NEU: Work Your Proper Hours Day – Teachers Top League Table for Unpaid Overtime

Friday, 1 March 2019 00:01

Commenting on data from the TUC to mark Work Your Proper Hours Day (1 March), showing that teachers do more unpaid overtime than any other workers, totalling 462 million hours per year, Kevin Courtney, Joint General Secretary of the National Education Union, said: “Year after year teachers top the TUC’s overtime league table. Even worse, teachers say many of the hours they are being expected to do aren’t even helpful to the children they teach....Request free trial

“Year after year teachers top the TUC’s overtime league table. Even worse, teachers say many of the hours they are being expected to do aren’t even helpful to the children they teach. Instead it is time spent evidencing the work they are doing. With workload going up and real terms pay going down it is no surprise that we are facing such problems with recruiting new teachers and keeping the ones we’ve got.”

ENDS

Editor’s note:

Today is the TUC’s 15th annual Work Your Proper Hours Day, marking the fact that the average worker doing unpaid overtime has effectively worked the year so far for free.

The following tables derive from the TUC’s own press release:

Table 1 – teachers and education professionals - unpaid overtime by education sector

	Pre-school	Primary	Secondary	Higher education	Other education
Number working unpaid overtime	17,152	272,134	300,072	88,033	33,171
Total employees	35,199	479,687	489,078	227,790	81,187
% working unpaid overtime	48.7	56.7	61.4	38.2	40.9
Total weekly hours unpaid overtime	109,152	3,540,134	3,826,989	849,461	346,135
Total annual hours unpaid overtime	5,676,000	184,087,000	199,003,000	44,172,000	17,999,000
Average weekly hours unpaid overtime	6.4	13.0	12.8	9.8	10.4

Source: LFS 2018 Q3.

Table 2 – unpaid overtime for occupations with longest average unpaid hours

Occupation	Number employees working unpaid overtime	Per cent working unpaid overtime	Average unpaid hours
Teaching and educational professionals	735,000	52.5%	12.1
Chief Executive	41,000	39.5%	11.4%
Legal professionals	69,000	42.5%	10.2
Hospitality and catering managers	40,000	17.6%	9.7
Functional managers*	374,000	40.4%	9.2
Production managers	133,000	32.1%	8.9
Managers in retail and leisure		88,000		32.7%	8.9
Finance institution managers		35,000		42.3%	8.9
Senior officers in the protective services		15,000		28.4%	8.7
Welfare professionals	50,000	31.3%	8.5

Source: the TUC’s analysis used unpublished ONS data from the Labour Force Survey (July-September 2018) and the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (2018)

*Functional managers: financial managers, marketing and sales directors, purchasing managers, advertising and public relations directors, human resource managers, IT managers.