Adapting Working Hours to Modern Needs

Over the past two decades standard hours of work have been progressively reduced in industrialised countries. At the same time, improved education and living standards have led to more widespread concern with the quality of life among those working in big cities, and more recently there have been new developments in the distribution of working hours over the week and year. This had led to discussion of the wider question of flexibility in the lifetime distribution of working time. This report is intended only as an outline of new trends in the pattern of working time that have emerged in industrialised market‐economy countries, for readers with a general interest in present‐day labour problems.