Study shows we put in more hours at work than any other Canadians
Katie May
LETHBRIDGE HERALD
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Albertans work harder and longer than other Canadians at the expense of quality down time, a new study suggests.
The University of Alberta's Parkland Institute found that in 2010, Albertans worked 7.5 weeks more than the average worker in Canada and in most other developed countries, having about 182 fewer hours of leisure time a year than the average Canadian. Most Albertans get only five hours of leisure time per day, compared to the Canadian average of 5.5 hours. Newfoundlanders had the highest amount of leisure time with nearly six hours a day on average.
The data comes from the most recent edition of the Canadian Index of Wellbeing, comprised of federal government statistics brought together to measure factors including education, environment, health and leisure to paint a picture of Canadians' overall quality of life. Based on the average Albertan's tendency to work longer hours and take fewer vacations, there's a lot the province can do to improve quality of life for Albertans, said Parkland Institute research director Diana Gibson.
Alberta has "a work culture that's fairly intense," she said.
"People at the lower income level are patching together a bunch of different jobs and at the higher end people are working longer hours - in the professional jobs, they're expected to," Gibson said.
People could be working more for a variety of reasons, including income inequality, a lack of unionization at the workplace, the need for more child-care and the demands of shift work and commuting, especially for fly-in or temporary workers.
"We haven't done a lot of research around the causes of it, but it felt like an important thing to just sort of alert people to that on Family Day, we're taking this long weekend but really when you look at other cultures like the Nordic countries or countries in Europe where they value spending more time outside of work and in communities and in family, that we might have our priorities not quite right," she said.
"Albertans have the lowest sense of belonging to their communities in the nation, and some of that probably comes from commuting - we have a lot of sprawl -so that's a big factor in spending less time on social leisure," she added.
The institute is getting ready to release its March 2012 social policy report looking at quality of life in Alberta and asking the question "How do we ensure that we have a better quality of work and better work-life balance?" according to Gibson.
"Family Day is a good moment for us to take stock of that."
"It's a good day for us to take stock of what we're doing in terms of families and community in Alberta. Do we have the right balance? Some of these trends indicate that we might not."