April 25, 2002 (The Editor’s Desk is updated each business day.)

Nearly half of executives have flexible work hours

Flexible work hours permit workers to vary the times they arrive at and leave their work places. The proportion of workers with flexible work schedules is highest for executive, sales, and professional jobs, and lowest for some manufacturing occupations.

[Chart data—TXT]

At 45.5 percent, full-time workers in executive and administrative jobs were most likely to have flexible work schedules in 2001. At 40.7 and 35.5 percent, respectively, workers in sales and in professional specialty occupations had the next highest incidences of flexible work schedules.

For many production workers in manufacturing and protective service workers such as police officers and firefighters, the nature of the work requires that it begin and end at set times. Operators, fabricators, and laborers—a group that includes assemblers and machine operators in manufacturing—had the lowest proportion of workers with flexible hours in 2001, at 13.7 percent. Other occupations with relatively low incidences of flexible hours were protective service jobs at 16.0 percent and precision production, craft, and repair occupations at 18.3 percent.

These data are a product of the Current Population Survey. Learn more about flexible work schedules in "Workers on Flexible and Shift Schedules in 2001," USDL news release 02-225.