The “nine-to-five” has long been a catch-all term for the average office job – potentially uninspiring but reassuringly regular. But today, it seems decidedly retro. I’m in my thirties, and very few people I know work those hours – with most of us accepting that nine to six, or eight to five, is the time required to get your job done.
According to surveys, working hours are actually decreasing – an average full-time worker spends 36.6 hours weekly at work according to the latest Office of National Statistics’ Labour Force Survey – which equals 9 to 5.02 with a halfhour lunch break, or 5.32 with an hour.
But it doesn’t feel that way to many, says Afzal Rahman, policy officer for the Trade Union Congress. “The long-term trend is that people are working less hours… but there’s this feeling that despite this, we are working longer, more intense days.”
British workers have always put in longer days than most – prior to the pandemic, we worked the most hours in the EU, working 2.5 weeks more a year than the EU average. (Greece are now the proud record holders, clocking in at 39.8 hours a week). A major cause is that overtime is endemic in the UK.
A 2024 survey found that more than half (51 per cent) of UK workers regularly exceed contracted hours, with 17 per cent work beyond two hours of overtime a day. According to the TUC, 3.8 million people did unpaid overtime in 2023 (an average of 7.2 unpaid hours a week).
You’d think that the post-Covid shift to remote and flexible working would have improved things, but this trend has continued. For those whose work moved to being solely based from home, 46 per cent reported working between 1 to 10 hours more than their contracted working hours.
Meanwhile, work intensification, where the amount of effort required by workers within the same period of time increases, is a growing problem. According to the TUC, a majority of workers (55 percent) feel that work is getting more intense over time and three out of five (61 percent) workers polled felt exhausted at the end of each day.
Christina, 31, is contracted to work 35 hours a week in the private social sector, but averages between 42 and 45 hours a week. “It’s a combination of the business of my job and the culture of the organisation. In the office, people were regularly staying late, so it felt like an implicit expectation.”
She’s considering moving to compressed hours (a nine-day fortnight working her current hours) but is anxious about getting everything done. “I don’t see how I can do [compressed hours] without doing less, and I think that’s something I’ve got to come to terms with.”
Overwork is most acute in sectors like education and public healthcare. Despite being contracted to work a maximum of 48 hours a week, NHS surgical trainee Helen, 30, says she regularly clocks in over 50 hour weeks.
“On a typical day of operations you’d come in an hour early to prep, consent patients and brief in theatres, and often leave late if operations overrun,” she explains.
“When on call or on nights you usually don’t have to come in early, but handing over to the next team at the end of the day can take up to an hour depending on interruptions, complexity of patients. That could end up with an extra four to five hours of unpaid overtime a week.”
She works these hours because she has a duty of care for patient safety. “I want to be a good surgeon and care about my patients, and have accepted coming in early and leaving late is a necessity. But being financially compensated for this properly would be ideal.”
Declan, 28, is a maths teacher at a state academy. He echoes that though he’s contracted for about 32.5 hours a week, he says he averages at least 55-hour weeks. “I am at work before 8am and I regularly work until 9pm, often until 11pm, and I typically work at least one day on the weekend.”
He does this, like Helen, because otherwise “things wouldn’t get done”. He only gets three hours a week for Planning, Preparation and Assessment (PPA) – which, he says “is simply not enough time to plan to teach good lessons that suit the needs of the large classes in front of me, nor meet marking demands.”
Overwork is not limited to the public sector in the UK. Afzal points to shift workers having their own sign of expanding work time. “In shift work and hourly paid work, there will be people who are not getting paid for arriving early to set up, leaving after they closed up, and so on. There’ll be hours in there that people might not record as working time or their employer won’t, but those hours matter as well.”
The combined forces of untracked overtime and work intensification are pushing British workers far beyond what the Labour Force Survey suggests.
Dr Lefteris Kretsos is an expert in the political economy of working time at Brunel University. He explains that a major reason why we’re working longer hours is the decimation of trade unions.
“Working time is kind of a lost battle for working people, for communities, as the main agent of change in working hours is trade unions.” He points to Margaret Thatcher’s demolition of the trade union movement (union membership in 2023 is at 6.4 million, compared to over 12 million as Thatcher became prime minister in 1979).
Without the support of unions, workers are unable to set clear boundaries in a rapidly advancing technological environment. The advent of remote working has made it harder to define when you are “on” or “off”. There is no legal obligation for UK companies to pay for overtime, and there is now less union power to negotiate for it – more employees work unpaid overtime (49 per cent) than paid (23 per cent). The gig economy has proliferated with limited regulation. And the technological advances that were meant to make work easier have enabled work to get more intense.
Long hours and intensive working practices can have a significant impact on health. Working 55 or more hours per week is associated with an estimated 35 per cent higher risk of stroke and 17 per cent higher risk of dying from ischemic heart disease compared to working 35-40 hours a week.
“All studies indicate that long working hours means increased stress, mental health issues, depression, anxiety,” Dr Kretsos says. “The vast majority of sick absences in the UK have to do with stress-related and depression symptoms that, in many cases, have to do with excessive long hours or working in unsocial hours.” And none of this extra work is actually resulting in anything: the UK’s productivity is ranked well below the US and France, with little signs of improvement.
It’s little wonder, then, that increasing numbers of workers are pursuing self-employment or requesting to work go part time. The Government wants to strengthen workers’ rights to doing reduced hours, for example a four-day week.
But Dr Kretsos says “a four-day working week can be a progressive measure, but in my view it’s not enough – we need a universal regulation that reduces working hours, creates a shorter working week (without reducing pay) that will provide everyone more space.”
Afzal argues that strengthening and normalising trade unions would also lead to better working conditions for all. Both he and Dr Kretsos point to Labour’s proposed “right to disconnect” as a step in the right direction. But far more needs to be done to steer us towards Brits actually enjoying the benefits of a nine-to-five job.
