At the moment, British people are facing stagnant wages, coupled with high inflation. Such a squeeze on real income is driving some to rely on credit to simply maintain their living standards.
British employees work more than 10 hours overtime every week on average, clocking up 469 hours of extra work a year.
Just under six in 10 of those workers will simply not get paid for those additional hours.
Such unpaid work undeniably costs employees. Research from the TUC shows that workers gave away more than £31bn worth of work last year. That extra, unpaid work was worth an average of £6,265 per employee, the trades union estimated.
And the TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady has previously warned that it’s the cost of living compared with wages that is driving consumers into debt, saying: “The surge in household debt is putting the economy in the danger zone. We’ve got this problem because wages haven’t recovered. Credit cards and payday loans are helping to prop up household spending for now, but millions of families are running on empty.”
Consumer debt is nearing levels last seen in 2008 at the time of the downturn and Jonathan Davidson, executive director of supervision for retail and authorisations at the Financial Conduct Authority, recently warned that many households are “in too deep”.
So wages are depressed and debt continues to rise, yet many workers still feel under pressure to routinely work for free for their employers. For some employees who earn either the minimum wage or close to it, those additional hours actually take their average rate below the minimum pay and that is against the law.
Last year, Sainsbury’s “corrected” hundreds of payments made to Argos employees after taking over the high street chain. It stated that many had been underpaid as a result of additional time demanded at work and made extra payments to the workers involved. For example, staff were required to attend unpaid briefings before their shifts and to wait for security checks before they could leave. The time added up and meant their average pay was below minimum wage.
Under the new auto-enrolment workplace pension scheme, employers have to pay 1 per cent of their worker’s salary into a pension, if that is matched by the worker. That rises to 2 per cent from 5 April. So if you are working an extra £6,264-worth of free time, then your employer isn’t just skipping paying that rate, it’s also avoiding paying more than £60 into your pension, rising to £125 a year from next month.
While many of us work additional hours to our contracts, the share of employees actually being paid for their extra work has fallen from 17 per cent in 1997 to just 10 per cent last year.
The Resolution Foundation has shown that even those who are paid for their extra hours are being paid less; with the number of overtime workers paid “time and a half” falling from 25 per cent 10 years ago to 20 per cent today.
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