Overtime Working

Abstract

The mention of overtime evokes a wide range of responses: the exasperated, ‘if overtime were abolished to-morrow, a quarter of a million jobs would be created in manufacturing industry alone’; the incredulous, ‘twelve million hours of overtime are regularly worked weekly in industry, yet three million hours are being lost through short-time working’; and the complacent, ‘we need overtime for flexibility, and anyway it is well controlled’. Innumerable epithets have been coined to describe the incidence of overtime working, including ‘the curse of the male manual worker‘¹, a ‘strange scandala’ and an ‘institution that will not die’³. Yet, almost fatalistically, overtime is often seen as an apparently unavoidable phenomenon of modern industrial life. In the words of a recent article, while overtime is ‘disliked by both sides of industry, for whatever reasons, it nevertheless has joined death and taxation as inevitable’.⁴