Did you know that the hours of unpaid overtime worked in Australia is equivalent to more than a million full-time jobs?

That startling revelation comes from an article by Martin Oliver writing in Wellbeing Natural Health and Living News last month.

Among Australian employees, 19 per cent regularly put in paid overtime beyond the official working week of 38 hours, Martin writes.

“This may be part of the package or a regular feature of the job. Non-essential paid overtime is often linked to ‘affluenza’, the name given to unnecessary consumerism and a shift in outlook where luxuries are seen as necessities,” he said.

However, unpaid overtime also applies to more than half of Australia’s full-time workers. This represents a gift of about $72 billion a year from employees to their employers, Martin said, and has received special scrutiny by The Australia Institute (TAI) a leading progressive think-tank based in Canberra.

Last year, TAI found in a survey that this unpaid overtime averages 70 minutes a day, adding up to 6.5 working weeks over the course of a year, usually exceeding the annual leave entitlement. It’s more common among white-collar employees and often comes down to corporate culture. Many workplaces have an unspoken assumption that employees will put in some extra time for the benefit of the company.

Martin’s article takes a long, hard look at the failing quality of the life of Australian workers and how their work-life balance has gone so far out of kilter that many have forgotten what a normal life is like anymore.

As individuals, we all know that time is our most valuable resource. The trouble is, we don’t seem to have enough of it anymore.

Our lives are becoming ever busier and more complex. Hours are devoted to traffic jams and nightmare slow commuting; electronic gadgets that don’t work properly; maddening bureaucratic procedures, reporting and forms; handling advertising spam emails and letterboxes crammed with junk mail; phone calls to machines that make you wait endlessly on Muzak…and on it goes.

Another ubiquitous cause of lost time is our jobs. Martin said: “Australians work the longest hours in the Western world — an average of 44 hours a week — and among OECD countries only South Koreans stay at their jobs for longer.

“At a time when working hours in Australia, America and the UK are rising, those in most of Western Europe are slowly decreasing. The EU’s Working Time Directive limits weekly hours to 48, with the exception of some industries and in Britain where it is voluntary. In 2000, France legally mandated a 35-hour week.

“It has been said that, while Europeans work to live, Americans live to work. Although it may seem outlandish to American employees, many continental Europeans have five to six weeks of annual paid vacation, and a career is less commonly the central focus in life.

“TAI has researched working hours and overtime in detail. It would like to see a reduced working week and a cap on the maximum number of hours over a given period, and it supports changes that would help employees to refuse long hours.”

Martin said research shows that long hours can lead to numerous problems and impacts at the individual and societal levels. These include:

• Less sleep time (it tends to decrease proportionally to the number of hours worked);
• Difficulty in concentrating on the job, and industrial accidents;
• Stress-related illness, anxiety, depression, headaches and sleep disturbances;
• Alcohol consumption and smoking;
• Binge eating;
• An increased use of throwaway packing;
• Threats to marriage and family bonds;
• Damage to one’s social life;
• Lack of time to engage in volunteering and other community involvement;
• Lack of time to become politically informed;
• Lack of time for self-development and spiritual growth;
• Missed opportunities to get away from people to experience nature and relative silence;
• Lack of quality care for children, or even child neglect;
• Neglect and abuse of pets.

TAI has coined the term ‘deferred happiness syndrome’ for a situation where an employee puts up with unsatisfying work or a low quality of life in exchange for future economic benefits. According to the TAI’s criteria, this applies to about 30 per cent of the Australian workforce. Switching to a job with shorter hours is a solution, but many people fall victim to inertia or a fear of the unfamiliar.

However, some companies are starting to think outside the square, Martin asserts.

“Following the global financial crisis, some media giants, including Channel Ten and News Limited, handled the squeeze by offering the option of a four-day-week as an alternative to redundancies. Their employees were largely supportive of the idea.

“If a reduction in working days during the week is not balanced by a corresponding increase in daily hours, it has been found on the whole to increase overall levels of education and health while raising per-hour productivity. Less use of transportation also translates into reduced carbon emissions.”

Martin’s article also discussed the ‘Slow Movement’ and its impacts on workers’ thinking.  The Slow Food Movement began in Italy in 1989 as a response to the opening of a McDonald’s restaurant in an historic quarter of Rome. As it evolved, the movement branched out into slow parenting, slow money, slow cities and a range of other leisurely initiatives. Its motto is, ‘A firm defence of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life’.

With a goal of addressing ‘time poverty’, the Slow Movement believes our culture is too fixated on doing things hurriedly and that this permanent state of speed is breaking vital connections in society that large numbers of people are searching for. Community fabric is eroded by full-time paid work in its present form and can be strengthened by its partial absence.