LONDON — Should commuting hours count as part of the workday?

The suggestion — sure to raise the hackles of employers everywhere — was made by university researchers in England who studied the commuting habits of thousands of people who travel by rail.

It’s no secret that the expansion of Wi-Fi on trains, planes and automobiles has led to the de facto expansion of the working day, tying employees to their electronic devices as they send and receive countless work emails after clocking out from their jobs.

The researchers at the University of the West of England found that more than half of those studied read their work email and pored over work documents as they traveled.

“As an academic, nobody bothers where I do my work as long as it’s done,” Juliet Jain, senior research fellow at the Center for Transport Society of the university in Bristol, said in a phone interview. She noted that with increasing workloads, most people in the study “didn’t see it as official work time, but something to make their lives easier.”