Weekend working in 21st century Britain: Does it matter for the well-being of workers?

Abstract

On any given weekend, over a fifth of the UK labour force is at work, while more than half of working adults report working at the weekend at least some of the time. This is despite the fact that weekends are conventionally set aside as rest days. The question that this paper addresses is: does this matter? This paper adds to the literature by using two large panel datasets to analyse the effects of weekend working on eight different measures of subjective well-being in the UK. I find that weekend working has a significant impact on how satisfied people are with the amount of leisure time they have, with the results suggesting that avoiding weekend working is equivalent to working six fewer hours per week. Moreover, people working at the weekend report significantly lower happiness yesterday than non-weekend workers. While weekend workers also experience lower levels of life satisfaction than non-weekend workers, this difference disappears when controlling for unobserved heterogeneity between individuals. This suggests that there is no evidence that weekend working causes people to be worse off overall.