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Young Generation Y fathers are cutting back on working hours, apparently to spend more time with their children and in leisure pursuits.
New figures from last year's Census, released yesterday, show that fewer men in their 20s, 30s and 40s are now working more than 50 hours a week.
Older men and women are still working longer hours than they did a decade ago.
Altogether, almost a quarter of all employees (23 per cent) still work more than 50 hours a week - higher than in any of 17 other developed countries except Japan in a 2004 survey.
But Business New Zealand's employment relations policy manager, Paul Mackay, said the drop among younger men pointed to Generation Y workers saying, "I'll do what I need to do but I'm not going to do any more than I have to".
"They are more inclined to look at work-life balance and an 'I'm not your slave' kind of syndrome," he said. "You might have a Generation X/Generation Y effect, with the Baby Boomers flowing through to their 60s still saying, 'I work for the company', to Generation Y saying, 'I work for me'."
Baby Boomers, born in the decades after 1945, are now nearing retirement. Generation X refers broadly to people who reached adulthood in the 1980s and 1990s, while Generation Y are still broadly in their teens or early 20s.
Victoria University economist Paul Callister said the latest figures represented the first drop in the proportion of employees working more than 50 hours a week since 1981, when only 17 per cent worked those hours.
The numbers working long hours peaked at 25 per cent in 1996 and levelled off in 2001, before dropping back.
Dr Callister said the increase up to 1996 reflected economic restructuring, with the loss of standard 40-hour jobs in manufacturing and forestry and the growth of service sectors with less-predictable hours.
He said the slight shift back to more standard hours in the past decade reflected a stronger economy, which gave workers more bargaining power.
"This is the time that workers have the most negotiating pressure over hours, and even with the hospital strikes you have seen some of those long-hours industries like the junior doctors push for shorter hours," hesaid.
"It's also the fact that you have more female doctors, for example. If more women are moving into some of those industries, they do tend to work shorter hours and that will have an effect on the male behaviour as well."
The proportion of all women aged 15 to 64 who work more than 50 hours a week has increased only marginally from 7.4 per cent in 1996 to 7.7 per cent, and is still way below the 23 per cent of men who work such hours.
But the proportion of women working standard hours (30-49 a week) has increased from 29.8 per cent to 33.6 per cent in the past decade. The biggest increases were among women in their 30s, who now return to work sooner after having babies than they did a decade ago, and among older women.
The most dramatic increases of all were for both women and men aged 60 to 64, because of the lift in the pension age from 60 in 1992 to 65 from 2001.
In that age group, women working fulltime (at least 30 hours a week) jumped from 11.7 per cent to 26.9 per cent, and men from 34 per cent to 55.8 per cent.
There were also smaller increases in fulltime workers aged 65 and over, from 1 per cent to 3.2 per cent for women and from 5.9 per cent to 11.8 per cent for men.
Mr Mackay said the shift away from very long working hours since 1996 might be partly due to the widespread loss of penal rates for overtime since the Employment Contracts Act of 1991, wiping out the incentive for workers to stay at work for long hours.
"The big change was from national awards to enterprise-based bargaining, but it took the better part of five years until people took real notice of that and you saw a wholesale change," he said.
"Quite frankly, the [Labour Government's] Employment Relations Act hasn't slowed it in the slightest because we are still talking about enterprise-based bargaining."
Council of Trade Unions secretary Carol Beaumont said higher wages, more women in work and Labour's Working For Families subsidies had also made it financially possible for men to cut back on overtime - and forced them to get home to the children if their partners were out at work.
