Despite complaints about the increasing pace of life, a new study shows most employees are working fewer hours than before. Over the past 17 years, the average working week in the Republic has fallen from 44 hours to 38.
The findings challenge the focus of recent US research into industrial relations which suggests that not only are people spending more time at work, but prefer their workplace to home life.
Prof James Wickham of Trinity College Dublin, who wrote the study, "Changing Times: Working Time in Ireland 1983-2000", said that while Ireland was "in many ways being very American, in terms of work-time patterns, we are not going that way".
The study found "most full-time workers want to shorten full-time weeks and most part-time workers want to work longer part-time weeks". He said weaker labour legislation in the US and stronger union density in Ireland, particularly in the public service, had been factors in bucking the US trend.
Men and women have benefited from fewer people working more than 40 hours a week. Between 1983 and 2000, men working full time (more than 30 hours a week) rose from 692,800 to 749,700. At the start of the period 86.8 per cent of them worked for more than 40 hours a week, now 59.5 per cent of them do so.
The number of women working more than 30 hours a week has soared from 284,300 to 421,100 since 1983, but the percentage working more than 40 hours has fallen even more dramatically than for men. In 1983, 68.4 per cent of women worked more than 40 hours a week, now the figure is 36 per cent.
However, the figures also show a large growth in the number of women working 35-39 hours a week. In 1983, 24 per cent of women fell into this category compared with 56.8 per cent today. The percentage of men working 35-39 hours a week rose from 10.8 per cent in 1983 to 38.2 per cent this year.
Prof Wickham said for many people the economic boom meant working longer hours but that "affluence apparently makes us count time as well as money, and industrial relations disputes increasingly involve questions of working time".
Prof Wickham said it was becoming increasingly difficult to define a normal working week. Because of the growing numbers of women entering the workforce he believed working lives for men and women were diverging.
"Whereas much labour market discussion sees women's labour force participation becoming closer to that of men, it would be more accurate now to see women as leading the way towards a greater fragmentation of the time structure of all those at work."