According to Circadian Technologies (great name!) of Stoneham, Mass., half of the 24 million Americans who work the night shift hold white collar jobs in IT, finance and health care. "One of the trends we've seen is that businesses that weren't quite 24-7 before are getting that way and the number of white-collar jobs at night are increasing," says Circadian's president, Dr. Martin Moore-Ede. Working at night can adversely affect both your personal life and your health, expose you to more crime and hazardous driving conditions, and is definitely not the thing for anyone who needs managerial guidance or continual personal interaction. Nonetheless, the demand for white collar professionals who will work at all hours has increased, which is at least partly due to globalization. With so many customers and vendors located overseas in wildly different time zones, not to mention the outsourcing of call centers and IT staffers to India and elsewhere, it is more imperative than ever that workers are at the office 24/7.

As white collar workers join other denizens of this workanight milieu, such as police, nurses and security guards, the demand for other nighttime services also increases. Restaurants, gas stations, grocery stores and call centers (even call centers that serve other call centers) are expanding their hours of operation and their nightshift payrolls to keep pace. We wager that it won't be long before globalization creates a whole new world of nocturnal workers from all walks of life, parallel to the daytime universe but separate from it. It will be interesting to see what the social and political consequences will be from yet another Balkanization of American culture.

"Around the clock" from the Orlando Sentinel