Ah, the holidays. Time for rest and relaxation with family and friends. Or is that just the Hallmark version?
Some 57 percent of full-time employees say they plan to work at some point over their purported holiday break, according to a new survey, mostly checking or answering emails. Almost half of them expect to spend two hours or more a day, on average, and some said they expect to spend seven or eight hours a day catching up on work. (The survey of 1,033 full-time workers was conducted this month by the online market research firm uSamp.)
Employees aren't just checking in over the holidays: they do it all the time. Some 43 percent of the survey respondents said they work for over an hour at night after leaving the office. Americans have been working long hours for some time: A study by Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, found that the average workweek increased 10.7 percent between 1979 and 2007. The Zix survey, for its part, found that two-thirds of full-time employees typically work outside their normal office hours. The data on holiday work, though, suggests that almost the same percentage will be logging in during what is supposed to be a nearly nationwide annual stretch of downtime.
IN-DEPTH
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- Two Americas: Many Brace for Have-Not Holidays
- Homeless for the Holidays: Many Americans on the Streets
-- Kelley Holland