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By LISA SCHEID; Times Leader Staff Writer
Thursday, January 21, 1993 Page:
It was 2 a.m. and Patricia Knight was just about ready for dinner.
While the rest of the world slept peacefully and dreamed sweetly — or so
it seemed — Knight, a nurse, was about half-way through her workday, caring
for patients at Wilkes-Barre Mercy Hospital. She does it all night — er,
morning — long, from 11 p.m. to 7:30 a.m.
She was hardly the only one awake.
Patricia Knight is just one of 20 million nightworkers in the United States
— almost 20 percent of the full-time workforce. They not only police our
streets, tend our sick and keep our electricity humming, they also transport
our goods, monitor our money, entertain us on TV and will sell us a dozen
eggs.
Everything seems to be moving to 24-hour mode, from the 7-Eleven
convenience stores (a misbegotten name in retrospect) to massage parlors.
Not even clerical workers go home at 5 p.m. any more. In many cities,
support staff at large firms work well into the night.
And life as we know it would be unimaginable without people like Knight.
She’s been working nights for 19 years and wouldn’t change a minute.
Oh, perhaps a few minutes. Like those late-morning minutes when her phone
rings.
It may be fine for daytimers. But for a night shift worker who has just
drifted off to sleep, it’s torture.
“You have to work for a while to appreciate what a night shift person goes
through,” she said.
“It cuts in a lot on my sleep. One of the things I miss is sleeping with my
husband,” said Knight, whose husband is a police officer.
Economists predict the number of people who work “non-standard” work
schedules will continue to grow as computers, telecommunications and other
advances in technology link the globe’s time zones.
Never mind that night work is bad for your health. If researchers prove
correct, these workers have an increased risk for cardiovascular disease and
gastrointestinal problems. Women may have more reproductive problems and
babies with low birth weight (not to mention the difficulty of getting
pregnant in the first place if a woman and her partner work different shifts).
Ralph Homyack, 19, spent two months working the 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift as
a doughnut maker at the Donuts Delite on Public Square, Wilkes-Barre. For the
diabetic, who must take regular insulin shots, the night shift life presented
a scheduling problem.
“Sometimes I have to take them a few hours apart,” Homyack said.
Sleep clinics, staffed by yet another group of night workers, have found
that even those who have worked nights for years may never get used to it.
Their body clocks can’t adjust.
Just ask journalist Kevin Coyne. Intrigued by an odd statistic he came
across — that at 3 a.m. on any given night, 10 million people in this country
were awake — he decided to look into it.
He focused his research on those who “had” to be awake because they were
working, and the result is the recently-published Random House book, “A Day in
the Night of America.” Neither a business text nor a sociological treatise, it
is the equivalent of an armchair traveler’s look at a place — or time — many
of us never see.
Not a night owl by nature, Coyne spent five grueling months with night-side
Americans, asking what they did and how they felt about it.
Hepped up on Coca-Cola and Hershey bars, he visited New York, where a
clutch of all-night currency traders were waging a turf battle with the
dusk-to-dawn cleaning crew. And Las Vegas, which he dubbed “the capital of the
American night,” where even the wedding chapels never close. And a Utah
mountain where Trappist monks pray at night, believing that is when “God hears
them best.”
Most daysiders are unaware of the extent of nightwork. “If I tell people I
work nights, they assume I’m a nurse,” a bank employee in Boston told Coyne.
Passing the city’s big office buildings at night, “they think someone just
left the lights on.”
Coyne echoes sociologist Murray Melbin, who contends the night “is a new
frontier, opened by electricity.” Just as the western frontier did, the night,
Coyne says, “offers economic opportunity …”
Business sees the night as a natural resource — the “only” one we can’t
deplete.
Tapping the wee hours has spawned a new industry — overnight mail — and
altered the financial world.
It makes economic sense for a business with expensive equipment to expand
operating hours, says David Crawford, a labor economist who also teaches at
the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Why shell out for the
equipment, then let it sit idle for two-thirds of the day?
But the workers are tired.
Night workers lose, on average, a full night’s worth of sleep every week.
It took Knight a few years to figure out that regular exercise keeps her
from feeling “sluggish.”
Eileen Spellman, also a nurse at Mercy Hospital in Wilkes-Barre, said she
tries not to “waste” the hours before she goes to work and therefore loses
some sleep.
“You don’t want to sleep all day,” she said.
As a group, night workers use more caffeine and other stimulants, drink
more alcohol, take more sleeping pills. Everything is magnified if you work a
changing shift.
“I find myself smoking more at nights,” said Homyack. “Sometimes (the work)
gets aggravating.”
Marty Klein, a psychologist who runs SynchroTech, a Lincoln, Neb.,
shift-work consulting firm, says his surveys have shown that more than 70
percent of nightworkers admit they fall asleep on the job every night.
Klein calls the naps — often inadvertent — “micro-sleeps” of 30 seconds
to five minutes. They are especially prevalent among workers who monitor
processes via computer.
Which brings up the issues of job performance and safety. If a trucker
zipping along at 60 miles an hour or a nuclear power plant operator goes
asleep for even a minute, the results can be deadly.
“If the circus were in town, and the elephants worked this schedule,
there’d be pickets” around the stadium, a CNN anchor griped to Coyne.
Yet nightwork remains largely unstudied. A recent report on shift work by
the congressional Office of Technology Assessment focused to a large extent on
what is not known: We have learned more about biological rhythms, but we
haven’t applied it to the workplace. There’s been insufficient data about who
is working what hours. There’s been no comprehensive safety study.
Not even the health effects have been thoroughly documented. In addition to
the specific health problems, researchers are concerned about what David
Lisowski, project director of the report, terms “shift work maladaptation
syndrome,” a fancy way of saying people who work shift work “feel lousy all
the time.”
The most common swing shift in the United States is called the “Southern
swing,” after the southern textile industry that supposedly originated it.
Here’s how it goes: Work seven days and get two days off (usually week days).
Work seven evenings and get two more days off. Work seven nights and get three
days off.
Schedules like this, Klein says, have “nothing to do with the health and
wellbeing of the employees,” merely harking back to “the notion of making
everybody equally miserable.” He notes that in addition to the usual health
consequences, workers on these shifts have a 25 percent higher divorce rate.
Keep in mind, though, that some people want to work the night shift. Coyne
says it is common in two-career couples with limited child-care options.
For Spellman, whose husband works a traditional “swing shift” as a
paramedic, the arrangement “works out well for the kids.” They have five girls
aged 3 to 11.
“We don’t have to worry about sitters,” Spellman, 35, said. “The best part
is you are always there when the kids are there. Maybe with one eye open.”
Few mothers can claim they woke up the kids on Christmas Day.
“It gives me more time with my family. I never missed anything at school,~”
said nurse Knight, who has two children now young adults. She even coached
softball.
Both nurses said their children, who were in bed before the women went to
work, rarely even missed their mothers.
Conversely, for a single man like Homyack the night life can be, well,
lifeless.
“Socially… I have to work at 10 p.m. It’s hard to meet women because
that’s the time you go out,” Homyack said while working one of his last late
shifts.
Not that it’s completely lonely out on the frontier of night.
He has his crowd of regulars and friends stopping in. And for a
self-professed “country boy,” the parade of personalities of late-night city
folk offered him quite an “interesting” view of humanity.
Homyack calls it “variety.” From the homeless to the apparently crazy or
just plain drunk, at 19, Homyack has served many.
Someday he wants to open a restaurant in the Back Mountain that specializes
in dishes for diabetics but, he said, it won’t be open all night.
Why?
“Too much riff-raff,” he said.
Some nightworkers say they like the illusion of added time — they can get
more chores done during the day. Some are avid golfers. Many enjoy free city
parking at night and like not having to buck rush-hour traffic.
“Traffic-wise, it makes a big difference,” Knight said. “It gives me time
for things during the day like doctor or dentist appointments.” She can also
make supper for her family and run errands before she is tired from a day’s
work.
In the past, few people considered their working hours a factor for a
career choice, but this will change with the growth of the practice, says
Klein. “Shift work is not a work schedule, it’s a lifestyle. It affects
everything — child rearing, when you can have meals with your family, whether
you can participate very much in the kids’ upbringing or school activities,
what kind of hobbies you can have, educational opportunities … ”
By the end of his journey, Coyne developed an affinity for the nighttime.
He found that people were friendlier. They had a healthy disdain for authority
and “a willingness to endure adversity.” They were individuals, if not
renegades. People who work at night, he says, “tend to think deeper” because
there are fewer distractions. “They have more room and space and freedom to
think.”
Spellman agreed.
“You kind of make up your own pace,” she said.
Knight said it is a good time for new nurses to learn how to do things like
EKGs, duties that specialists perform during the day.
For Homyack, it means complete charge of the entire doughnut shop, from the
counter service to doughnut baking.
Knight-Ridder Newspapers staff writer Sandy Bauers contributed to this
report.