Marc Loriol^[1]

The health crisis caused by the COVID-19 epidemic has reinforced the blurring of the boundaries between work and non-work and the impact of work time on personal life. During the first lockdown, a large number of employees found themselves, within a few days, fully teleworking without necessarily being prepared for it. In addition, the closure of schools has forced many parents, mostly mothers, to take on both distance work and childcare at the same time. More generally, working at home means that domestic and professional time must be rearranged in a new way. This may have been all the more difficult to manage as teleworking encourages possible excesses in working hours. When far from one’s own colleagues and immediate superiors, the difficulty of proving a sufficient involvement in one’s activity can lead to an increase in working time. Secondly, as working from home encourages more individualised time arrangements, coordination among colleagues can lead to an extension of the working time slots. For example, if some people prefer to start early in the morning and others decide to get up later, the choice of a remote meeting schedule or an e-mail that requires an urgent response can complicate personal arrangements and demand a wider availability.

For those who had to keep travelling to their workplace because their work could not be done remotely – the ‘frontline workers’ or ‘essential workers’ – the epidemic posed unique challenges. Fear of infecting family members or co-workers, longer travel times due to reduced public transport services and, in some cases, working overtime to cope with the crisis led some to sleep outside their homes, in or near their workplaces. Thus, in some nursing homes, certain staff members chose to isolate themselves with the residents, both to avoid introducing the virus into an establishment housing people at risk and to better support elderly people deprived of visits from their relatives.

However, these unprecedented situations only highlight, and sometimes exacerbate, developments that were already pointed out and discussed before the crisis. The secular trends had led globally to a reduction in working hours, an increasingly clear separation between work and non-work, and a standardisation and social synchronisation of working time and rest or leisure time; however, the recent period, under the effect of economic, social and technological transformations, seems to have thwarted these developments, particularly for the most precarious workers and those (more qualified) whose status defines obligations in terms of objectives or mission rather than working hours. While these reconfigurations of productive temporalities can sometimes be opportunities for a more personalised arrangement of the work/life balance, more often than not, they have an unevenly distributed cost in terms of health, well-being or social relations.

Maryline Bèque shows that women suffer more than men from the reproaches made by those around them about their lack of availability because of work. Women from working-class groups (blue-collar workers, white-collar workers) doing night shifts, alternating shifts or long hours are particularly affected because of the traditional family model in these social groups (greater social pressure to take on domestic and educational tasks).

Laurence Weibel is also interested in atypical working hours (shift work, evenings, weekends, variable working hours, irregular weeks, overtime, fragmented or cut-off work) and their health and social consequences: social isolation, metabolic or eating disorders, fatigue and psychosocial risks, disorganisation of private life and difficulty in making plans, etc.

In a study on company agreements at PSA-Mulhouse, Juan Sebastian Carbonell shows that negotiations lead to a flexible and fragmented organisation of working hours, more adapted to the needs of the company than to those of the employees. This leads to ‘bad fatigue’, which workers, especially older ones, feel they cannot overcome.

Marie-Anne Gautier, referring to epidemiological studies carried out in South-East Asian countries, reminds us that long working hours (more than 45 hours per week) have deleterious effects on health: an increased cardiovascular risk, an increase in depressive states, anxiety or sleep disorders and, for women, gynaecological consequences (risk of miscarriage, premature delivery, etc.).

Ludovic Joxe then takes us into a particular professional world, that of humanitarian work and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). During field missions, the separation between work and private time is more difficult to establish: expatriation, emergencies, and living in isolation 24 hours a day, constantly subject to security instructions, make it more difficult to preserve intimacy and personal autonomy during times that are supposed to be off work. The real rest time is between missions, even if this can put aid workers at odds with the social time of their families or friends.

Finally, Emilie Vayre, Anne-Marie Vonthron and Maëlle Perissé confirm, on the basis of an analysis of the literature and a questionnaire survey of 502 executives working in the Île-de-France region, that the use of digital technologies for professional purposes, both within and outside working hours, generates a risk of work spillover into non-working hours. The negative effects of digital technologies (acceleration, task fragmentation and multitasking, work overload, etc.) seem to outweigh the positive effects (enrichment of the activity, flexibility in time management, increased efficiency).

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