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 2018, 23 February was the day when the average person who does unpaid overtime finishes the unpaid days they do every year and starts earning for themselves. The TUC says over five million people at work in the UK regularly do unpaid overtime, giving their employers £31.2 billion of free work in just one year.


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).