ABSTRACT
Work schedule systems requiring night work, unpredictable work hours, long or short workdays, and weekend duty are often perceived as being nontraditional, unusual, infrequent, undesirable, uncommon, and unneeded work. Although some of these adjectives accurately describe many existing work schedule systems, these generalizations are not warranted and many are associated with service requirements. For example, the requirement for night work in the healthcare industry precedes the factory system and the industrial revolution. The humanitarian value of emergency search-and-rescue operations is widely accepted. Weekend work to monitor nuclear operations is mandatory In fact, it would appear that the majority of US workers are now employed on what some would term nonstandard work schedules (Presser 1995). In the contemporary world, the question is not if these alternative work schedule systems are to be used, but rather how and where these systems should be deployed.
