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. According to TUC event planner Robert Holdsworth, “the TUC first organised the campaign in response to stories about the cost of people taking ‘sickies’. This implied people were skiving, so we decided to turn the issue on its head and celebrate how committed employees are”. Over five million people at work in the UK regularly do unpaid overtime and last year, the TUC found that employees across the UK worked nearly two billion unpaid hours, worth over £29bn to the economy. Employers are also 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).