Oh, look! The dumbest article of the year has come out in Forbes (shocking): Want more pay? Get a night shift job. Yes, working the night shift may result in more pay temporarily, but the article conveniently overlooks the downside of night shift work, and long-term repercussions of the night shift.
Briefly,
* Night-shift workers have a 40% to 50% increased risk of heart disease compared with day workers, various studies have found.
* People who get five hours of sleep, common among night-shift workers, are 50% more likely to be obese than normal sleepers, Columbia University researchers have found. Several dozen other studies have tied sleep loss to weight gain as well.
* Women night-shift workers have higher rates of miscarriage, pre-term birth and low birth-weight babies.
* Night-shift workers show increased rates of breast (by 50%) and colon (by 35%) cancer in numerous, independent studies. And animal studies have shown that exposure to dim light during the night-time can substantially increase tumor development.
Yes, it’s more money, but at what carcinogenic and other medical cost?
May 28th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
My mom worked graveyard for years, and I swear, she must have slept an average of 4 hours a night because she saw her daytime as “I can do that!” time. I was really worried about her, because she was running herself ragged trying to do twice as much as she had before with all that “free time.” Most people I know of worked graveyard so they could be with their kids during the day, or so they could go to school. Not exactly “time off.” Or, they were like my dad, who worked rotating shifts (the worst, I think) for years, and was constantly putting his body through changes.
After all I’ve read about sleep and how important it is to be on a regular sleep cycle (esp. once you get past mid 20s), the less sane night shift seems for the vast majority of people.
May 28th, 2008 at 2:58 pm
Jim worked the night shift for years, but mainly he worked for a few hours, and then slept until 6 or 7 a.m. Not the same as being a police officer or on an assembly line. And yet he still had some of these issues. Our friends who still work the night shift seem to struggle with the same issues too.