Does the Working Time Directive encourage a long hours culture?
February 27, 2009
Today is officially ‘work your proper hours day’, which is an initiative from Worksmart, part of the TUC, intended to encourage UK workers to stop carrying out billions of hours of unpaid overtime and perpetuating a long hours culture. The Worksmart website says:
“Over five million people at work in the UK regularly do unpaid overtime, giving their employers £26.9 billion of free work every year. If you’re one, why not take some time to reflect on how well (or badly) you’re balancing your life? This is one day in the year to make the most of your own time. Take a proper lunchbreak and leave work on time to enjoy your Friday evening - You deserve it!”
The site goes on to explain the negative health-related effects of working long hours, including stress and damage to external relationships.
This information is not anything we haven’t heard before, but the long hours culture in the UK has been around for years and will probably still be in the future despite the efforts of organisations such as the TUC. What is it about our country that makes us all work so much, with arguably no benefit to productivity? Most of the time it doesn’t even impress the boss – whilst many people may be exercising a lot of ‘presenteeism’ at the moment in order to safeguard their jobs in uncertain times, a survey of 500 managers that was carried out in December by Kingston University found that 59% did not think that people who stayed late worked harder than those who didn’t.
One theory put forward by many Unions and a number of Labour MEPs is that our continuing support for the opportunity for employees to opt-out of the Working Time Directive (which limits the legal working hours to 48 per week) is ensuring the long hours culture remains in the UK. This is an issue that has again been in the news in the last few months as the EU continues to put pressure on the UK to remove the opt-out. Last year the UK managed to hold onto the opt out by negotiating better legislation for the protection of temporary workers (see Agreement reached on opt out of working time directive, June 08) however at the end of last year European MPs voted in favour of scrapping the opt out for the UK, and now Gordon Brown faces a difficult negotiation in order to keep it. Some members of the Labour party feel that the opt out should be scrapped, but Gordon Brown wants to keep it, as do Conservative and Liberal Democrat MPs.
The Government is also under pressure from business groups including the CBI as they feel that the opt out allows businesses to have more flexibility in the use of their workforce – which was the whole point of introducing the opt out in the first place. On the other side of the argument it is said that the Working Time Directive is a health and safety law; protecting employees’ health from the adverse effect of long hours. In addition MEPs argue that the Directive as it has been adopted allows flexibility for workers to work longer than 48 hours in some weeks when there is a high workload because an average can be calculated over a period of 12 months.
What is your opinion of this issue? Does the opt-out provide flexibility for businesses and employees, or does it exploit UK workers and perpetuate a long hours culture in the UK?
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