Overtime is not uncommon, not even in Corona times.
Employees even worked for three weeks for nothing, a study found.
How many hours did employees work in the Corona year? In which industries do you work the longest and how often is overtime compensated financially or by free time? In the latest study “Arbeitszeitmonitor 2021”, the salary
analysts evaluated
around 346,405 data sets in order to answer these questions. The result:
employees work almost three hours of overtime on average each week, only a third of which is compensated
. Over their entire career, employees work an average of 6,500 hours of overtime.
A total of 48 percent of all employees in Germany work overtime - an average of around three per week.
Women work an average of 2.1 and men 3.5 hours of overtime.
While skilled workers work around 2.5 hours longer, managers work 7.6 hours overtime.
The number of overtime hours has more than halved in the last 10 years
Even if three hours of overtime per week may seem like a lot to you, the situation has improved in recent years: the
average number of overtime hours
in the financial crisis of 2009 was around 6.5 per week.
Since then it has been falling annually and is currently 2.9
.
“The number of average overtime hours in Germany has more than halved over the past 10 years.
In times when the work-life balance is in the foreground and the labor market is increasingly geared towards employees, the willingness to work overtime tends to decline ”, says Dr.
Korbinian Nagel, labor
economist
at
Salary.de
.
The higher the salary, the longer the working hours
Among skilled workers, the number of overtime hours increases with the
income level
.
With an annual gross income of up to 20,000 euros, skilled workers work around 1.7 hours of overtime per week.
With a salary between 40,001 and 60,000 euros, they work around 2.7 hours of overtime per week.
Skilled workers with an income above the 100,000 euro limit even work around 6 hours longer on average each week.
Most of the overtime is not compensated
in all
salary classes
, only slightly more than 30 percent of employees receive compensation.
Also interesting
: Salary: These are the highest-paid professions in Germany in 2021.
Employees work 6,500 hours longer than agreed during their entire professional life
In total, employees work
a total of 6,500 hours of overtime
in their careers
.
Around 68 percent receive no compensation for this overtime.
So you work for almost 3 ½ years for free (including vacation days, weekends and public holidays).
In the past year, employees worked an average of 131 overtime hours.
With a 40-hour week, that is a total of three weeks of extra work.
Business consultants work the most overtime
Employees in
management consultancy
work
the most overtime hours in the industry
with
4.7
per
week
.
This is followed by the consumer and durable goods sector (4.1 hours overtime) and hotels and restaurants (4 hours overtime).
"Management consultants get lucrative salaries, but have to plan overtime in their daily work," says Dr.
Nail.
Also read
: Five tips on how to become more productive - without working overtime.
Hardly any regional differences in overtime
When comparing the federal states, there are hardly any differences in terms of the amount of weekly overtime.
In federal states with a higher wage level, there is a tendency to work a little more overtime, such as in
Hesse, Hamburg and Baden-Württemberg
(3 hours of overtime per week).
"In metropolitan areas with a high number of financially strong companies, there is a higher number of overtime hours than in rural areas," said Dr.
Nail finally.
Source: gehalt.de
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