Chained to the desk: millions put in hours of unpaid overtime
We’ve had extreme fishing, extreme skiing and even extreme ironing. Now, however, the TUC has found that almost a million workers are spending hours every week on an activity that may give them no pleasure and certainly no reward — extreme overtime.
More than five million professionals and managers in both the public and private sectors are working an average of seven hours a week without extra pay — and a million of them are working 48 hours a week or more, which the TUC classes as extreme.
According to the TUC’s analysis of official statistics, almost half of all lawyers report working unpaid overtime, with 18 per cent of them working more than ten hours a week of unpaid overtime. The average number of unpaid hours a week worked by legal professionals is 16.
Of those managers in finance and industry — including corporate managers, managers in service industries and business managers — who are working long unpaid hours, the average number of unpaid hours worked each week is 20.
Last year more than five million people clocked up an average of seven hours and twelve minutes of unpaid overtime a week — worth £27.4 billion, or £5,402 each.
The growth of “extreme” unpaid overtime comes as the number of underemployed people also increases. Official figures show that 2.8 million people say they want more hours in their existing job or full-time work instead of their present part-time job.
The TUC said that nearly half a million managers would be willing to work fewer hours, even if it meant a pay cut, and that there was a mismatch between the hours that people want to work and the hours that they are getting.
Brendan Barber, General Secretary of the TUC, questioned the need for such long hours: “There has been a surprise increase in people doing ‘extreme’ unpaid overtime, with nearly 900,000 workers giving away 18 hours of free work a week last year,” he said. “There is no direct link between excess overtime and underemployment, but those people who are struggling to find enough or, indeed, any hours to work must be wondering why some workers are doing so much for free.”
The success of girls at school and university in recent years appears to be filtering through to the workplace, where single women are the biggest group of people working unpaid overtime. More than a quarter of single women work extra hours, with 5.3 per cent working 18.5 unpaid hours a week on average. More than a fifth of single men and more than a fifth of married or cohabiting people with no children also work unpaid overtime.
The flexibility of Britain’s labour force is credited for a lower than expected recent rise in unemployment. Some employers have spoken of a “spirit of collaboration” that has seen staff make sacrifices to save jobs.
