Twelve-hour shifts will do your head in

I become nervous around people who work twelve-hour shifts. I will tell you why.

Several years ago I worked for a short period as a security guard. One of my first assignments was assisting loss prevention at a Myer store on New Year’s eve. I was teamed with another guard who had been working twelve-hour shifts for weeks. He told me that we would be the last to leave the building after the store closed. We would set the alarms and lock up. It sounded easy enough.

At 8pm he confided to me that he had lost the master key to the store. He was nearly in tears.  He was trembling. We had two hours to find the key.

Closing time came. Other security staff had long gone. Salespeople began to leave. After examining every inch of carpet in the store we still faced the prospect of having to call management, locksmiths, the police and God knows who else to report that we could not secure the premises.

We were alone in the store and he was crying openly as we checked all the changing rooms to make sure nobody had fallen asleep in there, or overdosed.

I had one clue. The master key had no tag to identify it. All other keys to cash registers and workstations had a tag attached. Think. If someone found an unidentified key what would they do? A member of the public would hardly pocket the thing and take it home. A member of staff would take it to the main office. Or would they?

The key cupboard in the main office was half empty. It should have been full. All the tagged keys should have been there. It was New Year’s Eve after all. People wanted to get out of there quickly and go home. We went through every drawer at every workstation in the building and finally found - one beautiful little key that had no tag.

We were saved from disaster. The final nightmare had begun. My colleague, already sleep-deprived and terrified out of his mind for the past two hours, had to set the alarms before our exit from the building. 

There is a sequence of nine numbers to be entered on the alarm keypad. A red light appears on the control board as each number is entered. If you make a mistake you have to start the entire sequence all over again. We got as far as number six several times. My colleague, now unable to even see clearly kept asking me “Is the light on?” I assured him it was and he would say “No, it’s wrong. I can’t make a mistake. I’ll have to start again.”

He kept asking me the same question and I gave the same answer and he started all over again. I remember being thankful that he did not have a gun.

At last he believed me. The sequence was complete. We had thirty seconds to get out. We made a run for it and closed the door behind us. In the carpark he cried again and hugged me.

Twelve-hour shifts make rostering simple for employers, but real people have to work them. We are not toys to be wound up and set in motion.

Long shifts play havoc with your sleep pattern and your digestion. Imagine that you are working from 6pm to 6am. Add an hour each way in travelling time and seven hours for sleep and you are left with three hours. What can you do in three hours? When do you have breakfast? When is your 'evening'? When do you see your friends or your family? If you work this shift long enough you begin to experience a disengagement from the world and people around you. If your shift is switched from 6am to 6pm, which is not unusual, your disorientation escalates. The times when you eat and sleep are inverted yet again. It is not enough to have  three or four days off occasionally to attend to your personal life and relationships with a normal timetable. Normality has gone. You can't get back to normal so quickly.

In 2012 doctors at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health examined data from studies over the previous fifty years and found that working long hours increases the risk of heart disease by 67%.

Our own Griffith University in 2011 studied working hours and rosters in the mining industry and found gastrointestinal problems, domestic and relationship problems, sleeping difficulties, fatigue, depression, increased use of anti-depressants, and higher accident rates were all consequences of working long shifts.

The Better Health web site of the Victorian state government states: "The body is synchronised to night and day by a part of the brain known as the circadian clock. A shiftworker confuses their circadian clock by working when their body is programmed to be sleeping. Common health problems include sleep disorders, digestive upsets, obesity and heart disease."

The consequences are known. They have been known for a long time. As early as 1817 the British factory owner and reformer Robert Owen proposed: "Eight hours labour. Eight hours recreation. Eight hours rest." By 1914 even Henry Ford had introduced eight-hour shifts in his factories.

The fixed twelve-hour shift in any occupation, performing specific repetitive tasks, is an assault on the body and spirit and a slow death for the mind. It should be assigned only as a last resort for essential services when necessary. I leave it to readers to wonder about the state of mind and competence of people who work these shifts routinely and whose lives touch ours - nurses and police, among others.

(Published in Australian National Review 3 December 2014.)