How Couple's Longitudinal Work Arrangements May Shape Individual Health and Sleep at Middle Adulthood

Background: Labor market transformations due to digital and technological advances together with the service economy since the 1980s have subjected more families to precarious work, such as irregular hours and low wages, threatening their economic well-being and health. The long-held notion of either male breadwinners or dual-earners with stable hours and wages has now given way to a variety of work and family trajectories fraught with volatility and vulnerability. Our work, supposedly providing us with resources to afford a decent living standard and a healthy life, might have, hence, become a daily stressor in our lives. Our study contributes to this line of scholarship by using a life course perspective complemented by cumulative advantages and disadvantages (CAD) and intersectionality lens to investigate: 1) What might work trajectories concerning nonstandard work schedules look like among coupled families? (2) How might lifetime work trajectories among couples shape future individual health outcomes? (3) How might the associations between work trajectories and health outcomes differ by social position, defined by gender, race-ethnicity, and education?

Methods: Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth-1979 and the life course lens, we used sequence analysis to first chart couples' work schedule patterns between ages 22 and 49 (n = 5,263). We focused on nonstandard work schedules for it is a vital indicator of precarious employment. We then used multivariate regression analysis to examine how variations in couples’ joint work arrangements may shape individual health (i.e., physical and mental health) and sleep behaviors (i.e., sleep deprivation, sleep quality, and sleep latency) at age 50 while controlling for rich sociodemographic characteristics. We also explored whether such an association differed by gender, race-ethnicity, and education.

Results: Our sequence analyses uncovered five joint work schedule arrangements among couples between ages 22 and 49, demonstrating the heterogeneities of couples' work trajectories. We also found volatile work arrangements (e.g., constantly changing between daytime and nondaytime hours), whether just one or both couples, were associated with significantly poorer physical and mental health and poorer sleep behaviors than their counterparts. Furthermore, females, non-Hispanic Blacks, and lowly educated (e.g., less than high school) were more likely to have poorer health and sleep than their counterparts due to volatile work arrangements.

Conclusions: This study advances our understanding of the critical role of employment, suggesting how work has become a vulnerability throughout our lifetime, with lasting cross-generational consequences. Our attention to the intersectionality of social position markers further acknowledges the interwoven nature of social position in magnifying health disparities via work. As a starting point, our findings provide evidence to advocate, a long tradition of social work profession, for employment policies providing living wages and supportive measures to reduce this accumulated stressor for workers with nonstandard work schedules.