Wage slaves in pin-striped suits

SOYMB has posted a few times on what defines a person as working class and we have questioned the validity of the claims of the existence of a so-called "middle-class". The TUC , that organisation made up of the gnarl-handed , cloth-capped , overall-wearing proletariat has just exposed the exploitation of the higher paid members of the working class.

The TUC has found that almost a million workers are spending hours every week on an activity that may give them no pleasure and certainly no reward.

Five million including professionals and managers in both the public and private sectors are working an average of seven hours a week without extra pay — and a million of them are working 48 hours a week or more, which the TUC called extreme. Last year people clocked up an average of seven hours and twelve minutes of unpaid overtime a week — worth £27.4 billion, or £5,402 each. Official figures show that 2.8 million people say they want more hours in their existing job or full-time work instead of their present part-time job.

According to the TUC almost half of all lawyers report working unpaid overtime, with 18 per cent of them working more than ten hours a week of unpaid overtime. The average number of unpaid hours a week worked by legal professionals is 16 hours.The legal profession has long had a reputation for excessively long working hours, with staff routinely working through the night in order to complete deals. Despite job cuts and a dearth of deals during the recession and job cuts across the profession, a culture of presenteeism is still prevalent.Long-hours and a high-stress culture meant that alcohol abuse was “endemic” in law firms and that the use of hard drugs was increasing, particularly in big City law firms.

Managers in finance and industry — including corporate managers, managers in service industries and business managers — who are working long unpaid hours, the average number of unpaid hours worked each week is 20 hrs .

Single women are the biggest group of people working unpaid overtime. More than a quarter of single women work extra hours, with 5.3 per cent working 18.5 unpaid hours a week on average. More than a fifth of single men and more than a fifth of married or cohabiting people with no children also work unpaid overtime.

The TUC said that nearly half a million managers would be willing to work fewer hours, even if it meant a pay cut, and that there was a mismatch between the hours that people want to work and the hours that they are getting.

Brendan Barber, General Secretary of the TUC, questioned the need for such long hours: “There has been a surprise increase in people doing ‘extreme’ unpaid overtime, with nearly 900,000 workers giving away 18 hours of free work a week last year,” he said. “There is no direct link between excess overtime and underemployment, but those people who are struggling to find enough or, indeed, any hours to work must be wondering why some workers are doing so much for free.”