Almost 60 per cent of Australians who work overtime say it stops them from exercising while a third believe it prevents them from eating healthy meal.
AUSTRALIANS want to spend less time at work, prompting a push for caps to be put on the working week.
More than half of all full-time workers would prefer to work fewer hours to manage their work-life balance.
They were the findings of a survey commissioned by independent think tank The Australia Institute, which quizzed 1700 people across the nation.
More than 60 percent of people working overtime say it limits their time for spending quality time with their families, and also found that Australians’ work hours are impacting their health.
Courier Mail found that overtime stops 58 per cent of workers from exercising, while long hours prevent more than one in three (35 per cent) from eating healthy meals.
The Australia Institute’s Executive Director Dr Richard Denniss said the findings tip cold water over claims that the nation has one of the most flexible labour markets in the world.
“Millions of Australians are unhappy with their hours of work. The result is unnecessarily stressful family lives, unproductive work lives and higher than necessary rates of unemployment.
“Tackling this problem will require change on a range of fronts. Governments need to follow the European lead and introduce caps on hours.
“Employers need to reduce their reliance on unpaid overtime and employees need to pay more attention to the number of hours they spend in the workplace and talk to both their colleagues and their managers about their desired hours of work,” Dr Denniss told Courier Mail.
The institute estimates bringing the standard working week down to 30 to 35 hours would create better work/life balance and in turn create nearly 400,000 extra full-time jobs for the unemployed and under-employed.
Recent research by the institute found Australians work more than two billion hours of unpaid overtime a year, a $72 billion gift to their employers.
A typical full-time employee is working 70 minutes of unpaid overtime a day, which equates to 33 eight-hour days per year, or six-and-a-half standard working weeks.
Across the workforce, the 2.1 billion hours of unpaid overtime represented 6 per cent free labour for the economy.
Bankwest’s Working Times report found that farmers work the longest hours in Australia averaging 60 hours a week, followed by miners. Government employees worked the fewest full-time hours.
ButterflyPlum
November 11th, 2010 at 11:32 pm
[...] who don’t work enough, the Australia Institute is worried about people who work too much. As ButterflyPlum reports, a survey commissioned by the institute found that: "More than half of all full-time workers [...]