Overtime may actually reduce your savings
For a lot of Australians, overtime is the norm. Australian’s work over 2 billion hours of unpaid work every year. For some, it’s a necessity to get the job done well, for others an expected part of work if you want to see a promotion any time in the next ten years. It’s not unusual to run late because you’ve kept back at work a couple of hours.
It’s such an accepted part of Australian life, it seems no one questions what effect is having on our lifestyles and finances.
Overtime is not healthy!
Overtime is not a healthy default for a majority of people. In the survey recently conducted by the Australia Institute. People who worked overtime said they’d spend the hours on family or exercise if they weren’t working. Working overtime keeps you from what you love doing- spending time with friends and family, playing sport, getting some culture or spending time on your hobbies. Work is important- for financial reasons, for self-esteem and to contribute to a developed and functioning society. But it’s not what makes us happy. In fact, we are kept from the things that make us happy by work.
I would also hazard a guess that overtime tends to reduce productivity in a workplace Studies have shown that we fill the time allocated to us. If we have three hours to do a task, it’ll take three hours. If we have one hour, it will get done in that time. That’s not the case universally of course. But the habit of eating lunch at your desk, and continuing on with your work can’t help the 3pm slump. I have always worked better if I go outside for an hour’s lunch, shop, pensive cloud gazing, whatever. The work gets done because you’re reenergized for the afternoon and the work day is broken up by more than the 10am coffee run.
The same goes for overtime. Is it possible to think clearly at 6am in the morning, when you only left work at midnight the previous evening? Sometimes it is a necessity. But Australia’s economy is now built around people contributing over 2 billion hours of unpaid overtime with 45% of people working over their paid hours every day. Australian workers forfeit 6% of annual GDP in unpaid labour. Put another way, if none of us worked overtime, there would be another 1.16 million full-time jobs.
If you’re not being paid to work overtime, then it is definitely impinging your earning capacity compared to the amount of hours worked. You are also not accruing the extra financial benefits usually associated with work While the report found the reasons for working unpaid overtime were diverse, from workplace pressure through to addiction to work, the general trend revealed that employees were dissatisfied with the hours they were working.
The report suggests the changes that can be made to improve Australia’s reliance on unpaid overtime include reducing the hours of a working week, capping the amount of hours people can work and remunerating people adequately for the extra work they do. They also suggest implementing protections for a worker who refuses to do extra hours.
Internationally, capped hours has been incorporated into policy without an effect on the macro economy.
On top of that, you would have more time to spend with your kids, get fit or find a second job if you needed the extra cash. I say bring it on.
Do you think unpaid overtime should be an expected part of a working life?
- Statistics all drawn from Something for Nothing, Australia Institute 2009.
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