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In discussing work-life balance, the focus is often on the amount of time spent at work, and flexibility of work time and place to accommodate family and other requirements. In both research and the popular literature, however, the focus of this balancing act is on a traditional 9-5 view of employment that spills over - in hours and energy - to a fairly traditional view of non-work life. The issue of balance may become more difficult, however, when the "work" in work-life balance is a series of rotating or shifts that result in dynamic discontinuities between workers and the rest of their life. For the shift worker, the particular issues of work-life balance, stress and coping, are both more complex and more compelling.
The term "shift work" is used to refer to a way of organising the daily working hours in which different persons or teams work in succession to cover more than the traditional eight hours per day, up to and including the whole 24 hours ([12] Costa, 2003). Consequently, the term "shift work" does not include the typical 8am-5pm Monday to Friday working arrangements ([20] Grosswald, 2002; [36] Presser, 2003). There are literally dozens of ways to structure shifts. In general they can focus on including or excluding night work; they can include or exclude weekend work or parts thereof; they can vary concerning flexibility of working times (e.g. rotating, permanent, split shifts) or the regularity or irregularity of the shift cycle ([12] Costa, 2003).
Increasingly non-standard working hours such as shift work, weekend work and split shifts are becoming the norm in industrialised, Western societies. According to a survey on working conditions carried out in the European Union's 15 member countries ([5] Boisard et al. , 2002), only 24 per cent of the working population are now engaged in so-called standard day work, that is between 7:30-8:00 am and 5:00-6:00 pm from Monday to Friday, and 18.8 per cent of the European work force is engaged in shift work that includes night work. As early as 1991, Presser (1995, cited in [20] Grosswald, 2002) reported that approximately 45 per cent of Americans are employed under some kind of shift work conditions.
The reasons for this increased shift work are two-fold and closely...