Long Working Hours in Australia: Working Time Regulation and Employer Pressure

By Iain Campbell

In Australia, the proportion of full-time employees engaged in long hours, often very long hours, of paid work is relatively large and has been growing larger over the past two decades.

This article begins by examining the proportion of workers engaged in long hours, trends in long hours and selected characteristics of the long hours labour force. It then links this to discussion of overtime and in particular to the prominence of unpaid overtime. The growth in unpaid overtime seems to be the main component of the increase in the proportion of full-time employees working long hours.

In seeking to explain these developments, Campbell describes the framework of formal working time regulation and identifies several channels along which trends in long hours, whether based on paid or unpaid overtime, are able to flow. He them looks at the way in which opportunities opened up by the deficiencies in regulation are taken up by employees and employers. The key factor in explaining the development of long hours in Australia seems to clearly be employer pressure.

(Economic and Labour Relations Review; vol. 17, no. 2, April 2007. pp37-68)