Unpaid Overtime Hours Research Articles

Lower monetary returns for that many overtime hours? Forget it!

This study uses the Statistics Canada Workplace and Employee Survey (WES) to test gender earnings disparities for management and professional employees who work hours in excess of the full-time weekly standard. The hypothesis is that lower unpaid overtime hours for women leads to a lower overall earnings profile compared to men, despite the achievement of relatively high labour market status. A rat race theory is advanced, which proposes that the majority of women face discrimination in their attempts to compete with men in the labour market based on overtime hours. The econometric analysis, which considers both supply-side and demand-side causal variables, confirms that women's hours over and above the standard workweek significantly influence earnings. However, a unique decomposition technique reveals that men clearly have a more favorable pay structure on the higher echelons of the labour market, while women are forced into inefficiently excessive hours.

Many doctors work hours of unpaid overtime

Many doctors work hours of unpaid overtime

‘How Many Hours Do You Usually Work?’

This article reviews how working hours are asked for in 26 large-scale surveys in six countries plus the European Union. Four dimensions of working time were investigated, notably number of working hours, timing of work, predictability and control over hours, and commuting time. Although almost all questionnaires ask for hours worked, the terminology varies greatly. In only half of the cases a reference period is taken into account and in half the reasons for working more/less in the survey week than usual are asked for. Contractual hours are hardly asked for and so are paid and unpaid overtime hours. The timing of work is asked for in a minority of the questionnaires, and predictability and control over working hours is also not a major issue. The incidence of an on-call contract is the most likely proxy for predictability.