A study on the current changes in labour and life time-use relationships in Japan

Research Project

Project/Area Number	62530040
Research Category	Grant-in-Aid for General Scientific Research (C)
Allocation Type	Single-year Grants
Research Field	経済事情及び政策学
Research Institution	The Institute for Science of Labour
Principal Investigator	WASHITANI Tetsu Chief of the 1st Lab. of the Division of Social Science, 社会科学研究部, 室長 (00124313)
Co-Investigator(Kenkyū-buntansha)	藤本武財団法人労働科学研究所, 社会科学研究部, 客員所員 KINOSHITA Takeo 財団法人労働科学研究所, 社会科学研究部, 研究員 (90320499) FUJIMOTO Takeshi Guest Researcher of the Division of Social Science
Project Period (FY)	1987 – 1988
Project Status	Completed (Fiscal Year 1988)
Budget Amount *help	¥1,300,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,300,000) Fiscal Year 1988: ¥500,000 (Direct Cost: ¥500,000) Fiscal Year 1987: ¥800,000 (Direct Cost: ¥800,000)
Keywords	Working time / Time use / Leisure / Health / Family human relation / Overtime work / 労使関係 / 帰宅時刻 / 残業 / 休日出勤 / 余暇活動
Research Abstract	Time-use studies on married man workers in various industries were performed to analyse the relationship between labour- and non-labour-related time-uses in modern workers in Japan. The summary of the main results and conclusions are the follows. 1) As the labour-related time including labour and journey-to-work times is prolonged, the 'active leisure time' spent for the activities such as entertainment, reading and socializing tends to be curtailed. The results suggest that the long labour-related time not only affects life time-use not quantitatively but also seriously deteriorate every-day 'life quality' of modern workers. 2) The return-to-home time crucially influences health and family human-relations, which are among the most important components of the life quality of workers; the critical get-home time is around 21:00 irrespective of differences in industry and locality. 3) The key to the improvement of the life quality of domestic modern workers, of which prerequisite is the reduction of working time, would be the construction of industrial relations effectual for normalizing working time practices.