Work, work, work

Apparently, last Friday was Work your Proper Hours day.

This is one of those subjects, like smoking and hunting, that everyone seems to have a strong view on. You are either for or against it, you either do it or you don't and having a day to "celebrate it" - like National Non Smoking day - is probably not going to change your attitude or behaviour.

Personally, I can't remember a time when I worked my "proper hours", apart from when they coincided with the hours in which I could actually work. e.g. the hours when the shop was open.

[But retail staff probably can't even do that anymore, unless they do 16 hour shifts or longer, I guess.]

And its never bothered me. Perhaps like a lot of people, I just work to get the job done because I enjoy what I do.

But equally, if I ever feel I need a break from work, I just take it. And this is more likely to do with someone or something that has really annoyed me to the extent that I adopt the "flight not fight" mentality - than with the hours I have worked. I'll just shuffle my commitments around so I can leave work early or go in late until I feel ready to cope with the situation again. No big deal.

What I did find interesting was the article in the Guardian which said that, according to new research, public sector staff work longer hours than their city counterparts.

Having worked in both the public sector (for 8 years) and now a city-type organisation for the past 7 years, I find this laughable.

For a start, most public sector workers I knew then and now get paid overtime. Or if its not overtime, its flexitime. Whereas city businesses, like the one I work for, pay no overtime at all apart from to junior staff. So public sector workers often have an incentive to claim longer hours.

I can't recall any public sector colleagues, apart from some schoolteachers I know, ever working weekends doing unpaid overtime. However, I have known loads of city workmates who have spent Sundays travelling to get to their place of work for the next week - unpaid of course.

And when I think back to my public sector days, I probably worked just as many hours as I do now. Except that I got credit for the extra hours in the form of flexitime, which equated to around 6 extra weeks, yes weeks, a year holiday!

Which meant 6 weeks of not working - as opposed to 6 weeks' of extra hours simply given to my city employer.

Public sector workers work longer hours? Next, they will be saying that chocolate doesn't actually make you fat.