News analysis: Why workers in Britain are still chained to their desks

European employees are spending less time in offices and factories, but in the UK the long-hours culture is as strong as ever

Most British employees are working harder and longer than ever before, despite years of rhetoric from ministers, trade unions and business leaders about breaking the UK's long-hours culture.

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Most British employees are working harder and longer than ever before, despite years of rhetoric from ministers, trade unions and business leaders about breaking the UK's long-hours culture.

According to the latest survey showing growing dissatisfaction in the workplace, only 16 per cent of men in professional or management jobs are happy with the hours they work, compared with 36 per cent in 1992.

Eight out of 10 employees who put in long hours say they have to stay in the office to meet the deadlines and pressures of their jobs, and 75 per cent say they are now required to stay late at work.

The findings of the Future of Work Programme, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, will be published tomorrow, days after the trade union Amicus-MSF won a ruling from the European Commission that a directive which aimed to limit the working week to 48 hours had been "unlawfully and inadequately" implemented in the UK.

The union complained to the Commission that employers were "leaning" on staff and failing to ensure that the legal minimum of breaks and holidays were being taken by their employees.

In a judgement which angered British business leaders, Rosendo Gonzalez Dorrego, head of the employment and social affairs unit at the European Commission, said the UK had failed to fulfil its obligations under the directive and that action would be taken.

Roger Lyons, general secretary of Amicus, will now demand that the Government follows both the spirit and the letter of the working time directive. "Britons work the longest hours in Europe," he said. "This decision will cut excessive working time considerably, slash stress and bring us closer to the level of working hours already enjoyed throughout the rest of Europe."

British employees work the longest hours in Europe, averaging 43.6 a week, three hours more than the European Union mean. France and Germany have a working week of 35 to 38 hours.

The British pattern is much more fragmented than the European norm. Among male employees, one in three works more than 50 hours a week, while more than half the male workforce works 40 to 49 hours a week. Among women, one in 10 spends more than 50 hours a week at work. Another 10 per cent of women work fewer than 20 hours a week because they are in part-time jobs.

Damien Grimshaw, a lecturer in employment studies at Manchester School of Management, said the discrepancy over working hours was partly the result of employees working long hours to make up their pay and partly the failure to implement restrictions.

"In Britain, many people work in low-pay sectors and they work long hours to improve their pay. If there was a restriction on hours, you would find different ways of pressing for more money," he said.

"The tradition of increasing the hourly rate for the job seems to have been lost in favour of simply increasing the hours worked. That is dangerous for family life and for the productivity of the economy. We do seem to be fairly alone in Europe in this kind of pattern."

Belgians, Italians, French and Dutch workers can all expect to work less than 39 hours a week. In recent years, the working week in France and Portugal has shrunk by a hour.

Four years ago, the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions carried out a survey across the European Union and found that on average employees wanted to reduce their time at work by 3.7 hours a week, with men preferring a 37-hour week and women a 30-hour week. But generally little has changed, with Britain still standing out as the country where employees are chained to their desks. The decline of the trade unions, which once helped to enforce more rigid rules about working hours, is one explanation. Many of the new service-sector companies which have emerged in the white-collar sector have never had any union presence.

David Foden, senior researcher at the European Trade Union Institute, said the lack of restrictions over working hours meant that managers had no incentive to use labour efficiently. "The UK is perhaps nearer to the American model than other European countries. UK workers have tended to be working longer partly because this is the way that the British economy competed," he said.

"In high productivity countries, like Belgium, France and the Netherlands, where there is regulation, they are forced to be efficient. It is the same argument about countries where labour costs are high: workers have to be used efficiently."

The British tradition of long working hours can be traced back to the early 1950s, when businesses, keen to exploit the buoyant post-war market for goods, were prepared to negotiate premium overtime rates with the unions so that they could maximise production.

Michael White, of the Policy Studies Institute, said: "Everyone benefited from overtime and it became a national habit. Now the majority of workers are not manual workers. They work in the service industry or in professional jobs and an awful lot of them don't get paid overtime. If employers can get away with that and get extra hours out of their staff, then they will."

He said the pressure to work long hours now extended far beyond the City banks and legal offices, where traders and lawyers were traditionally paid very generous salaries for their anti-social hours. Mr White said: "The working time directive is the only real thing to regulate the jungle that has grown up around the service, professional and white-collar sectors where the unions are no longer effective. It is a shame that the Government has not taken it more seriously."

Despite the long hours worked in Britain, the nation's productivity has remained stubbornly behind that of rivals in Europe and the US. The output of the average British employee is 30 per cent less than that of the UK's competitors.

The solution frequently offered by ministers and business leaders has been for British employees to work "smarter, not harder" so that they also have a life at home. But recent research has pointed a finger at the failure of British managers to master basic management skills, with poor standards of planning and supervision and a lack of clear goals for the workforce to achieve.