TUC says more older staff working unpaid

[dipsydoodle]

A quarter of a million more people aged in their late 50s and early 60s are now working unpaid overtime than were a decade ago, a report says.

The TUC said the rise was out of line with much of the working population where unpaid overtime had fallen.

It said this reflected people working past normal retirement amid concerns about income in later life.

The trade union organisation said it had found that 660,000 workers in this age group put in unpaid hours in 2011.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-17150380

[Owlet]

1. What is one supposed to make of this?

1. Dedicated older workers don't know when to go home?

2. Selfish older workers denying younger ones jobs by working unpaid overtime?

3. TUC laying the groundwork for mandatory overtime pay beyond normal working hours?

All of the above?

[geckosfeet]

2. You forgot -

salaried workers being asked to work longer hours to finish work, with the unspoken threat of job loss if they don't.

[Owlet]

3. I thought about that..

The article at the link is silent on that issue, and for some reason I got the impression that it was talking about hourly workers. Heck, salaried folks where I used to be employed regularly stayed beyond the time when hourly workers went home. There was no threat of job loss, and the article says nothing about anything like that, as it no doubt would have since it quoted the TUC extensively.

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. On the contrary, I think there's a lot of that implied in the article

There's a lot about a long-hours culture, and "it said this reflected people working past normal retirement amid concerns about income in later life." They are worried that if they don't put in extra unpaid hours, they will be told they must leave at the retirement age (because they employers know they can get younger workers to work unpaid overtime), or even made redundant before then.

[djean111]

4. More like

older workers being threatened with job loss if they don't put in unpaid time. I don't know if you noticed, but there is a growing movement to have people work beyond retirement years. It is not selfish to want to earn a living.
I believe Wal-Mart does the same unpaid overtime here in America.

[TreasonousBastard]

5. This is news? Back in the 80s I noticed the older workers...

blew out at exactly 5PM. We were mostly professional/managerial/exempt workers and somehow work was paced so it got done by then. Some of us young turks stayed late to finish special projects-- or, more likely, just weren't that good at pacing the work. The theory was that if work increased we get more people.

Then I noticed that we never got more people, just more demands on our "free" time. Eventually it would all work out, we were told.

It never worked out, though, and long after I got out of the corporate world I saw 60-80 hour weeks as common. Being exempt employees, nobody ever got paid for that extra time.

[enlightenment]

7. Same story here.

I bailed in the late 80s, when my workweek reached an average 80 hours. It was brutal. I was salaried, but did receive some overtime for about a third of the overtime hours I worked.

They wouldn't have fired me for refusing, but they would have found many other ways to get me to leave - or simply denied me any opportunity for advancement. I can certainly see where older workers may be responding to threats, both real and implied, that they do the extra hours - or else.