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Working hours, be it too many or too little, have been suggested to have a deleterious effect on human health. Given mental health conditions are increasingly recognised as the leading cause work-related ill health, sickness absence, and incapacity benefits in high income countries (Blomgren & Perhoniemi, 2021; Cattrell et al., 2011), much scholarly attention is being directed at the link between working hours and mental health specifically. Most research in this area focuses on long working hours, usually defined as working more than 35-40 hours per week. Two recent systematic reviews report a negligible-to-small meta-analytic effect of long working hours on incident depression (Rugulies et al., 2021; Virtanen et al., 2018). At face value this suggests that long work hours have a minor impact on our mental health. In contrast, a smaller body of evidence demonstrates that underemployment (where workers prefer to work more hours than they actually are working) is detrimental to mental health (Angrave & Charlwood, 2015; Bell & Blanchflower, 2019; Pratap et al., 2021). However, the extent of the effect of underemployment on mental health, or that of working less than 35-hours per week more generally, is largely unreconciled. There are methodological issues that are potentially obscuring the effect of working hours on mental health, most notably, the lack of consideration of the effect of work hours longitudinally (Ganster et al., 2018). Indeed, the studies included in existing systematic reviews of long working hours assess work hours at one point in time (i.e., baseline measurement) and then relate them to mental health outcomes across years of follow up. These studies acknowledge that exposure misclassification has likely affected their results as working hours could feasibly change over time (Rugulies et al., 2021; Virtanen et al., 2018). For some, long working hours at baseline may be a temporary situation and decline (either naturally or be actively reduced) during the follow-up period, negating potential risks to mental health. For others classified as working standard hours at baseline, working hours may increase and, in turn, also increase the risk of mental health conditions. Both such cases potentially result in inaccurate effect sizes predicting mental health outcomes due to long working hours and cloud resulting casual inferences. These limitations also apply to underemployment studies where hours are measured cross-sectionally. Factors such as layoffs, downsizings, technological advancement, and changing ways of working (i.e., hybrid work, working remotely) highlight that our current work hours may be poor predictors of our future mental health status. The International Labour Organization (2022) highlighted that the composition of those working part-time became increasingly highly educated, more female, and older during the COVID-19 pandemic. Other research estimates that approximately 50% of remote workers experienced changes in working hours due to COVID-19 (Fan & Moen, 2022). From another perspective, research on psychosocial work stressors like low job control finds that changes in stressors are linked with more pronounced changes in mental health outcomes and that their adverse effects may become more pronounced with ongoing exposure (De Lange et al., 2002; Taouk et al., 2021). Together, the available evidence suggests that many workers may experience changes in working hours across time, and consistent exposure to longer (or shorter) work hours may also have a pronounced effect on mental health outcomes. Neither of these considerations have been reviewed in the extant literature. |
