Managers top 2006 long hours league table

Senior managers have overtaken teachers to leap to the top of the 2006 unpaid overtime league table published by the TUC on Work Your Proper Hours Day.

Top managers who do unpaid hours put in on average an extra 12 hours of unpaid work each week - an increase of more than two hours from 2005. If they did all their unpaid overtime at the start of the year managers would not get paid until March 24, and if paid for their extra hours would be 24,000 a year better off.

Teaching professionals have been pushed back to second place, although their unpaid overtime is the same as in last yearís league table at 11 hours 36 minutes per week, on average. If they did all their unpaid hours at the start of the year they would not be paid until March 22, and if paid for them would be earning nearly 10,000 extra a year.

The TUCís annual league table is published today on Work Your Proper Hours Day - the day the average employee doing unpaid hours would start to get paid if they did all their extra time at the start of the year.

Thousands of managers will today get anonymous bossagram emails, which their staff have asked to be sent from the Work Your Proper Hours Day website www.workyourproperhoursday.com telling them that they should join their staff in taking a proper lunch break, then leave on time and take them all out for a coffee or cocktail to say thank you for their extra work.

The league table, which is derived from the official 60,000 strong Labour Force Survey, shows that managerial and professional staff dominate the top places. But less senior staff in IT, law, accountancy and finance are also likely to put in almost an extra day of unpaid work a week.

But there is also some slow progress. Unpaid overtime peaked in 2001/2002, nearly a quarter of a million fewer employees now work unpaid overtime, and the real value of unpaid overtime has fallen by more than half a billion pounds to 23 billion. Yet progress is slow, and there was just a six minute fall in average unpaid overtime last year. The UK still has the longest average hours for full time workers across the EU (even including the new member states) and a bigger proportion of the workforce do unpaid overtime in the UK (20.5 per cent) than in any other EU country. The EU average is 6.2 per cent.

TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber said: Work Your Proper Hours Day is an opportunity for a bit of fun after work and during lunch breaks up and down the country. But it should also make us all think seriously not just about our own work-life balance, but also about whether we can organise our workplaces better so that we can be just as productive but get home a bit earlier. We are beginning to cut the UKís working hours, but there is still a long way to go before the UK gets anywhere near the European average.

The full 2006 Unpaid Overtime League Table is available in pdf format at: