registered nurses, is less or the same as those who don’t work weekends.” But there are some pluses: “If you are married, your spouse may take care of the children, there is less traffic congestion, and it’s less crowded when you shop.” Whatever the pros and cons, more and more women the world over are working weekends, particularly on Sunday, Presser points out. The two countries with highest employment of all workers on Saturday are Italy and Spain; on Sunday, Sweden and Denmark. More than two-fifths of all employed Americans work non-standard schedules, she points out. “It’s part of the increasing diversity of work hours in the United States. More people are working part time, overtime, evenings and weekends.” According to Presser’s research, 41.2 percent of Americans working on Saturday are female; on Sunday, 45.2 percent. Not surprisingly, the growth of women in weekend work in Europe, Presser observes, is due to the fact that better child care is available. It’s also connected to the size of the service sector, particularly in Nordic countries: There’s more weekend work in service jobs than in the industrial sector, such as manufacturing — and women tend to be disproportionately employed in service jobs. Ever the sociologist, Presser says her findings raise new questions that she wants to answer. She’s concerned about “the changing structure of family life, where there may be two parents but only one home at a time on weekends. And school-age children are at home, unlike during the week. I want to look into that.” © 2006 BY WN/CHICAGO TRIBUNE
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Weekend warriors.