Earlier this year I wrote about the five million people doing an average of more than seven hours overtime every week for free. All that unpaid overtime is worth £5,000 a year.

Now this is further borne out by a survey by online recruitment specialist Theitjobboard.co.uk and reported this week in Personnel Today.

Of 500 IT workers surveyed for a report on working hours, just 10 per cent said they were paid extra money for it. This is despite over a quarter (27 per cent) of those surveyed claiming they worked between 48 and 60 hours a week, and five per cent working between 60 and 75 hours.

Other survey findings include:

• 26.6 per cent had opted out of the Working Time Regulations, introduced to address the long working hours culture by ensuring that employees do not work more than 48 hours per week. Nearly one third (32.8 per cent) of people questioned did not know whether they had opted out or not.
• 40.6 per cent felt their health had been affected by working longer hours
• 25 per cent cited relationship problems because of work overload – 52 per cent said it meant they were unable to pursue hobbies and 43 per cent stated they had no time for family or friends
• 64 per cent believed their social life had been compromised and 41 per cent said it resulted in their having no social life at all.

But of those who complained, only a minority (15 per cent) had taken up the issue with their managers. And this is the rub. Just like grumbling about bad food or service in a restaurant, if you don't take up the issue then things don't change. Why should they?

As the survey demonstrates, many people do not even know whether they have opted out or not. Very often, there is a paragraph in the documentation signed when joining the organisation, but the significance of this is not realised at the time.

Although employees are entitled to voluntarily work more than 48 hours by signing an individual "opt-out" agreement, employers cannot force or coerce employees to do so, nor can signing such an agreement be made a condition of employment. You can cancel an opt out with between seven days’ and three months’ notice, depending on the wording of the original opt-out agreement.

This is due to change as the original regulations will be revised in the near future, and the opt-out provision will be made more transparent, even though this will remain in the UK, unlike the rest of the European Union.

If you do nothing else, dig out your contract or letter of appointment and check it out.

A piece in today's Wall Street Journal caught my eye. It contrasts the differences between the US and the Eurozone in terms of the gap between pay increases and inflation. The article suggests that increases in pay and salaries in the Eurozone are matching the annual inflation rate whereas in the US workers fell behind.

According to pay consultants Industrial Relations Services, employees in the UK are suffering from the largest gap between pay rises and increases in the cost of living in nearly 20 years. They report the average wage increase in both public and private sectors is 3.2 per cent, compared to the retail prices index measure of inflation at 4.6 per cent - the largest gap recorded since October 1990.

However looking at take home pay, pay processor VocaLink said its take-home pay index registered its highest level for 2008, showing 4.5 per cent growth in July against 4.3 per cent for June.

The cost of shopping for a basket of essentials is now rising at 24.7 per cent a year according to the Daily Mail Cost of Living Index for August. The increases have put £300 a year on to the food bill of a family which spent £100 a week on food last year. This combined with increases in the cost of heat, light and petrol to push up the total for “must pay” bills by more than £830 a year.

Energy companies have also recently announced price increases of up to 30 per cent, and there have been warnings that another round of price increases is likely in January 2009.

Inflation forecasts for the fourth quarter of 2008, as measured by the Retail Prices Index, range from rises of 2.7 per cent to 5.9 per cent with a mid-point average of 4.7 per cent.

But IT pay is reported however to be rising faster than at any time in the past three years, according to the Computer Economics Computer Staff Salary Survey published last month.

The survey of more than 66,000 IT staff in over 570 workplaces found that basic IT pay had risen by 4.8 per cent in the year to May 2008. The main reason given for this defying of growing economic gloom was said to be demand for high-tech skills, which were running ahead of supply.

This will come as news from another planet for some working in IT. People write to tell me that they have not had a pay increase for a number of years. Well they should join a union like Unite  (I would say that, wouldn't I...).

All of this stands in marked contrast to the rewards available at director and board level. Part-time, non-executive directors of companies of all sizes received pay rises of 15.6 per cent last year, according to the PricewaterhouseCoopers annual guide Non-Executive Director Practice and Fees, although it is poetically described as “reaching a balance between pay and accountability.”

As a union, Unite is strongly in favour of skills and responsibility receiving reward, but pay should reward success and not excess.

You get the feeling sometimes that the organ grinder is being rewarded before we get to hear whether or not there is a tune.

Redundancy is an ever present fear even in the IT sector - and with the current so called credit crunch, probably an increasing fear just now.

Under existing employment legislation, in a redundancy situation involving more than 20 potential redundancies, employers have to consult with employee representatives; either trade union representatives where there is a trade union recognised, or elected representatives from amongst the workforce where there is no recognised trade union.

Where an employer fails to consult meaningfully, it is possible to bring a legal claim against that employer, and if successful obtain a sum of money for each person affected. This is called a protective award.

In a case recently decided at the Court of Appeal (Northgate HR Ltd v Mercy), the Court confirmed that if an employer fails to consult properly, only the employee representatives and not individual employees can bring a complaint.

This is an important ruling, and highlights the difficulties and problems for non-union representatives who may not have the necessary skills and resources to pursue a claim. Furthermore, it takes some considerable strength of character for someone acting as an employee representative to bring a legal claim against the employer they may still be working for, with the understandable fear – based on some real likelihood in my experience – that they may find their name in the list of people to be made redundant in a future redundancy programme.

This case further emphasises the value of access to skills and resources in a redundancy situation.

If you work for an IT company and have experience of being bullied, then unfortunately you are not alone.

In research carried out over the three months to February 2008, nearly two thirds (65 per cent) of the 860 Unite members surveyed in the electronics and IT sectors reported that they had experience of bullying at work, and more than half (55 per cent) said they had witnessed bullying in their workplace. This is also borne out by a further survey carried out by the Work Life Balance Centre and Coventry University, reported recently in the human resources journal Personnel Today, which highlighted the IT sector as being one of the sectors with the worst incidence of bullying.

Bullying at work is deeply destructive of workplace relationships and undermines people’s health, confidence and ability to cope. In the Unite survey, we found that more than one in five of respondents said they had to take more than a month off work as sick leave because of their experience of bullying.

We know from our schooldays that there is usually a bully in every playground, but most people do not get up in the morning to go to work intending to bully their work colleagues. It is the working environment that creates the circumstances where bullying arises, and all too often is then tolerated or accepted as a feature of working life.

Bullying is organisational and can only be adequately combated by an organisational approach. At the very least, employers should have a clear statement that bullying will not be tolerated, have procedures in place on bullying and harassment, send a strong message from the top of the organisation that complaints of bullying and/or harassment will be taken seriously, and provide training on how to apply and operate the policy, in particular for managers.

Sixty per cent of respondents in our survey reported that their employer did not have an anti-bullying/harassment policy, and even where such policies were in place, nearly a quarter said they had not received any information or training about the policy. In addition, and as borne out by our survey and experience, all too often people are reluctant to make a complaint because they do not believe this will be seriously considered, or even worse they are too scared of the consequences.

Employees and their know-how are the key assets of most IT companies and it is vital that employers improve the way in which people are treated. Since workplace bullying was recognised as a problem more than a decade ago, many organisations have adopted policies to address the issue. However, a policy is no use unless all parties work together to take on the challenge.

The Dignity at Work Partnership has been established with funding jointly from the Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform and Unite to tackle the problem of bullying and harassment in the workplace. The aim of the project is for employers and employee representatives to work together to find ways of addressing the issues around bullying, and develop sound practices based on sharing of experience.