「働きやすさ」と労働時間のミスマッチ―学際的な労働時間研究のレビュー―

抄録

The purpose of this paper is to review research done on mismatches of working hours. Work hours mismatches are one of important indicators that capture workersʼ subjective sense of comfortability at work. For the achievement of Work-Life-Balance, it is important to close the gap between hours workers want to work for and hours they actually work for. A non-negligible proportion of workers feels mismatches between the desired amount of working hours and their actual working hours. According to several empirical studies, most of the workerʼs felt mismatches are categorized as “over-employment” , which means actual working hours exceed desired working hours. These mismatches are often created by changes of gender and family roles during workers’ life course. They also have negative effects on workers’ health, well-being, and job/life satisfaction. However, the mismatches are not necessarily durable in longitudinal perspectives, and workers have been usually experiencing oscillations between work comfortability and un-comfortability during their life course. Job changes often resolve the mismatches by adjusting actual working hours to desired working hours but not vice versa. From the firms’ point of view, this also imply the mismatches can increase a risk of employees’ turnover.

Research on work hours mismatches has important theoretical implications for studies on working hours. In their life course, workers have been often experiencing work hours mismatches created by demand-side and institutional factors, but they also have some options to adjust those mismatches themselves, such as by changing their jobs. That is, mechanisms of determining working hours should be studied from both two perspectives: one is an approach typically seen in the theory of neo-classical labor supply which empathizes individual free choices of working hours, the other is an approach developed in the theory of labor demand and sociology which consider work hours constraints.