A global study by the World Health Organization (WHO) reveals that 745,000 people died from stroke and heart disease due to elongated working hours in 2016.
Per the study, working 55 hours or more a week was associated with a 35% higher risk of stroke and a 17% higher risk of dying from heart disease, compared to 35-40 hours per week.
Three-quarters of those who died as a result of longer working hours were middle-aged or older men. Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific region had the highest concentration of such deaths.
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The report, the first of its kind, further detailed how working long hours was responsible for a third of all work-related disease.
The two main ways that longer work hours led to such dire health consequences were direct physiological stress, and a higher likelihood to adopt poor health habits like smoking, drinking, getting less sleep, and a bad diet.
The WHO study, conducted with the International Labour Organization doesn’t include our recent COVID era, though WHO technical officer Frank Pega warns, "We have some evidence that shows that when countries go into national lockdown, the number of hours worked increases by about 10%.”
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According to the Office for National Statistics in the UK, “people working from home during the pandemic were putting in an average of six hours of unpaid overtime a week. People who did not work from home put in an average of 3.6 hours a week overtime.”
Capping hours in general would be beneficial for employers as that had been shown to increase productivity, said Mr Pega.
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