Working all the time? 300 Kiwis claim to work 168 hours a week

Almost 70,000 New Zealanders said they worked 60 hours a week. Photo / 123rf

By Susan Edmunds of RNZ

It’s time for New Zealanders to work fewer hours, one academic says – as the Census reveals we work less than we used to.

Census data shows that New Zealanders work, on average, 37.2 hours per week.

That is down from 38.1 hours in 2013, and roughly the same as the last census.

But 297 people said they worked 168 hours a week – that is, every hour of the day.

Work is defined as for pay, profit or payment in kind, or contributing directly the operation of a business, farm or professional practice operated by a relative, including a job or business that the person was temporarily absent from.

In 2018, 273 people said they worked all the time, but in 2013 it was 474.

There were a total of 2.6 million people who reported work in the Census.

Almost a million people said they worked 40 hours a week, 186,450 said they worked 50 and 69,192 said they worked 60 hours a week.

Almost 20,000 said they worked 70 hours a week and 9201 said they worked 80 hours.

Dr Paula O’Kane – from the Otago University department of management – said many of the people who reported working all the time were probably self-employed in on-call situations.

“They may see themselves working 24/7 because they could be called out at any point in time. They don’t have the protections that a larger business would offer, or the public sector would, around the amount of on-call they can have.

“While they’re probably not working 24/7 it’s probably that on-call nature of a small, self-employed organisation that makes them self-report as working 24/7.”

She said people in live-in caregiving roles could also report working all the time. “We’ve got a lot of movement in the disability sector to recognise carers who are caring for children, particularly adult children and high-needs adult children, recognition of them being paid -that’s changed a lot from 2013.”

O’Kane said the people reporting 168 hours a week of work were likely to be in more vulnerable employment situations. “That’s the scary part isn’t it.”

Massy University’s Jarrod Haar said it could reflect home carers who felt they were working all the time.

“They can’t really be but that might be a really sad group of society who feel like work never ends. They’re not CEOs earning $2 million, that’s the trouble. It’ll be a home-carer earning $52,000. And we’d all be embarrassed to think they do 12- to 14-hour days then get up in the night to look after somebody, six or seven days a week.”

O’Kane said the drop in hours worked overall could reflect more part-time workers, but she said it was significant given the size of the population had increased notably over the period since 2013.

“I would like to see the number of hours worked go down. We spend a lot of time talking about those input measures, the hours worked, but that doesn’t relate to productivity. We have this well-publicised low productivity per hours worked. If we worked fewer hours we could see more productivity.”

She said people should think about working more productive hours rather than more hours.

O’Kane – who is from Ireland – said it was more common there to think about working to get a job done rather than to clock in a certain number of hours.

“The output is way more important than the hours you spend working. If we could get people into more of those working models and get more productivity in shorter hours we could have better work-life balance, better well-being for individual employees and better production potentially, too.”

Haar agreed New Zealand needed to change its way of thinking about hours worked and focus on efficiency. Too many workers were stuck in hours of unnecessary meetings, he said, which was reflected in the fact that most people felt they were at least as productive, if not more, at home.

“We do have an obsession, and this does blur into the work-from-home debate. [Managers say] ‘I’d rather see you in person 40 hours a week then give you 20 hours’ extra work to do after-hours and not pay you for it, rather than say I expect you to do A to Z every month’.”

People working long hours were not slacking around, he said. “There’s so much fluffy time in meetings, wasted time. That’s why people like working from home ... we’ve got a greater understanding of how distracting the workplace can be but we’ve never really had that conversation about reducing distraction and improving efficiency and encouraging staff to reduce their extra hours.”

He said it was not just New Zealand. But whereas in other countries, particularly in Asia, working long hours might be a sign of showing love to a family through working hard, “In New Zealand, you have to work long hours just to make ends meet”.

- RNZ

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