As 2024 begins, employees are finding that their bargaining power isn’t what it used to be. About a year ago, job opportunities and rising wages were abundant, but now, those trends are reversing, with fewer openings and slower wage growth. A recent comprehensive study by Project Management unveils a troubling trend – the amount of unpaid overtime labor that workers are contributing saw a staggering uptick last year. They surveyed 3,000 employees, with some astonishing observations.
The data reveals a collective surge of 46 billion unpaid overtime hours in 2023, dwarfing figures from the previous year. On average, workers contributed an additional 4.5 hours per week for no compensation, totaling an extra 233 hours annually.
Residents of New Hampshire bore the brunt of this trend, reporting nearly 10 extra hours of unpaid overtime each week. Conversely, Montanans experienced slight decrease in such hours.
When it comes to North Carolina workers, it was found that they worked an extra 6.1 hours per week of unpaid overtime last year, compared to 2022. This equates to 317 hours over the year per employee, and collectively as a state this amounts to a whopping 2,088,910,260 hours.
The top 5 states who worked more unpaid overtime in 2023:
1. New Hampshire (9.9 more hours)
2. Iowa (7.6 more hours)
3. Alaska (7.4 more hours)
4. Utah (6.3 more hours)
5. North Carolina (6.1 more hours)
The 5 states with the smallest increases in unpaid overtime:
50. Montana (0.6 hours less)
49. Hawaii (0.9 more hours)
48. Idaho (1.9 more hours)
47. Maryland (2.1 more hours)
46. Arizona (2.7 more hours)