“There’s overwhelming evidence that employees nowadays want flexibility… but it too often ends up being flexibility that primarily benefits employers,” says Janna Besamusca, Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Social Science at Utrecht University and a member of WageIndicator’s supervisory board.
We spoke with Janna and Ferran Elias Moreno, Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Girona, about findings from the BARTIME project. This two-year, EU-funded study, led by the WageIndicator Foundation, explores how non-standard working hours—like evenings, weekends, part-time, or on-call shifts—are compensated in collective bargaining agreements and across the workforce in 24 EU countries.
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| Janna Besamusca | Ferran Elias Moreno |
When the Standard Work Week Vanished
What does it mean when scholars, trade unions say the “standard” work week is disappearing?
When we refer to the “standard work week,” we mean the industrial model that became common after the Second World War. That was the classic nine-to-five, Monday to Friday, 40-hour work week.
That arrangement has changed a lot. Globalization and 24/7 services mean more people now work night shifts, evening shifts, or irregular hours. While such work always existed in specific occupations, it was more of an exception — and often came with higher pay. Today, it’s much more widespread.
Another change is the growth of part-time work. In countries like the Netherlands, Austria, and Germany, many people now work two, three, or four days a week instead of a full-time schedule. This too breaks away from the “standard” work week model.
The Trap of Time Accounts and Annualized Hours
With the erosion of the standard workweek comes the concept of annualized hours, also known as time accounts. Could you explain what these mean?
Normally, if you have a contract for 40 hours a week, you’re expected to work 40 hours every week. If there isn’t much work, you still get paid for 40 hours. If it’s really busy and you work extra, those extra hours are paid as overtime. In that setup, the ups and downs in workload are really the company’s problem, not the worker’s.
With annualized hours, that balance shifts. You might still have a 40-hour contract on paper, but in practice the number of hours you work can change a lot from week to week. One week you might do 30 hours, the next week 50, another week 20 — depending on how much work there is. Over the whole year, it’s meant to average out to your contractual hours.
Companies usually track this through time accounts. If you work extra in a busy period, those hours get logged as credits. If you work less in a slow period, they’re logged as debits. The idea is that, by the end of the year, it all evens out.
So what’s the problem with time accounts?
Time accounts and annualized hours could work out perfectly well. In many companies, people do get the overtime paid in time off, or if they’ve worked too much by the end of the period, they get it as overtime pay.
But what we see in the literature is that in some companies it doesn’t work out that way. Every week is busy, every day is busy, and so workers end up working more and more without actually getting opportunities to take the time off.
Then you build up huge credits. The question becomes: what happens to those credits? In some contracts, if you don’t take the time off within a certain period, those credits simply expire—just like annual leave in many countries.
This especially happens in some professional, office-based occupations with high work pressure. People often don’t take the time off, either because of workload or self-imposed pressure to work more. And if they don’t get it back in time off or money, that’s considered wage theft.
Do you feel like this is an enforcement issue, or is it that the system itself has a flaw?
In 2019, Spain introduced a reform requiring every employee to record their entry and exit hours. The idea was to combat unpaid overtime, which was widespread. With proper records, it should, in principle, be easier to enforce overtime regulations and ensure workers are paid for extra hours.
From our perspective, the idea makes sense. But governments are often influenced by business lobbies. So while the reform looked good on paper, it was implemented in a way that made enforcement difficult. For instance, the registry was created but it was not digital. That made it hard for labor inspectors to access information and enforce the rules.
So this is an example of a law designed with flaws—technically existing, but practically unenforceable.
Overtime Pay: Who Wins, Who Loses?
You mentioned three forces in your research—global markets, employer discretion, and the ideal worker norm. Which of these do you see as the biggest factor behind the decline of the standard workweek?
The ideal worker norm is a concept from sociology and psychology. In short, it’s the cultural image of how the “best” worker should behave. It signals who is deserving of pay raises, promotions, or permanent contracts.
The norm essentially says that the ideal worker shows dedication and constant availability for work—making work the center of their life and identity. In professional settings (like consultancies, universities, or law firms), this is often expressed through extremely long hours, many unpaid. Working 50–60 hours a week becomes proof of passion and commitment.
Now, comparing this with globalization and the 24/7 global economy—it’s hard to disentangle. They reinforce each other. The material side of globalization (production and services running nonstop) is reinforced by cultural ideals like the ideal worker norm.
When you compare across sectors and countries, what do you observe in this regard?
Overtime hours were more common in blue-collar sectors—for instance, manufacturing and construction showed a higher incidence of overtime work.
In white-collar sectors, the health sector likely recorded the highest levels of overtime. However, it’s important to note that this refers to declared overtime, meaning hours reported by employers rather than employees. The data comes from the Structure of Earnings Survey and covers only paid overtime.
We can also complement this information by looking at whether overtime is concentrated in sectors covered by collective bargaining agreements (CBAs) that stipulate overtime premiums. To do this, we combine the Structure of Earnings Survey with data collected by researchers at WageIndicator and others, which document what CBAs say about overtime—for example, whether they establish premiums or impose specific conditions.
What emerges from this is that many workers are clocking overtime in sectors that don’t actually have any specific provisions on overtime in their CBAs.
What sets the BARTIME research apart from other studies conducted in the field previously?
What we know from earlier research is that overtime is a very widespread phenomenon. A portion of this overtime is paid, a large portion is unpaid, and some part is paid at a premium—which historically was the norm. If you worked extra hours, you were compensated for the inconvenience.
What we’re really studying is how premiums for overtime, or “inconvenience pay,” are shaped by collective bargaining. Historically, much of this came from trade unions, which either sought to discourage excessive reliance on overtime for health reasons, or supported premiums as a way to ensure higher incomes for workers. So there are essentially two motivations: protecting workers’ health by limiting overtime, or protecting their income by securing premium pay.
The key question we’re asking is whether these collective agreements are effective. If unions are doing their job well, then in sectors with a lot of overtime we should see agreements that guarantee premiums for those hours. In other words, we’re examining the strength of these institutions—whether collective bargaining actually translates into better working conditions and higher pay.
Can you share some early results?
Using the Structure of Earnings Survey, we can estimate how much workers would have earned if their overtime had not been paid at a premium. This allows us to calculate what share of earnings actually comes from overtime.
The findings show that the overall effect is relatively small: on average, overtime accounts for about a 2.4% increase in earnings. Only around 3% of workers who do overtime receive more than 10% of their total earnings from it. This is largely because the number of paid overtime hours is not very high.
Another important insight is that most workers doing paid overtime work are not at the bottom of the wage distribution. Instead, they tend to cluster around the median wage. One interpretation is that the strongest unions are not always in sectors with the worst conditions, but often in sectors with medium-wage workers.
Higher-wage groups, such as lawyers or consultants, often work long overtime hours but typically unpaid, so they don’t benefit from premiums. At the bottom, many manual or blue-collar workers may be losing access to premium pay through arrangements like time accounts or annualized hours. In these systems, what used to be paid overtime—sometimes at 150% of the hourly rate—is now absorbed into normal working time. Even if collective agreements specify generous overtime rates, if additional hours don’t officially count as “overtime,” workers never actually receive the premium.
Shaping Work: Unions and the Future of Flexibility
So what’s the bigger fight right now? Is it about making sure overtime gets compensated, or about protecting time off? Or do unions need to fight both battles at once?
I don’t think there’s a single answer to that. It’s a very individualized issue, and the context really matters at the organizational level. If you’re in a workplace where everyone is under intense pressure, working excessive hours, and colleagues clearly need more rest and fewer tasks, then health becomes the most important factor.
But in other workplaces, people may actually be working fewer hours than they would like. In that case, fair pay may be the priority. It also depends on where you are in the wage distribution. If you already earn a decent salary, it may be easier to prioritize health. But if you’re at the bottom of the distribution, being forced to choose between health and income is an unfair choice—one that nobody should have to make.
So I think the trade union movement is genuinely divided on this, and the responses vary across countries.
Can you illustrate this happening with an example?
In Spain, for example, the national-level debate is more focused on reducing working hours than on securing overtime pay. Left-wing parties in different regions are pushing for a four-day workweek instead of five. By contrast, you don’t see the same attention given to overtime payments. Perhaps workweek reduction appeals more because it ties into broader social debates—environmental sustainability, work-life balance, and health—issues that have become much more prominent in recent decades.
Policymakers and companies are also increasingly worried about sickness and burnout, with people even talking about a “burnout generation.” Stress-related illnesses have become widespread, and with aging populations across Europe, it’s crucial that people can continue working across their whole lives without burning out by their 30s or 40s.
For employers facing labor shortages, retaining healthy employees is just as important as avoiding turnover. So in that sense, the emphasis on health fits very well with the challenges of our time.
Does flexibility always lead to precarity or is there a way out?
There’s overwhelming evidence that employees nowadays want flexibility. We see this with people who have children, and also with young workers who want to enjoy life outside of work. Many want the option to work from home when needed, to attend a dentist appointment during work hours without excessive bureaucracy, or to adjust their work hours slightly to fit their personal lives.
Research by Piasna and co-authors, for example, shows that there are worker-friendly forms of flexibility. This includes arrangements like flexible starting times—where instead of everyone being required to start at 9 a.m., workers can arrive anytime between 8 and 10 a.m. The same applies at the end of the workday.
How this plays out is often not just a matter of national legislation or collective bargaining, but something very specific to the organizational level. That’s where these arrangements are implemented in practice—where you either can or cannot actually use flexibility as a worker.
So we do think there is a demand for flexibility from both employers and employees. But it too often ends up being flexibility that primarily benefits employers.
August 2025