CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 532Sleep and Work-Related FatigueWorkplace Health and Well-beingOccupational Health and Safety in Workplaces

Health and safety problems associated with long working hours: a review of the current position

Open access
Spurgeon, A, Harrington, J M, Cooper, C L·1997·Occupational and Environmental Medicine
DOI 10.1136/oem.54.6.367PMC PMC1128796
Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

Abstract

The European Community Directive on Working Time, which should have been implemented in member states of the European Community by November 1996, contains several requirements related to working hours, including the right of employees to refuse to work more than 48 hours a week. The United Kingdom government attempted to oppose the Directive, arguing that there is no convincing evidence that hours of work should be limited on health and safety grounds. Much of the research in this area has focused on the problems of shiftworking and previous reviews have therefore tended to emphasise this aspect of working hours. However, there is much less information about the effects of overtime work, which is a central element of the terms of the Directive. This paper reviews the current evidence relating to the potential effects on health and performance of extensions to the normal working day. Several gaps in the literature are identified. Research to date has been restricted to a limited range of health outcomes--namely, mental health and cardiovascular disorders. Other potential effects which are normally associated with stress--for example, gastrointestinal disorders, musculoskeletal disorders, and problems associated with depression of the immune system, have received little attention. Also, there have been few systematic investigations of performance effects, and little consideration of the implications for occupational exposure limits of extensions to the working day. Existing data relate largely to situations where working hours exceed 50 a week and there is a lack of information on hours below this level, which is of direct relevance to the European Community proposal. Finally, it is clear from investigations relating to shiftwork that a range of modifying factors are likely to influence the level and nature of health and performance outcomes. These include the attitudes and motivation of the people concerned, the job requirements, and other aspects of the organisational and cultural climate. It is concluded that there is currently sufficient evidence to raise concerns about the risks to health and safety of long working hours. However, much more work is required to define the level and nature of those risks.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1136/oem.54.6.367

Cites

57 of 57 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Initially, overtime was mainly studied as a one-dimensional variable, and most studies investigated the simple, direct association between overtime and health or well-being, treating overtime as a black box.

    “Initially, overtime was mainly studied as a one-dimensional variable, and most studies basically investigated the simple, direct association between overtime and health or well-being (5, 6). Most of these studies thus treated overtime as a 'black box'.”

    From A diary study to open up the black box of overtime work among university faculty members (2008) · cites this paper as [6]

    The review’s discussion of normal overtime (section labeled “4`6”; page not supplied) says the relation between hours worked and mental health was never studied directly and in isolation, but within investigations of multiple occupational stressors. That contradicts the claim that most studies examined a simple, direct association while treating overtime as a black box. The review does say published studies focused on total extra hours per week, supporting only the narrower point about how overtime was measured. (LLM, conf=0.84)

    Checked by a reasoning model — may be wrong.

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

  • Previous reviews on long working hours and mental health have not addressed whether there are systematic differences in the association between long working hours and mental health between countries and employee groups.

    “These issues have not been addressed in previous reviews on long working hours and mental health.”

    From Long working hours and depressive symptoms: systematic review and meta-analysis of published studies and unpublished individual participant data (2018) · cites this paper as [16]

    In the review’s mental-health discussion (section labeled “4`6”; page not supplied), the authors explicitly report that overtime was a much greater source of stress for managerial and professional groups than for clerical groups. That undercuts the claim that employee-group differences were not addressed. The passages discuss studies from several countries but do not assess systematic differences between countries. (LLM, conf=0.78)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

  • Although several reviews of this field exist, the few systematic quantifications of the evidence have been based on published cross-sectional or published longitudinal studies.

    “However, although several reviews of this field exist (5, 9-24), the few systematic quantifications of the evidence have been based on published cross-sectional (18, 19, 25) or published longitudinal studies ( 26).”

    From Long working hours and depressive symptoms: systematic review and meta-analysis of published studies and unpublished individual participant data (2018) · cites this paper as [16]

  • As globalization and technology penetrate society, sleep-related beliefs and practices can change, including longer working hours, shift work, and discouraging naps.

    “As globalization and technology penetrate society, sleep-related beliefs and practices can change, including the provision of longer working hours,113–120 shift work,121–124 and discouraging otherwise culturally appropriate naps.125–127”

    From Sleep, Health, and Society (2017) · cites this paper as [113]

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

1 of the 58 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Research works printed but not linked: 13

  1. Council of the European Communities. Concerning certain aspects of the organisation of working time. Council Directive 9311041EC. Luxembourg: Official Journal of the European Communities, 1993. (No. L 307, 13-12-93, 18-24.)
  2. Kogan H. Long hours culture: time for a change. Occup Health 1996;48:48. 8 Bulletin of European studies on time: statistics and news. In: Wedderburn A, ed. Trends in general hours of work. 1996;9: 17-29.
  3. Austin Knight London. The family friendly workplace: report presented to the conference of the institute of personnel and development. London: Austin Knight, 1995.
  4. Fukushima T. Working hours. In: Yoichi I, Hiroshi I, Fuku- shima T, eds. International comparison of labour statistics. Tokyo: Azuza, 1996. 12 Can long working hours kill? Labour Research 1995;84:21-2.
  5. Kasl SV. Mental health and the work environment. J Occup Med 1973;15:509-18.
  6. Dinges DF, Kribb NB. Performance while sleepy. Effects of experimentally induced sleepiness. In: TH Monk, ed. Sleep, sleepiness and performance. Chichester: John Wiley, 1991.
  7. Craig A. Human engineering: In: JS Warr, ed. The control of vigilance in sustained attention and human performance. Chichester: John Wiley, 1984.
  8. Craig A, Cooper RE. Symptoms of acute, chronic fatigue. In: AP Smith, DM Jones, eds. Handbook of human perform- ance. Vol 3. State and Trait. London: Academic Press, 1992:12.
  9. Folkard S, Barton J. The scientific basis for the CEC's pro- posed directive on working time. Annals of the Polish Acad- emy of Sciences 1992;36:311-3.
  10. Haugland G. An investigation into the effects of working overtime on: a) mental health, b) human performance -a pilot study. [MSc dissertation]. Birmingham: University of Birmingham, 1996.
  11. Russek HI, Zohman BL. Relative significance of heredity, diet and occupational stress in coronary heart disease of young adults. AmJMed 1958;325:266-75.
  12. Ohta T. Work rules in Japan. International Labour Review 1988;127:627-39.
  13. Sparks K, Cooper CL, Fried Y, Shirom A. The effects of hours of work on health: a meta-analytic review. Journal of Occupational and Organisational Psychology 1997 (in press).

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Related

Authors
Spurgeon, A., Harrington, J. M., & Cooper, C. L.
Affiliations
University of Birmingham (GB)
ORCID
Venue
Occupational and Environmental Medicine
Publisher
BMJ
Published
1997-06
Volume
54
Issue
6
Pages
367-375
ISSN
  • 0007-1072 (ISSN-L)
  • 1351-0711
  • 1470-7926
DOI
10.1136/oem.54.6.367
PMC
PMC1128796
OpenAlex
W2005572054
Cited by
532
References
58
Citations by year
2026: 5 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 9 · 2023: 20 · 2022: 17 · 2021: 22 · 2020: 23 · 2019: 27 · 2018: 22 · 2017: 20 · 2016: 29 · 2015: 28 · 2014: 27 · 2013: 25 · 2012: 27
FWCI
6.89
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Occupational and Environmental Medicine (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Sleep and Work-Related Fatigue
  • Health Sciences › Health Professions › General Health Professions › Workplace Health and Well-being
  • Health Sciences › Health Professions › Occupational Therapy › Occupational Health and Safety in Workplaces
Keywords
long working hours, overtime, shift work, occupational health, occupational safety, mental health, cardiovascular disease, employee performance, occupational exposure limits, stress, musculoskeletal disorders, gastrointestinal diseases
MeSH terms
Adaptation, Psychological, Cardiovascular Diseases, Employee Performance Appraisal, European Union, Female, Humans, Male, Mental Health, Risk Factors, Safety, Sex Factors, Stress, Physiological, Time Factors, Work Schedule Tolerance, Global Health, Occupational Health, Workload

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review