July 26, 2000 (The Editor’s Desk is updated each business day.)

Executives most likely to have flexible work hours

Flexible work hours allow workers to vary the times they arrive at and leave their work places. The proportion of workers with flexible work schedules is highest for executive jobs and lowest for some manufacturing occupations.

Full-time wage and salary workers with flexible schedules, selected occupations, May 1997
[Chart data—TXT]

In 1997, 42.4 percent of full-time workers in executive, administrative, and administrative jobs had flexible work schedules. Workers in sales and in professional specialty occupations had the next highest incidences of flexible work schedules of the occupations shown in the chart, at 41.0 and 35.5 percent, respectively.

For some employees, the nature of the work dictates that it begin and end at set times—for example, police and firefighters and many jobs in manufacturing. Operators, fabricators, and laborers—a group that includes assemblers and machine operators in manufacturing—had the lowest proportion of workers with flexible hours in 1997, at 14.6 percent. Other occupations with relatively low incidences of flexible hours were protective service jobs at 16.6 percent and precision production, craft, and repair occupations at 17.6 percent.

These data are a product of the May 1997 supplement to the Current Population Survey. Learn more about flexible work schedules in "Flexible schedules and shift work: replacing the 9-to-5 workday?" by Thomas M. Beers, Monthly Labor Review, June 2000.

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