Rethinking ‘discretionary’ travel: The impact of night and evening shift work on social exclusion and mobilities of care

Night and evening shift workers play critical roles in the modern economy, yet the mobility implications of working at these times is understudied. Shift workers’ schedules are mis-aligned with the schedules of their families and most of society, complicating their contribution to household-serving travel and their participation in social activities. This study models the effects of working nights and evenings on household-serving and social trips, including social trips with other householders. I apply binary logistic and Poisson regression with block bootstrapping to the 2017 U.S. National Household Travel Survey, which contains records for over 160,000 travelers recruited through stratified random sampling of U.S. addresses. Night and evening shift workers are less likely to make a trip for recreation, visiting others, or eating out, on days that they work. Shift workers are also less likely to conduct household-serving trips on days that they work, and this effect is amplified for women with regards to errands and shopping. When people work impacts what activities they can participate in, including whether they join in social activities with other household members. These results demonstrate the limitations of understanding social trips as ‘discretionary,’ in that these activities are still subject to coupling constraints that make it difficult for some groups of people to participate. These impacts hold negative implications for the mental health and wellbeing of shift workers.