As world competitiveness sharpens, more industries are using shiftwork. This set of short pages from the most recent international symposium on shiftwork brings together review papers on a number of the world's leading shiftwork researchers. Health problems must concern both shiftworkers and their managers, and a series of papers report new findings on coronary risk factors and cardiovascular diseases, general health complaints, sleep and the effect of poor sleep in performance. Should women work night shifts? There is a series of contributions on women and nightwork, a topic that has grown into controversy in a number of countries in recent years. Recent research has highlighted the role of bright light in influencing human adaptability to unusual working hours, and some recent work on this is reported. There are also many contributions covering other topics concerned with shiftwork such as the adoption of condensed working hours and the standardization of questionnaires used in epidemiological studies.