SAFETY SATURDAY: OVERTIME

I hated to pay overtime. I hated it. I shouldn't say this, but I wouldn't pay it.

 - Donald Trump

Workers attend to their jobs for a set amount of time during the day, for a set amount of time during the week. This amount of time is referred to as an employee’s ordinary hours (Fair Work Ombudsman, n.d.a) and is determined by an employee’s agreement that set out the maximum hours that can be worked in a day, the minimum hours that must be worked, and the hours of that work. The times within ordinary hours are worked are referred to as the spread of hours, and time spent working outside of the ordinary hours is referred to as overtime (Fair Work Ombudsman, n.d.b.). Work done during overtime, in addition to or outside of an employee’s normal spread of hours, attracts overtime rates. Employers can ask employees to work for longer than their weekly hours if those additional hours are reasonable, and employees can refuse to work those hours if the demands are unreasonable. In Australia, as of August 2024, 32% of surveyed employed workers reported usually working extra hours or overtime (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2024), and unpaid overtime hours amounted to 10.9% of all total paid working hours (Australia Institute Center for Future Work, 2024). Where surveyed, workers in full-time arrangements reported the highest amount of unpaid overtime per week, workers in education reported the highest amount of unpaid overtime across surveyed sectors,and the number of unpaid overtime hours appeared to increase in proportion to increasing annual income up to the $110,000 - $130,000 per annum pay bracket (Unions New South Wales, 2024). The same report indicates that workers typically believe that workplaces are dependent on unpaid overtime to function, and 51% report no formal overtime policy. It should be noted that overtime does not only apply when work is done outside of work hours - additional and excess work can be done through lunch breaks, where workers start ahead of and finish after their assigned shift times, or take work home to put in extra hours on the weekend (Canberra Times, 2024). Where workers can work from home, the problem may be worsened; performance enhancing flexible working arrangements may increase the number of unpaid overtime hours worked per week (Chung & Van der Horst, 2020). In Australia, the introduction of right-to-disconnect laws in August 2024 resulted in a 33% reduction in the amount of unpaid work completed by Australians working remotely (Australian Council of Trade Unions, 2025). Before the laws were introduced, the largest burden of unpaid hours were worked by workers in the 18-29 year old cohort.

Working overtime is not the same as working for an extended shift. While overtime refers to work that is done in addition to the normal working hours of a workday, within scheduled breaks, before and after shifts, or outside of normal working conditions, an extended shift is a spread of working hours longer than 8 hours (Caruso et. al., 2004). Both overtime and extended shifts expose workers to health-degrading hazards as a consequence of fatigue, altered working hours, and variable working arrangements. However, while overtime work can result in workers working for longer periods than normal, and extended shifts may become overtime if their start and finish times are not controlled, the nature, incidence, effect, and prevention of risks related to overtime will be examined here as a matter of focus. While working for at least 12 hours per is found to be associated with a 37% increased hazard rate, working for at least 60 hours a week is associated with a 23% increased hazard rate, and jobs with overtime work were associated with a 61% higher injury hazard rate compared with jobs without overtime obligations (Dembe et. al., 2005; De Castro, et. al., 2010). Investigation has also identified an increased risk of heart disease in those job roles where overtime is used (Persaud & Williams, 2017). Where workers need to work overtime, this increases their time at work. Consequently, a worker’s exposure to hazards such as chemicals, noise, vibration, as well as psychosocial exposures including stress and cognitive load increase as well. Work and labour are activities which, by virtue of their organisation in shifts and rotations, expose workers to doses of stressors in controlled environments as a consequence of their construction and arrangement. For simple example, if a worker’s job is sedentary, overtime work increases that dose of sedentary activity, which also decreases dynamic physical activity as a whole. The hazard effect of overtime may be magnified where workers are working in nonstandard shifts or where they are already working in hazardous environments (Dembe et. al., 2008). This can have flow-on effects that impact lifestyle in addition to those risks posed by sustained psychological activation (Taris et. al., 2011). The relationship between overtime exposure as well as adverse health outcomes is further affected by job strain - jobs which impose high strain on workers are implicated in the development of maladaptive health behaviours in workers, including increased alcohol consumption, smoking, and changed sleep patterns (Heikkilä, 2020). Overtime work is also strongly associated with the incidence of depressive disorder in workers working for more than sixty hours per week, when adjusted for age, lifestyle factors, sociodemographic and work-related characteristics (Kato et. al., 2014). These findings are consistent where overtime results in excess concentrations of work completed during a week or over a month (Kikuchi et. al., 2020), which may be due to the fact that workers who work longer hours have fewer opportunities and less time to recover when off shift (Rabenu & Aharoni-Goldenberg, 2017). These outcomes may be further concentrated by the relative intensity of work. Work intensification describes an increase in the concentration of tasks a worker needs to complete within their shift, either due to an increase in the number of tasks, a decrease in the amount of time needed to complete those tasks, or a combination of both (Paškvan, & Kubicek, 2017), and is an identified job stressor (Franke, 2015; Mauno et. al., 2023).

Overtime work increases the physical, mental, and emotional demands a worker must meet by extending the time in which that worker must meet those demands. In addition to the direct pathogenic effects of overtime, the indirect effects of overtime arise from the subtraction of free hours on the worker’s part. Workers working longer shifts have fewer free hours in the day (Arlinghaus et. al., 2019), meaning that their ability to recover from work-related tasks is impaired. Workers need to recover following periods of exertion so that they can meet the demands of life within and outside of work (Zijlstra & Cropley, 2013). For workers who do not work at home, the typical travel time is 3.2 hours per week commuting to and from a place of employment (The Melbourne Institute, 2024). Where work requires an overtime commitment from a worker, the commute time typically remains the same, and a worker does not have a reciprocal increase in their recovery time within a 24-hour period. Given the assessed proportion of workers who report regularly engaging in overtime is around 33%, it is then unsurprising that 32% of males and 38% of females reported feeling rushed or pressed for time (ABS, 2022). That the percentage proportion is higher in females may be owing to the fact that females complete more unpaid and caregiving work than males (Ferrant et. al., 2014), as well as the concentration of female workers in those industries that are more vulnerable to requiring overtime, such as education, caregiving, and hospitality. The combination of time-pressuring, overtime, and gender gradient may also go some way to explaining why female workers are represented twice as much as their male counterparts in the epidemiology of mental health conditions within the 2024 reporting year (Safe Work Australia, 2024). Overtime compromises worker health by compromising their sleep. Reduction of sleep as a consequence of overtime hours increases the risk of cardiovascular and coronary heart diseases (Heslop et. al., 2002), cardiovascular heart diseases (Chandola et. al., 2010), and diabetes as well as worker cognitive function (Rumble et. al., 2015). Specifically, when a worker is experiencing fatigue as a consequence of insufficient rest, their error rate and the consequent likelihood of experiencing an adverse outcome increases (Lerman et. al., 2012). Overtime increases worker fatigue by demanding worker resources and engagement during their working hours and depriving workers of the means to recuperate those resources in their off time. The knock-on effect of this deficit of hours is further magnified by the fact that worker personal and social demands do not change as a consequence of worker overtime obligations. A worker is still a human that needs to eat, entertain, and enrich themselves outside of their job role so as to replenish those capacities that allow them to make the most of their lives. Additionally, those self-same capacities, of thinking, action, endurance and engagement, are those capacities that are employed in the doing of work on a daily, weekly, and ongoing basis. The problem is equally pernicious where the overtime work infiltrates workers’ home lives. Workers in hybrid, remote, flexible, and distributed settings are able to do their work at distance using information and communication technologies, however the use of occupational technology in personal and non-occupational spaces increases strain on workers where work can spill over into family time if worker boundaries are improperly managed (Lazauskaite-Zabielske, et. al., 2022). That is not to say that the fault lies with the worker - the most common reported reasons for working outside of work hours was excessive work (41%), staff shortages (31%), and manager expectation (21%); workers also report fewer interruptions when working outside of work hours, and one-in-five reported working to enhance their career progression (The Australia Institute, 2024).  Four of these reasons for working overtime and outside of work hours have to do with organisational factors; failure to minimise the amount of work, failure to provide staff, inappropriate expectations and inappropriate organisation of work and cognitive environments to facilitate an interruption-free working spread of hours. 

Businesses and persons conducting business undertakings manage overtime by managing the occupational load imposed on workers. Overtime exposure may be formally protected through legal enshrinement of the rights of workers in their labour contracts and in national employment legislation - Governments should clearly recognise the importance of maintaining the health of workers because the productivity of the workforce is what sustains the development and enhancement of society and the economy (Wong et. al., 2019). Safe Work Australia provides guidance in the management of fatigue (2013), recommending that work schedules, job demands, and sleep be considered as points of intervention. Work schedules which limit the time workers can physically and mentally recover from work may cause fatigue, and the organisation of work should prioritise the standardisation of work within normal working hours, for normal durations, and with appropriate consideration of needed downtime (Stock & Deml, 2020). Where job remands require sustained attention, engagement, or activity for extended periods of time, those roles should be protected from intensification in terms of work demands and spillover into overtime so as to minimise the exposure of workers to undue uncontrolled or disproportionate fatigue. Given that worker perceived and experienced fatigue as a consequence of job demands is a subjectively measured and declared factor, consultation with the workforce to ensure that fatigue consequent to overtime and excessive overtime demands are not impacting the health and sustainability of the workforce is essential (SWA, 2022). Further to this, design and organisation of work-related factors at the origination phase should be considered in work design, to ensure decomposition, distribution, and delegation of work tasks to an appropriately informed, trained, instructed, and supervised workforce as part of workforce performance optimisation (SWA, 2015) and to protect workers from spilled over or excessive job demands. Additionally, given that workers are typically on the receiving end of job demands but require advocacy for their wellbeing and rights through vertical managerial channels (Parker & Wall, 1988), internal advocacy for and engagement with worker wellbeing and workforce entitlements should be undertaken on the part of the workers, either through internal channels or through representatives, all of which should be protected by robust legal assets and frameworks. Unfortunately, as time has continued, with the technologisation and transformation of working arrangements with communication technologies, Artificial Intelligence, and the integrated global market, legislative and organisational protection of worker rights and entitlements may play catch-up in comparison to the speed at which the labour market demands competition, capacity, and continuous engagement. 

The time in one day has been divided into 24-hours. Of those hours, they must be divided between work, rest, and leisure, all of which must be attended. So many hours must a person work, so many hours must they take their rest, so many hours must they contemplate, and so many hours must they sport themselves. For all of this, a person must also work, to provide themselves with the resources they need to meet the demands of the life they live in a sustainable manner by engaging in a contractual exchange of time and effort for a monetary reward. The problem is when the demands of that exchange are increased in response to circumstances with which the business is not prepared to contend, and the consequence of this is that the worker must leverage their personal resources in greater measure, trading their energy, their willpower, and that most sacred of things, their time. The organisation of work tasks, work environments, and work systems must be arranged so as to protect a worker from un-necessary risks to their life and health, and so too to protect their time and those other finite resources and capital that they have in their life. Life is not lived at work. Life is lived at play, at leisure, at home, among family, friends, and good things. Work should only ever be undertaken in the support of access to and perpetuation of the dignity of human life, never in service to the work, and never in conflict with the life that is traded so that the work can exist. 

None of this information constitutes medical, legal, occupational health and safety, best guidance, standard, or other guidance, instruction, or prescription. 

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