Unpaid overtime threatening productivity, report warns
Requirements for employees to work unpaid overtime are posing a “huge problem” for staff retention and threatening productivity, a recent report has found.
A survey by recruitment firm, Hays, found that employees were increasingly looking to change jobs in search of a better work/life balance.
The survey found that one in three employees worked overtime in the last 12 months. Nearly two thirds (65%) of the 2500 workers surveyed said that the overtime they worked was unpaid.
Of the businesses where employees worked overtime, 40% said they were routinely working an extra 5 hours a week.
“It’s been slowly progressing over the past four years,” a Hays spokesperson was quoted as saying, “and [it] is starting to impact on people and they’re ready to change organisations.”
“I think there will come a time .where productivity will be negatively impacted .and we’re now at a tipping point.”
Unpaid overtime tends to be a bigger problem in less unionised areas of the economy and at the professional/managerial levels of the workforce, especially in the private sector.
But employers everywhere will be willing to squeeze extra time out of their workforce if they think they can get away with it.
Any such attempts to get CWU members to work unpaid overtime should be reported immediately to the relevant state branch of the union.
Source: Australian Financial Review
