Abstract
Workplaces have changed profoundly in the last century, especially in the developed world. In many places, the workforce has gone from being relatively homogenous - predominantly male employees in full-time employment living within traditional family groupings - to quite diverse - greater cultural diversity, greater participation rates for women, increased use of automation and technology, increased work intensity, significant casualization, and a significant increase in "on-call" working time arrangements. Importantly, working times have increasingly shifted into the night, and workplaces have increasingly become "24/7" (24 h per day, 7 d per week), leading to a substantial increase in productivity, availability of goods and services around the clock, and economic growth. ... Overall, the literature on working time arrangements is sporadic and mixed, inadvertently enabling stakeholders to draw selective findings from the literature in support of opposing views. To address these issues, the Scientific Committee on Shiftwork and Working Time of the International Commission on Occupational Health (ICOH) commissioned a series of papers from the Working Time Society (WTS) to provide a broad and international perspective on the current state of research, identify working time-related health and safety risks, recommend guidance for effective interventions to mitigate adverse outcomes from non-standard working hours, and suggest future directions. In that context, the goal of this special issue of Industrial Health is to provide succinct and clear information - in the form of consensus statements - on key issues in the field of shiftwork and working time arrangements.
