UK employees worked £26 billion worth of unpaid overtime in the last year, according to the TUC.
Marking its 20th ‘Work Your Proper Hours Day’, the union body calculated that 3.8 million people did unpaid overtime in 2023, putting in an average of 7.2 extra hours per week.
This is equivalent to an average of £7,200 in unpaid wages, it argued, although the total was down slightly compared with 2022, when workers added an extra 7.4 unpaid hours to their working week.
This year, teachers topped the list for both the proportion of staff doing unpaid overtime (40%) and average weekly overtime. Across the profession, all employees put in 4.4 extra hours per week, but among those doing unpaid overtime this total was 26.3 hours.
Chief executives and senior officials were the second most likely to have worked unpaid hours, at 38% of workers, working an average extra of 4.2 hours per week across the board, and 48.7 hours in some cases of workers reporting unpaid overtime.
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Unpaid overtime was most common in the public sector, where one in six workers did extra hours last year, compared to one in nine in the private sector. Public sector staff gave £11 billion worth of unpaid overtime in 2023, it claimed.
London had the highest proportion of workers doing unpaid overtime, at 18.8%. Workers in Wales were least likely to do unpaid overtime (6.2% of workers), and the proportion of workers nationally working extra unpaid hours was 13.2%.
Women and men were equally likely to have worked unpaid overtime, although women who did so worked 0.3 hours fewer unpaid per week than men.
Black, Asian and ethnic minority workers were less likely than white workers to have done unpaid overtime, the TUC said, but when they did they worked slightly longer hours on average than white employees.
TUC general secretary Paul Nowak said: “We’re encouraging every worker to take their lunch break and finish on time today. And we know that the best employers will support them doing that.
“Most workers don’t mind putting in extra hours from time to time, but they should be paid for it.”
Nowak called for government ministers to tighten the rules around employers recording hours worked, pointing to a 2019 European Court of Justice ruling that employers should establish objective and reliable systems for recording hours.
“Part of the problem is that some employers fail to record the overtime staff do. And when they don’t record it, they don’t pay for it. Working people deserve a government that is on their side,” he said.
The TUC has historically calculated the date of Work Your Proper Hours Day based on identifying the day in the year when the average worker doing unpaid overtime effectively stops working for free.
Technically, based on 2023 data, this would be 2 March, but the organisation decided to keep it as the last Friday in February as this has traditionally been the date it has fallen.
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