48 hour employees under pressure?

A new survey conducted by Gallup for the Today programme has found that 20% of employees felt pressurised into signing waivers under the Working Time Regulations.

The 48-hour limitation was set up to regulate the time put in by employees and has caused widely divided opinions in the work environment.
The UK has the longest working hours in Europe, according to the TUC. It is also estimated that 40 million working days are lost in the UK due to stress, which according to experts, can be directly related to pressure at work.

Professor Carey Cooper, a leading stress specialist from the University of Science and Technology at Manchester, believes that consistently long working hours will damage health.

Another recent survey of over 600 employees found that 64% felt they were affected by workplace stress. 56% said they had lost sleep as a result, and 26% had fallen ill.

The results from the Gallup poll may give cause for concern, especially with the Government looking to relax the regulations further by allowing more opt-outs. The TUC believes this would mean the protection the EU Directive intended to provide would be circumvented.

TUC general secretary John Monk noted: "We get a lot of information through the unions and from Citizens Advice Bureaux about workers who complain they are being pressurised by their employers directly or just by the culture of a particular workplace."

Julie Crisp