Working Long Hours and Having No Choice: Time Poverty in Guinea

Abstract

This contribution provides a new definition of time poverty as working long hours without choice because an individual's household is poor or would be at risk of falling into poverty if the individual reduced her working hours below a certain time-poverty line. Time poverty is thus understood as the lack of enough time for rest and leisure after accounting for the time that has to be spent working, whether in the labor market, doing domestic work, or performing other activities such as fetching water and wood. The study applies the concepts used in the traditional poverty literature to measure time poverty defined in this new way to analyze its determinants in Guinea from 2002 to 2003. It finds that women are more likely to be time poor than men in Guinea, and even more so according to this new definition.

Keywords:

• Time use
• employment
• underemployment
• poverty
• Guinea

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Workshop on Time Use in 2005 (World Bank, Washington, DC), the IAFFE session at the ASSA Meeting in 2009 (San Francisco), and at the Special Issue on Time Use and Public Policy Workshop in 2009 (American University, Washington, DC). We thank all the attendees at these presentations – in particular Kathleen Beegle, Diane Elson, Maria Floro, Caren Grown, Susan Himmelweit, and Paul Winters – for their helpful feedback. We also thank the four anonymous reviewers of Feminist Economics, whose useful input improved our work greatly. This work was prepared with funding from the Gender Action Plan at the World Bank for work on gender, time use, and infrastructure in Africa. The views expressed here are those of the authors and need not reflect those of the World Bank, its Executive Directors, or the countries they represent.

Notes

¹ They calculate that women worked roughly 15 hours longer each week than men and that, over a year, they worked an extra month of 24-hour days.

² According to the 1995 Human Development Report (United Nations Development Programme 1995), using data from a sample of thirty-one countries, women's share in total work was 53 percent in developing countries and 51 percent in industrial countries. Moreover, the distribution of women's time was two-thirds in unpaid work and only one-third in paid work; for men, these percentages are reversed. In developing countries, men were found to spend even less time in unpaid work.

³ We use “freedom of choice” in a simplistic way to mean a broader set of options. Obviously, the definition of what this means in practice is not straightforward. One possibility is to use a concept of minimum necessary time (an absolute time-poverty line) and calculate all possible combinations of time and income that the individual can generate by working different numbers of hours and purchasing different amounts of replacement services, while still meeting minimum obligations (see Burchardt 2008). Other alternative definitions of “freedom of choice” are possible; for example, one could calculate the share of time spent providing for basic needs over the total time spent as an indicator that helps distinguish people who work long hours by necessity versus “free choice” (we thank one of the referees for this suggestion). It should be noted, however, that the actual time spent in meeting basic needs when used as an indicator of the constraints faced by household members in the use of their time is itself dependent on the poverty status of the household. That is, the fact that very poor people spend a great deal of time on the fulfillment of basic needs is in part due to their poverty, which prevents them from living in areas with access to piped-in water, so that they need to spend significant time fetching water; this in turn results in less time for paid work (as noted by a referee, poor people's time allocations are devoted first to activities that fulfill their basic needs, which is an outcome of their revealed preference functions, as noted by Nicky R. M. Pouw 2008). Another issue is that some among the poor have very few options in the paid labor market and may end up spending more time in basic needs activities simply because they are underemployed.

⁴ Makdissi and Wodon (2004) show that the approach to robust comparisons for poverty measurement using stochastic dominance may be adapted to indicators where excess (for example, polluting more than a benchmark of what is acceptable), as opposed to insufficiency (for example, consuming less than what is needed for basic needs), is considered as welfare-reducing.

⁵ This is a nationally representative and somewhat standard priority survey with detailed modules on household composition, income, consumption, education, and health, among others. The survey also includes a time-use module. The survey includes data on 7,611 households; but 516 households were deleted from the analysis for various reasons, leading to poor data for these households.

⁶ We preferred this variable to the alternative “female-headed household” because many female-headed households in Guinea include several adult men.

⁷ While it is obvious that availability of or proximity to water and electricity can save women several hours a week, there are virtually no studies that show how the saved time would be spent, and in particular whether this time would be spent in (decently) paid work. In other words, while infrastructural policies are clearly necessary, it is less apparent whether lack of infrastructure is the binding constraint to poverty or if other policies would be required.