What our unpaid overtime is worth

by Simon Ward on 07 January 2012  |  3 comments
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The TUC has calculated just how much the extra hours we put in each week are worth.

We worked a staggering two billion hours of unpaid overtime last year, according to figures by the TUC. And it calculates that adds up to 7.2 hours per person per week, or around £5,300 per person over the course of a year.

Around 5.3 million of us are now putting in some extra unpaid hours, up by over a million since the TUC began compiling records.

Workers in the West Midlands put in the most extra hours a week, working an average of 8.3 hours unpaid overtime. London and Yorkshire and the Humber come in joint second with 8.2 hours apiece.

People in Wales and Scotland work the lowest amount, but still put in an extra 5.9 and 6 hours respectively.

And the West Midlands has also seen the biggest growth in people working extra hours, with 56,000 more workers coming in early or working late.

Here’s how the unpaid overtime breaks down across the UK:

The TUC has called for “a small number of employers” to stop exploiting their staff and, more generally, “changing work practices and [an end to] the UK’s culture of pointless presenteeism”.

Recent figures by the Office for National Statistics found that we work more hours than almost all of our European counterparts, with the exceptions of Austria and Greece.

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