An interesting report issued by the TUC recently to mark Work Your Proper Hours Day has identified that the proportion of employees in their late 50s and early 60s working unpaid overtime has increased sharply in the last decade – despite a fall in unpaid hours for the rest of the workforce .
The TUC analysis of official government figures shows that over the last decade the number of workers doing unpaid overtime has increased by just 96,000. Given the growing size of the working population, this means that the likelihood of doing unpaid overtime has fallen by 0.2 per cent.
However, the analysis reveals sharp age disparities. The proportion of workers in their early 20s doing unpaid overtime has fallen by 36 per cent in the last decade, while the likelihood of workers in their early 60s doing unpaid overtime has increased by 45 per cent.
This means that a quarter of a million more workers in their late 50s and early 60s did unpaid overtime in 2011 than in 2001. According to the TUC fears about a loss of income after retirement mean that more people are working past their traditional retirement age which is leading more older workers to do unpaid overtime.
This in itself seems unsatisfactory as an explanation of causality, but as the report includes considerable detail about types of work and other influencing factors, it provides plenty of food for thought. For example, the likelihood of doing unpaid overtime increases the longer someone has been in their job. Workers who have been in the same post for at least ten years are twice as likely to work unpaid overtime (25 per cent) as those who have been working for less than a year (12.5 per cent).
The most apparent immediate value of the analysis is the weight it adds to the case for employing or retaining older workers. Any researcher looking for a focus of study could undoubtedly reveal much more of interest in relation to why older workers do more unpaid overtime and the degree to which it is voluntary or a response to the vulnerability of their position.
Further information about the report can be found at http://www.tuc.org.uk/workplace/tuc-20663-f0.cfm
