While the nature of work has undergone significant changes and expanded economic opportunities, the labour market impacts have been accelerated by work arrangements that include remote work, gig work, freelancing, fly-in-fly-out work and a heightened dependence on digital technologies. These transformations have concurrently exacerbated labour force challenges. First, the accelerated uptake of digital transformation has necessitated new skills, demanded increased efficiency and intensified performativity pressures. Secondly, while gig and freelance work have afforded flexibility, this has come at the cost of job insecurity and a loss of ‘traditional’ employment benefits that include forfeiture of paid sick leave, loss of retirement (superannuation) contributions and reduced social and economic security that long-term employment affords. Third, the increased reliance on digital technologies has led to increased working hours for workers and sectoral employment.
Several factors have contributed to increased work time. For instance, remote work has blurred the boundaries or lines that separate work and personal life. Digital technologies have increased the expectations of employee availability and constant connectivity. Gig work has accelerated job insecurity leading to pressures for long working hours as a demonstration of commitment to work and economic survival.
In turn, longer working hours can be looked at from two critical but concerning perspectives. First is the impact of longer working time on workers’ health and safety and the deterioration of mental wellbeing. Flexible work arrangements and remote work have been positively associated with increased job satisfaction, work safety and psychological wellbeing. While the global pandemic accelerated remote work arrangements, there were reports of increased work hours and work intensification. The World Health Organization’s global comparative analyses attributed heart disease and stroke to longer working hours, although there is still limited evidence of mental health effects. This is significant because protection from overwork and the resultant physical and psychological health consequences extend beyond individual culpability to state responsibility. There is an ongoing struggle between the incongruence of work time and employer/workplace demands, and increased deteriorating mental wellbeing and mental ill-health costs. In Australia, the costs of workplace mental ill-health were estimated to be $12.8 billion in 2015–2016.
Second is the need to regulate the harmful effects of long working hours. For example, in Australia, despite existing work health and safety legislation’s provisions for mental health safety under the broader definition of health, in 2020, a Productivity Commission inquiry into mental health (re)emphasised the employer’s obligations to prevent the negative health impacts of overwork (paid or unpaid). In tandem with state-based workplace health and safety regulation is the Federal Industrial Relations legislation (Fair Work Act, 2009) which introduced a 38-hour working week in 1983 but also allowed for managers’ prerogative in deciding on ‘reasonable additional hours’. Reasonable working time assumes that all workers can be requested to undertake some work time that exceeds the 38-hour stipulation, but there is no maximum limit.
In our research, we examined two decades of data between 2001 to 2020 from the Australian Household, Labour and Income survey to see how many additional work hours per week were considered to be ‘reasonable’ and if these additional hours of work impacted workers’ mental health scores. We assessed the impact of labour regulatory changes on work hours by sector, age, gender, employment contracts and mental health reports. Work time was grouped into six categories, with the first category (35–38 working hours/week) being used as the reference group in the modelling. Mental health scores were based on the SF-6D mental health dimension scores and ranged between 0 and 100 (with 0 indicating the lowest and 100 the best mental health).
Our findings show that in comparison to the reference group, workers who worked between 49 and 53 hours per week had a negative 4.3 decline in their mental health score, while those who worked for more than 60 hours per week had negative 7.04 units lower for every additional work hour. This suggests that notwithstanding the regulatory 38 hours per week of work, ‘reasonable additional hours’ does result in lower mental health outcomes for workers.
Despite the growth of ‘work availability creep’ and ‘staying digitally connected to work’, regulatory amendments to the ‘reasonable additional hours’ clause remain muted. Instead, lengthy working time has been clustered under a raft of psychosocial hazards in work health and safety guidelines. In more recent collective agreements, trade unions have negotiated to ‘regulate’ working time through the inclusion of clauses that give workers the right to disconnect from electronic communications during leave periods and weekends. It is too early to tell the effects of the collective agreement clauses. Perhaps it is time for a test case to be heard by the Australian labour tribunal.
Kantha Dayaram is an Associate Professor at Curtin University, Australia. Hasnat Ahmad is a Research Fellow at University of Tasmania, Australia.
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