Barber urges workers to force bosses to pay up

TUC leader Brendan Barber revealed that even as the recession deepened in 2009 five million hard-pressed workers still handed bosses "a £27 billion gift" - more than seven hours of unpaid work from each employee every week.

The massive redistribution of wealth from workers to wealthy executives means that companies are pocketing an average of £5,480 worth of labour from each of their employees. This follows last month's news showing that wages had registered their steepest fall since 1955.

Mr Barber pointed out that if everyone who worked unpaid overtime added their total hours together from the start of the year they would not even start getting paid until February 26.

"Sacrifices made by staff have saved jobs and kept companies afloat, but millions are still working too many hours," he stressed.

"More than 190,000 employees - one in six workers - regularly work unpaid overtime, and some 30,000 work more than 10 extra hours a week," he added.

TUC Wales organiser Julie Cook warned that long working hours were causing extra stress and damaging workers' health. She criticised employers' "pointless culture of 'presenteeism' which keeps people at their desks for no good reason."

Federation of Small Businesses spokesman Russell Lawson tried to counter the TUC's revelations by claiming that the figures represented "lots of ambitious, career-minded individuals willingly putting in extra hours.

"They want to give themselves a higher profile in their company, in the hope of moving on into bigger and better things," he breezily asserted.

But GMB general secretary Paul Kenny lost no time in slapping such claims down and urged workers to "organise and unionise if you want to be paid the right rate for all your work.

"Only when a workplace is properly organised do employers take their workers seriously and pay up in full," he emphasised.