This report by the think-tank Autonomy explains that an overtime “epidemic” driven by the rise in home working during the pandemic must be curtailed with new right to disconnect laws. Unpaid labour is a growing problem in the UK, exacerbated by home working during the pandemic. The report proposes draft legislation to implement a ‘right to disconnect’ based on French law, which ensures respect for employee rest periods and allows them to ignore work calls and emails outside of working hours.
Unpaid labour time is a growing problem in the United Kingdom. In 2018, over 5 million UK workers put in a total of 2 billion unpaid hours.1 This is an average of 7.5 hours a week per worker and amounts to £32.7 billion of free labour annually. Much of the data on unpaid labour time concentrates on low paid hourly work and labour market violations. But there is a more subtle problem emerging in our digitally connected world – the expectation to be ‘always on’. Modern workplaces and homes are digital spaces. The fact that we are able to send and receive messages, emails, and online content twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week means that it is increasingly hard to disconnect, enjoy our leisure time and develop a healthy work-life balance.
This has created an epidemic of ‘hidden overtime’, where workers never quite ‘switch off’ and continue to do bits of work throughout the evening and weekend.2 Being ‘switched back on’ by an employer after the working day has finished differs from standard overtime, whereby a worker is usually required to ‘stay on’. Instead, a call from an employer - and the response it requires - expands the working day fragment by fragment, meaning the worker is never quite ‘off’.
A report by the ILO that synthesized research across 10 EU nations found that this problem particularly impacts those working remotely.3 In the UK, the study reports that a lack of clear boundaries between the spheres of work and leisure means workers are more likely to take calls, respond to emails and return to work throughout the evening, effectively spreading the working day over a longer period, but outside of the parameters of official overtime.4 One can reasonably speculate from this that once a worker is ‘switched back on’ they are more likely to do other bits of work unrelated to that mentioned during phone calls and via e-mails.