Working Overtime in East Asia: Convergence or Divergence?

ABSTRACT

Working long hours has become a routinised part of life in East Asia. The different patterns of overtime across this region are understudied, however. This study represents a first systematic attempt to analyse overtime and its determinants in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and China by testing hypotheses that specify the distinctive influences of employment status and job contracts on work hours. Class exploitation, post-industrialism and flexibility theories are mobilised to identify distinctive but supplementary factors in long working hours. Using data from a recent four-country survey, a Tobit regression analysis of full-time workers’ hours reveals that employers and self-employed people work longer hours than hired workers across this region. Despite this convergence, there is a contrast across occupations. In Japan, overtime is positively associated with occupational prestige, while a reverse pattern operates in China, where low-skilled workers work more overtime. Contract workers in the private sector in South Korea and China also have longer overtime when compared to public sector employees. In sum, this study highlights more divergence than convergence of working conditions within East Asia.

KEYWORDS:

• Social class
• overtime
• working conditions
• transition economy
• post-industrialism
• social structure

Acknowledgements

The authors like to thank Salvatore Babones, the late Randy Hodson, and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions to improve the article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The original coding for occupation follows the International Standard Classification of Occupation (ISCO-88) so that the groupings of occupations by skill level across the four countries are comparable.

2. The state sector includes an original design of EASS jobs in the government and those in public enterprises and non-profit organisations. We collapsed these two types of jobs due to trivial differences in our estimation. Contract jobs in the state constituted only a small percentage (ranging from 1% in South Korea to 3% in China) and did not generate distinctive patterns of overtime. We decided not to separate them from permanent government workers. For reference, the last entry on Table 1 reports the percentages of permanent and temporary workers regardless of sector.

3. Taiwan practices a legally set “fair working hours,” which is 42 hours; however, the workers in the public sector and many service jobs use 40 hours as a minimum standard.

4. For instance, Japanese workers in manufacturing jobs were reported by the International Labour Organization (2009) to work only 38.6 hours in 2008, which is 10 hours fewer than the results from the EASS survey. Official reports on Taiwanese employees had an average of 179.7 working hours and 8.2 hours of overtime per month, a significant discount compared to the results of our survey (see http://statdb.cla.gov.tw/statis/stmain.jsp?sys=100, accessed May 27, 2011).

5. We estimated the equations for the Taiwanese sample by using 40 hours per week as a basis of observing overtime. The outcomes were largely the same as we report in Table 3 in which the legal 42 hours are used as a benchmark. To save space, we did not display this alternative result.

6. A small number of respondents did not provide information and thus were excluded. The sample size for each model differs for this reason. We decided to use the method of pairwise deletion in order to keep as many as respondents in the analysis as possible. This approach is applied consistently throughout all regression models.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was partially supported by Samsung Research Fund, Sungkyunkwan University, 2011.