Mandatory Overtime

Over the last two decades, American workers have been clocking more and more hours on the job, and they now work more hours than workers in any other industrialized country. Annual work hours are 4% higher than they were in 1980, amounting to an extra 1 hour and 30 minutes at work per week, on average (ILO 1999). Workers are also clocking more overtime hours. Almost one-third of the workforce regularly works more than the standard 40-hour week; one-fifth work more than 50 hours. The growth in overtime work, while helping to drive the healthy growth in output in the U.S., has unhealthy social costs. It is taking its toll not only on workers, but on their families, communities, and, ultimately in many cases, patients, customers, and employers. The tenuous balance between work, family, and other non-work activities is thrown off most when overtime is mandatory (also referred to as "compulsory" or "forced"). Therefore, with the rise in household work hours and overtime, there is a growing need for limits on involuntary overtime. Labor laws such as the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA) need to be amended to protect workers against mandatory overtime and to protect the public from the dangers of an overburdened, stressed workforce.
Rather than raising wages to attract new employees, some employers opted to have their current workforce work more hours to enjoy cost savings in training of new employees. Sadly, long hours can detrimentally affect workers, their co-workers, their families, consumers, and the public. Indeed, there is evidence that, despite the short-term benefits that make overtime attractive to employers (Easton and Rossin 1997), it may in the longer term create offsetting harm to an organization by decreasing quality, increasing mistakes (Babbar and Aspelin 1998; Hirschman 2000), and reducing productivity (Shepard and Clifton 2000). A study on the effects of overtime work on autoworkers found that overtime resulted in impaired performance in