> [encourage night-shift workers to] take other modes of transportation, including public transit or ride-share services
It's not obvious to me that ride-share services would be materially safer here. It seems like many of the same concerns for night-shift workers in other jobs would also apply to ride-share drivers, added to the propensity for the flexibility of those jobs to increase the number of people driving ride-shares in addition to other full-time employment.
When I was working a third shift factory job, there was no public transportation that was remotely close to covering my commute, and taking Uber to and from work would have taken a huge bite out of my paycheck. These remedies just aren't realistic for a large number of third shift workers.
I'm not sure how many people actually know night-shift workers, but a friend of mine is one.
He is no position to afford to take a taxi to get to work, regular public transit does not run at the hours he commutes, and even if he worked a 9-5, there is no public transit that will get him from the town he lives into the town he works in.
And no, he can't remotely afford moving closer to work. Being poor is very expensive.
Cheap taxis are something I've never experienced. I'd even say taxis are hideously expensive especially for actual trips over significant distance and/or on a regular basis.
The better way to deal with shift work is to be ultra mindful of diet and exercise since night work messes with metabolism and hormones in general. Or stop doing night shift but thats a long term solution and usually you're doing that shift work for actual economic reasons.
In many places, Uber was significantly cheaper than what local taxes used to charge. So on the margin, many more people could afford the former for more trips compared to the latter.
That's independent of still being expensive in an absolute sense.
I used to work regular night shifts when I was in my 20s - 2300-1100.
public transport was available for those times, but occasionally I’d drive as it tended to be faster - especially on the way in.
One morning I was driving back home and it was really sunny, no AC in the car, and the traffic ground to a halt on the m25. I closed my eyes and woke when the car behind beeped me for not moving forward.
Fortunatly it was stoped traffic rather than sluggish traffic.
It was the day shifts that needed a taxi - 1130-2330 for example was too late to get the last train. Work provided a taxi at those times (and on Christmas Day / Boxing Day)
I would love to see a general audit of night shift work and ongoing plans to keep it at an absolute minimum, but that's probably too utopian a project to see in this country any time soon :/.
Many night shift jobs already pay a shift differential. Many employees seek out those shifts. Why would we, as a society, want to prevent these seemingly mutually beneficial arrangements? Don’t like shift work? Don’t take a job that requires it, but don’t ban others who do prefer it from taking it because you don’t like it.
I don't want to be manslaughtered by this person on my morning commute, simple. When the courts and insurance companies shift, we will make your side on these things moot.
You have much greater odds of killing yourself or a pedestrian within a mile of your home because you weren't paying attention than being hit by a tired driver.
Because its a shitty deal, like cigaretts are? You get social alienated, your health suffers and if you calculate the health-risk cost vs the more earned money during lifetime, it turns out nightshift workers actually earn less.
Its a "use-equipment-at-all-costs" method praying on the social weak and un-educated.
It turns out that people need healthcare and fire/police coverage around the clock. A lot of retail and grocery restocking is done overnight when the stores are empty for customer safety and convenience. A lot of goods are moved, loaded, and unloaded at night so they can arrive fresh to market or to move overnight for the next business day.
By no means is this only "run this large piece of capital equipment most efficiently".
For the same reason we, as a society, place wage floors, etc.
The crime committed when two people form a lopsided employment relationship isn’t really against either of them (because clearly each is deriving sufficient utility); it’s against us.
We don’t want to be employed in this manner so we prevent the existence of these things.
I worked 3rd (11-7) and then 2nd (3-11) shifts a couple years ago. You don't end up 'having sunlight in...free time instead of work time' unless you are sacrificing sleep for it on 3rd shift.
I had a short commute and was able to get reasonable sleep most of the time, in about a year I made 1 driving decision I'd call 'bad', and that was just pulling out somewhat aggressively in front of light traffic (I started taking a route that didn't have that decision after that).
Growing up, my Dad had a few years working odd shifts. 3rd shift was the hardest on him physically as he had a really hard time sleeping during daylight hours. 2nd shift was the one that made him demand a return to 1st shift.
There was about 18 months where I lived in the same house as him and literally never saw him. He would leave before I returned from school and arrive home after we were asleep. In the mornings, we'd be off to school again before he woke up. Combined with him having to work 3 of 4 weekends a month, it was hard on all of us. He did what he needed to provide for us and I am grateful but I'm more grateful that he's enjoying a decent retirement today.
Yeah, I was able to sleep pretty well and don't have kids. There were definitely people on 3rd so that they could see/help with their kids more.
I switched to 2nd because the sleep schedule isn't offset during off time, but it would be a lot harder if that meant not seeing your family much of the time.
Night shift work in factories is also accompanied by unrealistic expectations. It's expected to work as efficient as during daylight shifts and personally I wasn't able to achieve that. A couple of people did that, but I don't think that anything of this is healthy or good for the worker.
Sleeping during the morning isn't that great, you need really good blinds and sometimes ear protection because it's loud out there.
If we were build to work during the night, we would have headlights instead of eyes was a pretty good union slogan during my time.
I'm happy I moved on but would think it would be better for everyone to not work during the night as during the day.
“We” is a generalized aggregate of society weighted by political power.
Some people also prefer to work for less than minimum wage because they are on the wrong side of an information asymmetry. And yet they cannot. Because they have not sinned against themselves or their employer but against us.
I agree. Some workschedules are quite toxic, and (perhaps biased as someone sensitive to circadian rhythm disturbances) would prefer not to see this normalized as it is today.
> Maybe they like having sunlight in their free time instead of their work time.
With a real night shift (3rd shift) your body would strongly want to sleep through all the good sunlight anyways. And if you do stay up for it, well good luck enjoying any part of the day.
Often not an option, as grave/swing shift often has the end that isn’t in common with day shift facing reduced frequency or no service on public transit lines.
I know that the conversation wasn't in depth, but I'd like to point out that 'public transit' also includes shuttles, it doesn't just mean 'city bus with schedule determined by best fit for public use'. Depending on circumstance a couple shuttles to a couple 'park and rides' could smooth out some issues. Maybe some one smarter than me could devise an elegant way to handle the last mile.
I meant good option: a normative not descriptive statement. So either we build more public transit, or relocate night shifts away from areas without it.
If the job is at a giant factory of some sort outside the city, I would like to see some sort of shuttle between the factory and a transit station. I am not sure how safe park-and-rides are during that last mile, but housing for commuters ought to be in areas dense enough to not require cars, even if the commuters are doing some sort of reverse commute.
building and maintaining a reliable public transit takes a lot of resources and planning, things that politicians are notoriously bad at managing. In France there's a lot of public transit but it is plagued by strikes all the time making it completely unreliable to use it for work.
While physiological effects are doubtlessly a part of it, how much of the increase is just down to the fact that driving at night, when it is hard to see, is more dangerous? According to the NHTSA, the odds (per mile) of dying in a car crash at night versus during the day is... approximately 300%.
In college one summer I worked on a car factory line, alternating between morning/afternoon and "late shifts" that ended around 11 PM.
I had to commute to the factory, and I felt my driving was dangerous in two ways. First, I would drive recklessly fast to get to my 6:00 AM shift start because company policy was that if you were late 3 times you were fired. Second, after my late shift ended, I would be driving home exhausted at night on quiet + dark 2-lane highways.
I probably had more near-miss accidents during this 3 month period than the next 15 years as a driver.
Generally companies don't actually need to have 100% of their workers at the same place at the same time ready to start their day. They just like insisting on it, first because they can, it's considered an acceptable cultural norm to always be punctual and it's one of the things they can ask for unlimited amounts of without looking evil. The second reason is, for the boss, it's extremely gratifying to have everyone there at a bad time, at your beck and call.
But it's wage theft. Part of it's they want you there early on the off chance you do some work for free. If you punish lateness extremely, the subordinate has to go to extreme lengths to avoid lateness, and that eats up their time in exchange for nothing. Especially with the idea of "no excuses", which is bizarre, because that leads to the logical conclusion that you should spend every hour outside of work commuting to and from work. Every hour. Because there's no excuses, and let's take for granted getting fired is unthinkably bad (it could be), then why not wake up an extra two hours earlier every day? Or four hours? You can't rule out the likelihood that there will be three accidents on the way to work, and there are no excuses, so the logical conclusion is you have to dedicate even more hours to commuting if you really don't want to be late.
In fairness to employers, however, there is such a thing as a slippery slope where if you don't insist on showing up on time it becomes a mess and work never starts.
And I do believe that being on time every time gives you dignity if you do it for your own sake, as an employee.
>But it's wage theft. Part of it's they want you there early on the off chance you do some work for free.
That's a stretch. It's not wage theft because you don't have to work before your shift starts. You could very well sit outside and browse HN before work starts.
Forcing someone to be at the job site and not paying them, regardless of whether they are working, is definitionally wage theft, per the US Department of Labor.
Under "Waiting Time". If you're forced to be there, they have to pay you. There have been several cases recently. There was a case against Apple about whether the time spent waiting for them to frisk you counted as payable time, and I believe another against Amazon relating to how long it took to get into their parking lot. I don't recall offhand what the decisions were, but they're easy to find if you're interested.
> If you're forced to be there, they have to pay you
But you're not forced to be there. If you walk to the factory (or otherwise have a very predictable commute), you don't have to show up early at all.
Also, the source you provided doesn't really support your claim. The examples under "Waiting Time" are all instances where they have to be present, and are waiting for work (which appears randomly/sporadically) to arrive. This is different than having to show up to work at a precise time.
>I believe another against Amazon relating to how long it took to get into their parking lot
I searched around and can't articles referencing this.
> But you're not forced to be there. If you walk to the factory (or otherwise have a very predictable commute), you don't have to show up early at all.
Besides the fact that you're changing the subject out of nowhere, this simply ignores the entirety of the original comment you were responding to, which addresses this in depth.
>Besides the fact that you're changing the subject out of nowhere
How is it changing the subject? The argument in your previous comment was literally "If you're forced to be there, they have to pay you". If you're not actually forced to be there, then that puts a giant hole in your argument.
>this simply ignores the entirety of the original comment you were responding to
The previous comment's argument was also "forced to be there".
Realistically, it is generally so that the other people can go home. It's not some sadist conspiracy. If a shift starts at 7 and another ends at 7 then having a lack of people means things could have to stop or others have to stay longer.
Lots of places have legally mandated requirements of the number of people to be working at any given time so there's no leeway for someone being late, it's a 1:1 if you're late someone else has to stay longer.
at a submarine watchfloor (the 'shore side' of submarine communications) we had a wild schedule: 5am to 5pm for two days, then 5pm to 5am for the next two days. Four days off after that, but then the cycle continues. I can't count the number of times I woke up several hundred yards from where I last was conscious - freeways, intersections, etc. Most of my coworkers had this issue as well. we finally convinced the command to go to a more normal policy, but this took decades.
Even judged purely based on getting the best work-results out of your subordinates during their working hours, this sounds crazy. What was the stated justification?
Most military watchfloors end up on stupid schedules like this. They aren't looking for work-results, they're looking to maximize accountability and minimize drama. The teams are fixed so they can align to command structure, so it will basically always be 4 shifts evenly divided. Because there is no night or weekend incentives, they want to rotate the night/weekends across all 4 teams.
I used to do panama shifts, swapping between days/nights every 2 weeks.
Such a schedule makes a lot more sense when you’re on the submarine deep underwater, especially if you’re trying to train for combat situations (where you may not be able to do a shift change).
Lack of sleep is a huge public health danger that our society refuses to take seriously so far.
I highly recommend the book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker (2018) [1]. It goes into great detail how driving while tired late at night is no different from driving drunk in terms of resulting fatalities -- yet driving while tired is entirely legal while drunk will lose your license.
It's also terrifyingly eye-opening in the number of hospital fatalities from sleep-deprived doctors, surgeons, residents, and nurses with their extremely long shifts.
This is a conversation America needs to be having. Thankfully there are hard-won limits on how many hours a day drivers and pilots can drive and fly... but it's a vastly larger problem than just those professions.
This is a brilliant book. You get major new insights every few pages, and many of them are highly relatable with your own experiences with sleep. Probably goes a bit overboard with some of its claims but even then there is too much good in it. Considering we spend anywhere between 25-30% of our lives on this one activity, its almost criminal how we ignore its importance.
Sleep apnea - it's weird how you often don't notice/understand it until an external observer who has seen it before tells you what's going on. You just feel very slightly more tired each day. You randomly microsleep without realizing. It's quite insidious. It's obviously very dangerous if you drive a car.
This area needs much more awareness (and tech-based
"disruption" - especially in detection, but also in making CPAP treatment more affordable and accessible).
Since blood oxygen can be measured with an external sensor, I'd be very surprised if fitbit or Apple watches weren't able to monitor oxygen levels combined with sleep movement to detect this. (They probably already do this.)
Edit: Of course, that only works for people who would own one. People working third shifts might not be common in that set.
If cost is an issue there are Garmin smart watches with pulse oximetry sensors and sleep tracking for as little as $130. (I do understand that can still be out of reach for some low wage workers.)
I'm not sure how society (or at least the US, because that's the only society I'm familiar with) can properly tackle sleep problems.
Encouraging people to track their sleep would be awesome, but $130 is still completely out of reach for low wage workers. You can save up for a $400 phone or some other luxuries that bring joy into your life but $130 towards sleep tracking? Nobody will want to save towards that, and I'm not sure they should.
My idea if society wanted to tackle this issue would be for the government to step in and provide these smart watches to everybody, much like how some companies have giving fitbits to all their employees to promote more walking and awareness of sedentry. The US already spends $11k/person/year on healthcare, so a one-time cost of $130/person seems small and could even break even if it encourages people to be more active and helps with the obesity crisis.
Unfortunately because it would be the government promoting this, there will be people convinced that it's another device to spy on you through. I mean, it's a device constantly measuring your heartbeat and movement to see if you're sleeping or not. Some sherif would probably try to subpenea Garmin to see the heart rates of people suspected of a crime.
It's worth noting that sleep apnea can disrupt your sleep without oxygen desaturation. Typical at home sleep tests cannot return a negative result, they can either be positive or inconclusive. EEG monitoring for arousals is necessary to rule out sleep apnea which most at home tests don't include.
> Blood oxygen monitors, or pulse oximeters, are considered Class II medical devices by the FDA. Generally, any company that wants to sell one in the United States has to submit documentation to the agency confirming that its product works just as well as other versions of the same product already on the market. There’s a workaround, though: if the company says that the product is just for fun, or for general “wellness,” they don’t have to go through that process. They can’t claim that it can diagnose or treat any medical conditions, but they can put it up for sale.
You might still use that as a cue that you should get tested for sleep apnea, but the watch itself isn't considered a medical device for measuring blood oxygen.
The full set of arterial blood gasses requires a blood draw, but just oxygen saturation is easily and accurately done via a simple light sensor. The FDA requirement is that the finger/light sensors be within 2-3% of the measured blood gas value.
Under ideal circumstances they are accurate to within a couple percent. But accuracy varies widely based on watch band tightness, skin color, hair, etc.
For those of us who are naturally nocturnal but work day shifts I'm wondering if we're in the same risk profile by simply not respecting our weird but established circadian rhythms.
I naturally wake up at 11AM - 12 PM and have difficulty going to sleep before 3 AM. Having to wake up at 6:30 daily would be a comparable torture.
I am one of those people (and, also, coincidentally, typing this at 3:07 AM local time). There was a period of time in which I was forced by circumstances to go to bed every night at 10 PM (by which, I mean lights out, in bed, ready to fall asleep), and wake up at 6 AM. I did not like it, but, eventually my body adapted to it to the point where when 10 PM rolled around, I would be tired, and automatically wake up at 6 AM.
This all went straight to hell when I ended up working a very long shift one day that extended well past my 10 AM working time. From then on, I was going to sleep more like 12-1AM and waking up at 9-10 AM.
I wouldn't necessarily assume so, and neither does TFA:
>According to researchers at the University of Missouri, people who develop this condition are also three times more likely to be involved in a vehicle accident.
They don't mention lack of light, but instead associate the higher crash rate with sleep disorders brought on by consistently working graveyard shifts.
What times of day are consistently night shift people going to be driving? Mostly night time. It's inseparable unless explicitly controlled for which it sounds like they didn't.
>> These remedies just aren't realistic for a large number of third shift workers.
Its difficult to explain to people who live in cities how different things are in the suburbs. There's no street lights or even Sidewalks where I live. There is No Public transportation in off-peak hours, none. And ride-share... with who--someone who lives miles away from you?? What about in the snow when its a bitch to just get your own ass in on time.
This the reality for millions and millions of people in the US.
It seems like analyzing fault here is important. Maybe driving late at night makes it more likely you will be hit by another driver (e.g. a drunk driver)?
Once I had an early morning flight to the airport and called an Uber. Sitting shotgun, I got to chatting with the driver. Asking about her day, she told me that she had just come off an 8 hour shift at the airport doing Fedex unloading. She was visibly tired. It was a stressful ride. :/
I took a Super Shuttle one fine morning and the driver was drifting in and out of sleep. Scary as heck. They had an app that would beep and he'd wake up and tap it and then kind of drift back.
My experience with early morning taxis (if they actually show up) and unlicensed taxis has been a lot better. But I've also resigned to being ok with paying an arm and a leg for airport parking because I trust myself to get enough sleep to drive safely.
Sleep deprivation got so bad for me that I would nap in my car at a gas station halfway home. Park at the far end of the lot and set a timer for 20 minutes.
that’s actually the more responsible thing to do vs. trying to power through (something i’ve been guilty of doing in my younger days). it goes without saying that the ideal is not being sleep deprived at all, but our lives are rarely ideal.
I was working night shift at a factory and preparing a rave during the day when I fell asleep on my way home from work and crashed into a house. It cost my my drivers license for 10 months in Germany.
We should really start using hours per week instead of number of jobs. It's too easy to push an agenda with the latter. 'I work 3 jobs' reads differently than 'I work 45 hours a week'
Number of hours can also be misleading. I work 40 hours a week at one job. Someone who worked 40 hours a week at three jobs would certainly have more difficulties at work, like more commutes, more context switching, not having the benefits that arise from a full time job, etc.
It does matter how many jobs you work though, because low-wage employees arrange things so nobody gets 30 hours a week to qualify for full time benefits. Also the kinds of jobs that people who work 3-4 jobs often work typically have chaotic schedules that aren't set well in advance, meaning that they inevitably come into conflict creating stress and the potential to be fired for not being able to show up at one of them.
Likely a decent number. Sometimes it's just the hours at one. A job I worked once had us doing 14 hour minimums with a rolling start (Monday start at 7am, by Friday start at 3pm), until two of the guys fell asleep on the ride home within one week, one barely surviving hitting a parked garbage truck, and the other ran a red light and flipped some guys minivan.
After that we were working 12 hour days instead, in part due to workers saying enoughs enough
Sleep in the film industry is a big issue; years ago Heskel Wexler made a great documentary about it after his camera assistant died driving home, it's called "Who Needs Sleep"
the film industry, sleep, and driving one sparked a memory. i took a film production elective while completing my undergrad. The class left and I stayed behind to finish up. A while later, they walked back in. Confused, I wondered if they all forgot something. Nope. Turned out it was the next class session! I hadn't moved in nearly 24 hours, and was awake at this point for at least 40 hours. I then had over an hour drive home up a curvy mountain road (at night) with thousand foot cliffs.
I actually full on hallucinated.
1/3: A giant SUV (20' tall) was reversing onto the highway. I slammed on the breaks only to realize it wasn't there.
2/3: A bit later, a hundred foot tall heavy woman in a moo moo standing akimbo over the road. I recall telling myself to not look up as I passed underneath.
3/3: someone reversing their boat and trailer onto the road, but the boat was 20' tall (my mind had _something_ going on with giants I guess). By that point, I just drove through the illusion, and, after, realized just how scary that was.
Finally got home, and I recall aiming for my pillow and being asleep before hitting the mattress.
I've never realised that hallucinations could occur so early, comparatively speaking, into sleep deprivation. I been awake for far longer on a few occasions (longest was a little over 110 hours), and only experienced minor visual effects (trails behind moving objects). I wonder to what degree it differs between people.
Mentally though, I was a bit of a mess. I was more or less whilst I was focusing on the thing I was working on, but as soon as I stopped, everything just felt muddy and unclear. I wasn't even sure I was going to find my way to a building I'd walked to multiple times a week for the last three years.
At least in the U.S. vehicular homicide (that doesn't involve drugs or alcohol) is usually no more than a ticket. Maybe they'll suspend your license for a couple of months. Prison? Pretty much never.
Anecdatum: I have worked for 30 years at various jobs. Only two of those years was I working a night shift. I have been involved in one car crash that resulted in vehicle damage; it was when I was working night shift.
Interesting point: it was on my way _in_ to work at the beginning of the shift, so I didn't attribute it to being on night shift. Now, looking back, I wonder if the wonky sleep schedule was nonetheless a contributing factor.
Also: the Fates have now decreed that I'm going to get in a wreck next week.
Yes, 300% of 1 is 3. Thus, 300% more is 1+3=4 which is a 4x increase. Other commenters have already commented that the article uses both 3x and 300% interchangeably which is wrong.
You're right, here is a detailed list for various age groups for unintentional deaths [1]. Still, first or second depending on the age group for all age groups. However, unintentional deaths isn't the leading cause for the older age groups.
You seem to be suggesting that informing people that working night time shifts is dangerous for them and thus should be compensated proportionally is not important. Again, the absolute number doesn't really matter, the person is significantly raising their chance of dying.
You're turning it into a moral issue instead of a measurable one...
Loggers, oil and gas workers, roofers, police, and more, all have SIGNIFICANTLY higher chances of dying then the average person.
They do their job everyday.
The idea of 'significant' is subjective. Statistically, anything that is not random is significant.
You need points of comparison.
Significant in comparison to what?
Do the night shift workers have higher chances than these groups and therefore should people be overly concerned?
Is it about equal?
I'm asking for accuracy instead of outrage from the news media so people can decide for themselves because statistics is easily massagable for the less knowledgable to create maximum outrage.
The paper lists all of those things. Confidence intervals, what the groups are, the baseline. In this case, the baseline are people with no sleep disorders. The whole purpose of this study was to elucidate that this is a serious problem for people with sleep disorders. In particular, people with Shift Work Sleep Disorder. This is a press release from a university with a link to the paper so you can discern this stuff yourself. What more transparency do you expect from them? Last time I checked University of Missouri wasn't part of the news media.
On my way to work i would drive past our regional research clinic and we all knew, that the nightshift nurses would drive out at 8-10° clock in the morning. So everyone local drove super-slow and carefully, while the non-locals honked.
When I was in the military I was fascinated that they had us pull 24 hr staff duty which is pretty much secretarial work with no sleep and then expected to drive home afterwards.
Been there, won't do it again. nightshift DC:Op I crashed on the way home after finishing a 12hour 4on4off night shift pattern. And of course had to be on my last shift home.
It's not obvious to me that ride-share services would be materially safer here. It seems like many of the same concerns for night-shift workers in other jobs would also apply to ride-share drivers, added to the propensity for the flexibility of those jobs to increase the number of people driving ride-shares in addition to other full-time employment.