The new Observatory on Crises and Alternatives from the Centre for Social Studies (ETUC) on supplementary work, concluded from calculations based on data from the National Statistical Institute (INE) that in 2018 alone all unpaid overtime corresponded to 49.4 percent of the total work done.


The authors add that “of the 221 million hours of overtime worked by 576,000 workers, with a total of remunerations that should have totalled about € 1.7 billion per year, there was an additional €820 million left unpaid.”


In an analysis of the period between the start of troika intervention (2011) and 2018, the observatory indicates that, on average, 55 percent of the 1.6 billion hours of overtime worked remained unpaid, corres-ponding to €6.6 billion.


In the document entitled “Extraordinary hours: Why is the law encouraging further work?”, The observatory concludes that the use of overtime is growing due to “a drastic decrease in the value of extra work” since the legislative changes of 2012, in the context of labour reforms agreed with the ‘troika’. “The relative cost of supplementary work in relation to the effective cost of normal work has been drastically reduced and is at present very low or even negative,” conclude the authors João Ramos de Almeida, Diogo Martins, Fausto Leite and Filipe Lamelas.