The misery of long hours
By Joshua Jennings | smh.com.au | 09 August
Been a long day ... one in five Australians work more than 50 hours a week. Photo:iStock
Too many people are doing unpaid overtime and their health and family life are suffering, writes Joshua Jennings.
It's dark when you go to work and when you come home. You're too zonked to spend time with the family in the evenings but it wouldn't matter even if you weren't.
The overtime is such that by the time you plod in the front door it's time to get organised for the next day's work. You'd like to cut back but that would make you the black sheep among the rest of the staff. So you put up with it.
2008 Australia at Work – Working Lives: Statistics and Stories, a survey published in October by the Workplace Research Centre at the University of Sydney, shows about one in five Australians work more than 50 hours a week. “I don't know what could possibly be good about this,” says University of Sydney researcher Brigid van Wanrooy.
“It does artificially inflate our productivity but this productivity is based on unpaid working hours, so that's not a sustainable approach and it's definitely not a smart approach. I think we should be ashamed to have some of the longest working hours in the OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] and it proves that it doesn't have to be this way – there are lots of other countries that don't work as long.”
Van Wanrooy attributes Australians' long work hours to a number of key factors: people want to buy more, so have to work more; and as work becomes more knowledge- and skill-based, it's becoming more difficult for managers to judge what workers are doing, so they base performance on hours worked.
Australia also lacks any “real working-time regulation”.
Under the Fair Work Act, The National Employment Standards (NES) to take affect at the start of 2010 specify the hours an employee works must not exceed 38. That is, unless the employer requests or requires an employee to work “reasonable” additional hours during the week.
“A lot of clients of mine are starting to worry because there is no definition [of what constitutes reasonable additional hours],” says Peta Tumpey, partner at TressCox Lawyers. Tumpey is also concerned about how the act will account for people who want to work late voluntarily.
“With younger people who are ambitious and want to work back, I think employers will be worried that they don't want them there. Or they'll be worried there might be claims for unreasonable hours – yet they weren't asked to work back.”
There is a slew of contract negotiation services available to employees to protect themselves against “unreasonable” work hours but even assuming that employees are savvy and confident enough to negotiate a contract that suits their interests, contracts offer limited protection, says Katherine Graham, managing director of contract negotiation service provider The Resolution Centre.
“What happens in employment contracts is that fairly standard terms and conditions are issued. Most employers will stick to the minimum requirements of 38 hours. But with salaried roles they'll put a proviso in there that, if additional hours are required, your salary will take that into consideration. So it doesn't actually protect the employee from having that requirement to continuously work 50 or 60 hours a week.”
Australia is one of only a few OECD countries yet to place a limit on working hours. Last year, van Wanrooy was involved with a submission asking the Federal Government to cap the number of hours employees are legally allowed to work at 48. It's an idea Barbara Pocock, director of Centre for Work and Life at the University of South Australia, also supports.
“The reality is there are many Europeans who have implemented a cap on the persistent working of long hours. It's a fairly benign cap: it's 48 hours per week and that can be averaged over an extended period of about three months.
These kind of capping arrangements don't prevent some extended hours working, where business requires it for relatively modest periods of time,” she says. My Career sought comment from Julia Gillard's office on capping workers' hours but they didn't respond to repeated requests. But according to Pocock, the consequences of not capping hours is too serious to ignore.
“What those caps are trying to do is prevent economies functioning through the persistent working of long hours by large numbers of workers. And that is now the situation in Australia, where we have 31 per cent of men who are working 48 hours per week or more.
The international data [shows] it has significant health costs associated with high rates of cardiovascular illness, depression and loss of social time. So I think there are significant hidden costs for Australia's health budget.”
Should work hours be capped? Tell us at mycareer.com.au/vote.
HOW TO CONTROL YOUR TIME
■ Travel less Work from home without interruptions.
■ Say "no" more often Use your diary and work plan to negotiate what tasks can be dropped to take on extra work.
■ Use your diary Book in your own tasks and stick to them.
■ Alter your start time Do you need to be present at 9am?
■ Delegate Utilise others' skills.
■ Leave on time You might be the first to do it but you won't be the last.
■ Turn off your mobile If you answer calls at 9.30pm it becomes expected.
By Kath Lockett, the author of Work/Life Balance for Dummies (Wiley Australia).
First published by Smh.com.au on August 09 2009
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