Working time mainly refers to the time that employees are engaged in labor in the unit according to the relevant laws. In many cases, working time has become a basis for organizational managers to regulate and restrict employees' behavior at work, a yardstick for measuring the quality and quantity of work they complete, and a basis for giving employees rewards and incentives. Taking working time as an important institutional arrangement and structural element in an organization is the basic stipulation for the existence of an organization, the basic condition for the behavior of an organization, and the basic premise for the survival and development of an organization.

    In China, a good and decent working time should fully consider the health and safety of employees at work, cautiously use overtime, and improve the efficiency of working time utilization. Efforts should be made to take into account the balance between work and life of employees, and strive to reduce stress and burnout caused by time arrangement at work, so as to improve people's enthusiasm and creativity at work; At the same time, we should emphasize gender equality, equal pay for equal work, and improve the efficiency of working hours per unit. Finally, a decent working time requires that managers in an organization strive to create a harmonious, peaceful, and positive work condition with flexible working time arrangements.

    In a sense, one of the core issues of decent working time is to fundamentally improve the quality of working time. According to the sixth Working Conditions Survey Research report of the European Union, the quality of working time mainly refers to the work efficiency of employees as much as possible during the working period, improve the utilization rate of unit time, maximize the efficiency of working time, and make the initiative stronger, so that employees can maximize the development and use of time during the working period. In the study of working time in China, we also try to analyze working time quality in terms of working hours, irregular working hours, working time scheduling and working time flexibility. In fact, the higher the quality of working time, the higher the quality of work in an organization, and the better the working conditions in the organization. The quality of working time is positively correlated with the quality of work in an organization and the working conditions.

    In this study, we measured and discussed the working time of the workers around these three aspects, and were translated into working hours including monthly working days and daily working hours, irregular working hours including overtime, scheduling, night shift and weekend working, and flexible working hours including flexible working system and flexible working hours. Among them, irregular working hours is the change of working hours, based on the general or legal working hours arrangement, and focuses on working hours that are different from the general or legal working hours arrangement. Flexible working time is the empirical expression of autonomy in working time, that is, the system gives workers the space to control working time independently and the degree of flexibility of working time felt by workers. As mentioned above, these three dimensions are the three aspects of working time. By comprehensively examining this information, we can investigate the allocation and control state of workers' working time, so as to have a relatively comprehensive understanding of the working time status of urban workers in China. The specific measuring apparatus is shown in Table 1 below:

Table 1   measure questions of working time