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Working for the weekend? Or working more on it?
By Karl Henkel
BOARDMAN
Employed in the retail industry for more than three decades, Bob Gorup is used to working on the weekends.
Gorup, an appliance associate at The Home Depot in Boardman, works most weekends in one of the store’s busiest sections. He’s part of a segment of workers who saw their average shift increase by 30 minutes, according to the 2010 American Time Use Survey, released Wednesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Thirty-five percent of employed Americans worked on weekend days — the same percentage as in 2009 — but worked 30 more minutes on average compared to the year before.
Weekend workers averaged 5.5 hours per shift in 2010; the weekday working class, comprised of 82 percent of employed Americans, averaged 7.9 hours.
The 30-minute difference per shift brings the average weekend work assignment in line with past years’ statistics, which regularly hovered around 5.5 hours.
Lockwood Reynolds, a labor economics expert at Kent State University, said the deviation to longer weekend shifts represents a couple of trends in the labor force.
Businesses are still hesitant to hire new full-time workers, shown by the pause in unemployment numbers in May. They aren’t, however, afraid to stretch their full-time weekday work force over seven days.
“Firms are stretching more and more hours out of the same work force,” he said. “People are adding more hours but not necessarily adding more employees.”
There’s also part-time work, which among males grew on weekend days by 9 percent from 2009 to 2010 and had a per-shift increase of nearly an hour.
In Gorup’s case, his regularly scheduled weekend shifts have more to do with consumer convenience and demand.
“There’s an influx of customers on the weekends,” Gorup said. “More people are shopping.”
Gorup’s boss, Buddy Colley, store manager, agreed and said he devotes most of his resources to the weekends to coincide with consumers’ needs. He said weekend shifts often are longer than weekday assignments to get the most out of each employee at the store’s busiest times.
Colley estimated that the store earns half of its weekly sales on Saturdays and Sundays, one reason he schedules roughly 100 employees on any given weekend day, compared with 50 or 60 on the average weekday.
“The lowest shift I’ll ever work anyone is a six-hour shift,” he said. “On the weekend, almost every time you work it’s going to be an eight-hour shift.”