For many employees, a 40-hour week is only on paper.
A current survey shows how things really look in terms of overtime in Germany.
Hamburg - A good half of the employees in Germany regularly work overtime.
An average of three hours of overtime per week.
However, only a third of the employees received compensation for this.
This was the result of the “Working Time
Monitor
2021” from
gehalt.de
.
According to estimates by the Institute for Employment Research (IAB), employers save tens of billions of dollars in salary costs each year, the report said.
Overtime in Germany: "More than halved in ten years"
In 2009, the weekly overtime hours were estimated at 6.5 in the survey and have fallen steadily since then.
The trend of the past two and a half years must also be viewed in the context of the corona pandemic, it says on
gehalt.de
.
Keyword short-time work.
Nevertheless: “The number of average overtime hours in Germany has more than halved over the last 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
gehalt.de
, entered the results.
Survey for Germany: salary and overtime, gender and overtime
According to the survey, a higher salary goes hand in hand with more overtime.
Anyone who earns a six-figure gross annual salary has more than 6 hours of overtime per week.
Those who earn less than 20,000 euros, on the other hand, 1.7.
This may also explain (in part) that men worked more overtime on average than women.
Keyword gender pay gap.
Overtime by industry: differences between catering and administration
The “Working Time Monitor 2021” also found differences between the industries.
They are particularly high in management consulting, the consumer goods industry and the hotel / catering industry, but lower in tax advice, legal advice and public administration.
Also interesting: “In metropolitan areas with a high number of financially strong companies, there is a higher number of overtime hours than in rural areas,” says Nagel.
Analysts extrapolate overtime to life: three and a half years
In total, this can lead to 6500 overtime hours in the entire working life, calculate the
gehalt.de
analysts.
In 2020, employees would have worked an average of 131 overtime hours.
On average, this would mean 6500 hours or three and a half years of working time.
For the “Working Time Monitor 2021”, remuneration analysts have the overtime of 346,405
Employees evaluated.
The calculation was based on an average of 254 working days per year, minus the average working days.
The average number of overtime hours per 5-day working week (2.9) was divided by 5 and multiplied by the number of working days per year, according to
gehalt.de
- this was how the overtime account balance was calculated at the end of a working life.
