When Ruby started working as a lawyer in Sydney for a large private practice firm, she was clocking up extremely long hours.
She would often eat lunch at her desk just to get the work done, and it wasn't uncommon for her to start work at 7:30am and work through until 10 or 11pm.
"I was the most anxious I have ever been in my life during that time. I didn't like who I was, and I think that was a function of sleep deprivation, to be honest," she tells ABC RN's This Working Life.
Since then Ruby has left that private practice. She works in a different area of law, working standard full-time hours. Now she says she can see that it was never reasonable to be expected to function for extended periods of time without getting more than four hours of sleep.
Doing 'excessive hours'
Like Ruby, there are still plenty of employees across Australia who are being overworked.
Eliza Littleton is a senior economist at the Australia Institute's Centre for Future Work. She says Australians often do more paid overtime than workers in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
According to an OECD survey, 13 per cent of employees in Australia work very long hours, which is above the OECD average. And our work-life balance is worse than many other countries.
"So that's pretty bad. We're doing a lot of very long or excessive hours compared to a lot of other very comparable countries," Littleton says.
Last year, she researched the amount of unpaid overtime Australians undertook each week, and the results weren't uplifting.
"On average, workers put in four hours and 20 minutes of unpaid overtime per week. It is a very frequent and prevalent issue in Australia," she says.
Across the year, that works out to be six weeks of unpaid overtime on average. And no particular sector is immune, she adds.
"Unpaid overtime happens for all types of workers in all industries and occupations. It's an issue for everyone," she says.
Workload issues and workplace culture are among the top reasons for people doing overtime, Littleton explains.
"We can all relate to having too much work and having to stay back to finish it," she says.
"Also staff shortages, particularly with people taking sick leave during COVID, can result in other workers having to fill the gaps at work.
"Then there are things like the expectations of managers. So again, if there's a workplace culture where lots of people are doing unpaid overtime, it's really hard to push back against that."
Why a 38-hour work week?
What's deemed as reasonable working hours is viewed on a case-by-case basis, but the Fair Work Act provides a good reference point.
The act questions whether there could be a risk to an employee's health and safety if they were to work additional hours. It also evaluates a person's personal circumstances, such as family responsibilities and having young children. And it takes into account project deadlines, penalties, bonuses and the seniority and level of responsibility of a position.
The act states that the ordinary number of hours a full-time employee is expected to work per week is 38 hours.
But where did this number come from?
Barrister Kate Eastman says the history of the 38-hour work week in Australia can be traced back to Victorian stonemasons in the mid-19th century. In 1856, stonemasons walked off the job in protest in Melbourne, calling for reduced working hours.
"They really said that their health and safety were being jeopardised by requiring them to work long hours. And so they made industrial demands and threatened to go on strike if their employers did not agree to an industry-wide standard of 38 hours a week, or in some cases 40 hours a week," Eastman says.
And since 1983, when it was officially introduced, the 38-hour work week continues to be reflected in the act.
The impact of time poverty
Harvard Business School assistant professor and author Dr Ashley Whillans studies time poverty. That's the psychological feeling of having too many things to do in a day and not enough time to complete them.
She says about 80 per cent of working adults report feeling time poor.
"Many people say that the number one reason they can't exercise or eat as healthily as they would like to is that they don't have enough hours in the day to prepare healthy meals or to get on the treadmill," she says.
"So time poverty can have really negative consequences for our physical health or mental health when we're feeling completely overwhelmed."
Reflecting on her experience, Ruby is aware of the lasting impacts her former job had on her overall work-life balance.
"The hardest part was the relationships I lost with people because of all the late-night cancels on special occasions or catch ups with friends," she recalls.
"And eventually, you just stopped being invited because you don't feel like you can tell your boss that you need to leave, but your loved ones find it very hard to understand that.
"Some of the relationships that were a bit strained during that time have come back with more investment on my side.
"But there's a friend that I've had for a very long time, we still don't speak."
Dr Whillans would like to see more of a push for employees to disconnect and unplug from their work after scheduled hours, including not responding to work emails, virtual meetings or answering work-related calls.
"Because research does substantiate, from a correlational perspective, the idea that the most productive employees are also those who are the most likely to take their paid vacations," she says.
"Some of the most creative employees are those that are the most likely to take breaks and sabbaticals, paid time away from the office.
"So a lot of these conversations around reduced work week schedules, around the four-day work week, are meant to try to push against this cultural imperative of constant [responsiveness] and long hours and being always in the office as a way to signal your commitment, devotion, and ultimately, the value that you create for your organisation."
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