Work Your Proper Hours Day

Work your Proper Hours Day is an annual TUC campaign highlighting the amount of unpaid overtime by Britain’s workers, and emphasising the risk to workers’ health of long hours. In 2013, one in five employees across the UK regularly worked unpaid overtime, worth over £28 billion to the economy. Employers are bound by an implied contractual duty not to require that employees work such long hours as to damage their health (Johnstone v Bloomsbury Health Authority [1991] IRLR 118).

The TUC published figures on the professions doing the most unpaid overtime, based on statistics from the Labour Force Survey, to coincide with the 2014 Work your Proper Hours Day. The figures revealed that teachers and education professionals did the most unpaid overtime (54%), averaging 12 hours per week.

In February 2014, The Department for Education released the outcome of its Teachers’ workload diary survey 2013. The results showed that on average a primary school teacher was working nearly 60 hours per week, secondary heads 63 hours and the average secondary teacher was working nearly 56 hours a week. The findings were condemned by teaching unions.

The survey is available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/285941/DFE-RR316.pdf.