Long Hours Damage Family Life

By TUC

Family life is being damaged by long hours working, so the individual opt-out allowing parents to work over 48 hours a week must be abolished, a new report from the TUC and the charity Working Families has concluded.

More time for families: tackling the long hours crisis in UK workplaces warns that six years after the Working Time Directive was introduced to limit the working week, there are still more employees working over long hours than there were in 1992.

In the UK employees can only work over 48 hours if they sign an opt-out, but many long hours workers are never asked or are forced to do so. A survey for the report found more than four in ten (44 per cent) of the respondents who were working full-time said they regularly had to work more than 48 hours a week, and nine out of ten (90 per cent) of all the parents felt that these kind of excessive hours were harmful to families.

In an attempt to work more child-friendly hours, almost eight in ten of the parents (79 per cent) had asked their employers if they could work flexibly, yet only 40 per cent of these parents were aware that they had a legal right to ask to change their hours. Just over four in ten (43 per cent) of the requests to work flexibly were successful, a quarter (25 per cent) were altered in some way before being agreed, and almost a third (32 per cent) of the requests were rejected by employers.

Working Families chief executive Sarah Jackson said: 'We know that parents are struggling to find a balance between work and family life even on a 35 hour week... Employees need the right to say no to long hours working, and employers need to recognize how much better it is for business to work smarter, not longer.'