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. On 2016 Work Your Proper Hours Day (February 2016), the TUC reported that in 2015 UK workers gave their bosses an astonishing £31.5 billion of unpaid overtime. More than five million people put in an average of 7.7 hours extra work a week in unpaid overtime in 2015. This would add up to £6,114 a year each if they were paid the average wage for those hours.


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).