REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

This area discusses the related literature that covers the important ideas
in connection with this study entitled, “Excess Clock Work: Multiple Struggles
of Teachers Teaching Overtime.” The review includes theories, concepts,
principles, analysis, and views and ideas regarding the subject matter of the
study. With the necessary information that we researchers had put in this
section, this study that we had made would probably enlighten the minds of
those individuals who wish to read this study that we had and would fully
understand what our study is all about.

Teaching Overtime
According to Anxo and Karlsson (n.d.), overtime is normally defined as
working hours that are done in addition to normal legislated working hours
during a day or a week. In many countries, it may be compensated by
overtime premium pay, which can play a role in worker renumeration.
Overtime working hours can have important benefits for worker compensation
if a premium is paid for each overtime hour worked, but can pose health and
well-being concerns for workers if they work too many hours. Working
conditions in general, and overtime in particular, are crucially dependent of
the prevailing institutional setup at the national and supranational level.
Furthermore, the behaviour of governments, employer and trade-union
organizations is important for understanding a country’s working time regime,
and in turn how they address overtime. Anxo and Karlsson’s paper reviews
some of the evidence, mainly from labour economics, industrial relations and
sociology, to provide an inter-disciplinary overview on how overtime issues
are addressed by different academic disciplines. It also examines the
incidence of working overtime within the context of several distinct national
employment regimes and industrial relations system, which provides a useful
framework to enhance our understanding of overtime in theory and in
practice.
To Anxo and Karlsson, very few empirical studies have tried to assess the
individual consequences of overtime hours. A majority of studies have
analysed the consequences of long working hours on job quality, well-being
and health. Reviewing the relationship between time, health and safety, a
Deloitte (2010) report found that the risk of accident or injuries is not only
proportional to the number of working hours but increases proportionally
beyond the 7th, 8th, and 9th hour worked per day. The risk of accident-based
injuries or illness is found to double between 40 and 65 work hours per week.
A German study covering 1100 German working in the automotive
industry found that a rise in overtime hours increased sickness absentism and
accident or injuries. Furthermore, safety may also be decreased with long
working hours. For example, the nurses working more than 12.5 hours per
day have been found to be 3.3 times higher than for individuals working below
8.5 hours per day.
According to Wu-Chung Wu (2013), from past research studies, working
overtime is generally treated from viewpoints of motivation, cost or
management theories. Firstly, from motivation theory, it was believed that
employees may choose voluntarily to work overtime because of financial
pressure on their own disposition. However, overly relying on working
overtime may result in long-term efficiency for work performance. From the
cost theory aspect, it is believed that an enterprise’s strategy to implement
working overtime often entrails many hidden costs. For example, employees
physically exhausted from overtime work are more prone accidents. Also, the
equipment, employees and other resources used in overtime are usually not
utilized in the most efficient manner, so it opens door for more overtime.
Bannai and Tamakashi (2014) provide a thorough and systematic review
of epidemiologic research on the potential detrimental impact of long working
hours. The survey includes only studies with a control group of employees
working around 40 hours per week or eight hours a day and a treatment group
where employees work more than 40 hours per week on average.
Furthermore, they exclude study including a typical work (shift-work, night-
work), since a typical work is associated with its own specific health risks.
OPJ Nyawara (2010) pointed out that workload as a compound of
performance management, may cause if poorly managed. Schreiber (1967)
emphasizes in his paper that employees experience so many demands on
their skills and abilities when workload is high that they become irritated and
confused and this affects their efficiency. Employee dissatisfaction with the
workload has been noted.
Rosenholtz and Simpson (1990) cited by Buckly et al. (2004) revealed
that the burden of overtime obligations affects new employee’s commitment.
They further identified high workload as one of the factors contributing to high
employee attrition.
Most researchers have come up with workload as a major cause of stress
to employees. Scottish Council reported that teachers perceived their job to
be stressful (Johnstone 1993 a). Guardian (2002 b) has attempted to clarify
what he sees as 40 years of generally held opinion about stress of studying
real life situations. He found that 14 factors were associated with occupational
stress. Among them were workloads, performance, hours of work, homework
balance and communication. In normal situations, we see that workload (in
terms of quantity, quality and time pressures) and dealing with people are
identified as the prime causes of stress at work.
According to Golden et al. 2012 “There is considerable variability in
working tome across the globe and within countries by industry and
occupation, by gender and race, by family type and by time period. In the last
100 years, though, the overall propensity among industrialized economies has
been to take a portion of productivity gains achieved in the form of a reduced
work week. Throughout the 19th century, the nascent labour movement took
up the struggle to reduce the standard hours in paid employment in order to
increase hours for leisure and to prevent feared technological unemployment
(Schor 1991a.). The shorter hour issue spawned the first wave of strike and
organization activity including the Ten Hours Movement in UK. In the USA,
Europe, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, reduction of working hours
through gender-neutral legislation and collective bargaining. Evidence
suggesting average hours per worker may be lengthening over the last few
decades has reignited intense discussion and debate about the present and
future course of working time and its public policy implications. There is so
very much at stake, not only for scholars but for workers and societies, in
determining whether the nature of post-industrial economic growth is to
deliver shorter or longer working hours. For a variety of reasons, it is difficult
to definitively establish recent trends in work hours. One is that different
samples and methodologies are used. For instance, findings are affected by
whether a study considers only full-time workers or production workers.
Average work hours may be suppressed by the growing percentage of labour
force working in non-standard, less than full-time or year-round employment,
such as temporary work, contingent work, or voluntary and particularly
involuntary jobs. There is evidence also of proliferation of jobs with
nonstandard hours of work and variability of scheduled hours, a departure
from historical standardization. Fewer workers work five-day work weeks, and
the proportion working seven days has risen in the last thirty years
(Hamermesh 1996, 1998). In the USA and throughout Europe especially,
there is an increasing diversity of work patterns, across sectors, industries
and even individual workers (Hinrichs, Roche and Sirianni 1991; Bosch,
Dawkins, and Michon 1993; ILO 1995; OECD 1995). Canada exhibits similar
trends: declining annual hours due to increased vacations and the expansion
of part-time jobs, as well as increasing diversity of work schedules (ILO 1995).
The longer the average total hours usually worked, the greater is the tendency
for such workers – male and female—to indicate dissatisfaction with their
hours. At the lower end of the hour spectrum, though, workers are getting less
than their preferred amount of work hours, Jacobs and Gerson link the rise in
work hours to demographic shifts in the labor force. Specifically, between
1970 and 1997, the escalation of joint hours worked by dual earner, husband-
wife families, has created time pressures.
Moreover, Golden and Wiens-Tuers (2005) provide an empirical analysis
of mandatory overtime based on US household survey conducted in 2002.
They find that mandatory overtime is more common among men.
Meanwhile, Anxo et al., 2017 concluded in their paper that long working
hours and/or a typical work in EU28 are negatively correlated with work-life
balance, job satisfaction and well-being. Furthermore, they have shown that a
preference for a reduction of working time is, everything else been equal,
positively correlated with long working hours. In other words, employees with
long and excessive working hours have a stronger preference for working
shorter hours (Anxo et al., 2017). Against this background and taking into
consideration the detrimental consequences of long working hours on health
and safety, a policy favouring an increase of hourly wage for low-paid workers
coupled with a reduction of working time by reducing overtime hours may
appear to be a good policy instrument for improving the well-being of citizens
and beneficial for the society as a whole (Anxo et al., 2017). This is
particularly true in countries with a high share of excessive working hours and
low-paid workers (Anxo et al., 2017).