Working Time in Public, Private, and Nonprofit Organizations: What Influences Prospects for Employee Control?

ABSTRACT

Employee control over work-time arrangements promotes work-family reconciliation and buffers against stress. But which human service context provides employees with the best opportunities to control their work schedules? Analysis of Australian survey data shows that after accounting for the low levels of work-time control in human service occupations like teaching and nursing, nonprofit organizations offer superior prospects for work-time control. However, whether this is true is strongly influenced by other occupational, employment and personal characteristics, such that for personal-care workers, work-time control is lowest in nonprofit organizations.

KEYWORDS:

• Flexible work arrangements
• gender
• human resource management
• human service organizations
• nonprofit sector
• women
• work-time

Acknowledgments

This paper uses unit record data from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) survey. The HILDA project was initiated and is funded by the Australian Government Department of Social Services (DSS) and is managed by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research (Melbourne Institute). The findings and views reported in this paper, however, are those of the authors and should not be attributed to either DSS or the Melbourne Institute.

Funding

This work was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (Project DE130100028).

Notes

¹ Like Berg et al. (2004), our focus is on individual control rather than workers’ collective control.

² The Wave 1 (2001) household response rate was 66% and as a longitudinal survey, there was some attrition in subsequent years. In Wave 12, 96% of individuals interviewed in Wave 11 were reinterviewed, and 88% returned the self-completion questionnaire in addition to completing an interview. More information about the survey structure and sampling is in Wilkins (2015, see pp. 91–94) and Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research (2014).

³ These were defined as education and training (ANZSIC 8000–8299) and health care and social assistance (ANZSIC 8400–8799), see ABS (2006b).

⁴ Casual employees are defined as those without entitlement to either paid annual leave or paid sick leave, as per the primary measure of casual employment used by the Australian Bureau of Statistics and contained in the HILDA survey (Kryger, 2015).

⁵ Remaining studies examined specific subdimensions of work-time control only.

⁶ Missing values on any of the three items were imputed based on respondents’ average scores on completed items.

⁷ The category of “managers” included all managers, including school principals and health and welfare managers (ANZSCO codes 1000 to 1499). The category of “teachers” included school, tertiary, and other education professionals such as private tutors and teachers of English to speakers of other languages as well as education aides (ANZSCO codes 2400–2493 and 4221). The category of “nurses” was defined as midwives and nursing professionals, as well as enrolled and mothercraft nurses (ANZSCO 2540–2544 and 4114). Personal support workers included aged and disabled carers, nursing support and personal care workers, and special care workers (ANZSCO codes 4230–4231 and 4233–4234).

⁸ These scheduling measures also differed across occupations in our sample. For example, whereas 48.4% of nurses and 35.6% of personal care workers had schedules that varied week to week or month to month, this was the case for less than 8.8% of human service workers in other occupations.

⁹ Employee control of working time may also be shaped by competitive conditions in the labor market, as excess demand or skill shortages can improve the bargaining position of employees seeking individual control. It may also be shaped by employer strategy, including managerial use of time arrangement to lower costs or increase efficiencies (Berg et al., 2004). As the HILDA survey did not capture labor market conditions or details of managerial approaches, these were not included.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (Project DE130100028).