Holiday just another day of work for many on shifts

While other workers will be celebrating the anniversary of the nation's independence today, KeySpan dispatch supervisor Dan Zimmerman will be at work, just as he was last year on the Fourth of July, monitoring the four crew members who will dispatch gas company workers to sites in and around Boston.

A member of the nation's expanding 24/7 economy, Zimmerman works most holidays.

"My wife and I work around it," he said. "She's used to seeing me leave for work on July 4, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. We actually celebrate our holidays later on. So, on Monday, after everyone is done with the Fourth of July holiday, we will be going to the Cape to start ours."

About one in five U.S. workers are employed at service jobs with alternative or nontraditional schedules that make few allowances for holidays. Of the nation's 106.5 million-member work force, 24 million are so-called shift workers, up from 21 million five years ago and about 16 million in 1993, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Once primarily blue-collar, today's shift worker is employed by the service sector and holds a white-collar professional, administrative or supervisory job in finance, retail trade, marketing, computer operations or law, labor specialists say.

The information technology support staff at a local company, the customer service worker at a health care or insurance company, and the investment banker on the foreign desk of a big investment firm all work irregular schedules to accommodate employers' 24-hour work cycles.

Increasingly, as the country's workplace grows more diverse, holidays are becoming rarer for some of the nation's shift workers, said David Mitchell, the marketing director for Circadian Technologies Inc., a Lexington consultancy that advises companies with around-the-clock production and staffs.

He maintains that at companies with fewer native-born American employees, production may not shut down for traditional holidays because the bulk of the work force does not celebrate them.

"When is a holiday not a holiday?" asked Mitchell. "The answer is when you are a shift worker. Depending on the shift a worker is on, a person could go six or seven years and never have the Christmas holiday off, much less the Fourth of July. The machine never turns off. It needs a person sitting in front of it, always."

Some companies provide such workers with flexible benefit plans, permitting them to exchange benefits they don't want or need for time off. Others allow employees to bank a certain number of hours and then "borrow" from the hour bank. This permits those who still celebrate certain holidays to take the day off.

Zimmerman, who was employed by an emergency medical service prior to joining KeySpan Energy Delivery several years ago, said he's worked holidays for more than 20 years. He now oversees a staff of 21 dispatchers from the company's site in West Roxbury. With demand for service high and staffing low, he also logs about 780 hours of overtime -- about 15 per week -- yearly.

According to Mitchell, growing numbers of shift workers are becoming just-in-time employees, people who work only when needed. The trend began in manufacturing more than a decade ago. Today, said Mitchell, most U.S. manufacturers do not have more than four hours' worth of inventory on hand at any given moment. But since staffing levels are based on consumer demand and customer orders, it also means less flexibility for some shift workers.

"For some shift workers, this means being on call at all times," noted Mitchell. "They could be called three hours before a holiday or before a day off and will have to come in because their name is on the rotational on-call list. It also means that shift workers are likely to work more overtime, about 250 hours of it per year."

Harriet Presser, a sociologist at the University of Maryland and author of the upcoming book, "Working in a 24-7 Economy: Challenges for American Families," said the divorce rate among shift workers is three to six times higher than average.

"Divorce is high in the United States anyway, but this is remarkably high," she said. "Evening schedules tend to take parents away during meals, an important ritual for families, particularly children. They work holidays; they work weekends. So, they are just not there."

KeySpan's Zimmerman said he tries to accommodate his staff's personal needs. On Thanksgiving Day, Zimmerman worked the afternoon shift so that a coworker could have dinner with his family.

"There is a lot of generosity here," he said. "We try to work it out so everybody gets a fair shake."

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