Objective: Contribution to the discussion of the role of participation/consent of employees in working hours regulation.
Methods: Exploratory analysis of conflicts between preferences of employees and ergonomic recommendations in shift scheduling by analysing a large number of participative shift scheduling projects.
Results: The analysis showed that very often the pursuit of higher income played the major role in the decision making process of employees and employees preferred working hours in conflict with health and safety principles.
Conclusions: First, the consent of employees or the works council alone does not ensure ergonomically sound schedules. Besides consent, risk assessment procedures seem to be a promising but difficult approach. Secondly, more research is necessary to check the applicability of recommendations under various settings, to support the risk assessment processes and to improve regulatory approaches to working hours.