Half of all media and marketing professionals work an extra 32 hours a month unpaid, according to a study by the TUC, which shows the longer staff have worked for a company, the more likely they are to toil away for nothing.
But the analysis reveals sharp age disparities. The proportion of workers in their early 20s doing unpaid overtime has fallen by 36% in the last decade, while the likelihood of workers in their early 60s doing unpaid overtime has increased by
45%.
Fears about a loss of income after retirement mean that more people are working past their traditional retirement age; this is leading more older workers to do unpaid overtime, says the TUC.
The likelihood of doing unpaid overtime increases the longer someone has been in their job. Workers who have been in the same post for at least ten years are twice as likely to work unpaid overtime (25%) as those who have been working for less than a year (12.5%).
Workers in their late 30s are still the most likely to work unpaid overtime, with over one in four employees in this age bracket (26.6 per cent) regularly putting in extra hours for free.
The TUC analysis also shows that teachers are the most likely to do unpaid overtime, with media professionals and managers in financial services, health and social services also featuring highly in the Work Your Proper Hours Day charts.
At least half of all workers in these professions regularly put in unpaid hours, showing that a long hours culture is now ‘part of the norm’, despite much of it being unpaid, bad for their health and not productive, claims the TUC.
Across the UK around one in five workers (5.3 million people) put in an average of 7.2 hours of unpaid overtime per week last year, worth £29.2bn to the economy.
TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said: “While most people have no objection to putting in some extra hours to help their employer through a busy period, an entrenched long hours culture causes stress, health problems and lower morale.
“Given that managers themselves tend to do a lot of unpaid hours, taking a few simple steps to address long hours problems will benefit everyone in the workplace.”
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