Australians work more than two billion hours of unpaid overtime a year, a $72 billion gift to their employers, a new study by an independent think tank shows.

The Australian Institute research shows a typical full-time employee is working 70 minutes of unpaid overtime a day, which equates to 33 eight-hour days per year, or six-and-a-half standard working weeks.

Across the workforce, the 2.14 billion hours of unpaid overtime represented six per cent free labour for the economy depends.

“While Australians might have a reputation for taking ‘sickies’ and ‘smokos’, the evidence suggests otherwise,” the institute’s executive director Richard Denniss said when releasing the research on Wednesday.

During the past decade Australia had simply accepted the “dubious honour” of working the longest hours in the western world, when other developed countries had sought to reduce working hours.

“The amount of unpaid overtime worked in Australia is the equivalent of 1.16 million full-time jobs,” Dr Denniss said.

“In an economy where unemployment is rising, overwork is an obvious area for government to address.”

The survey found 45 per cent of workers, and more than half of all full-time employees, work more hours than they are paid for on a typical workday.

The online survey of 1,000 respondents, commissioned by the institute, found that 44 per cent of people who work unpaid overtime said it is “compulsory” or “expected”.

Slightly fewer (43 per cent) said overtime was “not expected” but also “not discouraged”.

Australians also work three times more hours or unpaid overtime than they volunteer to community organisations.

In response to its findings, the institute has nominated November 25 as national Go Home On Time Day.

This research is merely confirming what plenty of us know already. In short, a majority of Australian workers are doing charity work for their bosses by compulsion, or, at the very least,  without explicitly agreeing. Most workers are subject to theft, in other words.

Dr Denniss, the executive director of the crowd who published this research, suggests that the problem is one for government to address. He neglects to mention that government has been addressing the issue of overwork for years — addressing it by entrenching it in the labour market and economy at large. This is still the case, in spite of the Federal ALP’s new and ‘radical’ IR laws. For all the histrionic talk of union thuggery, the unions of Australia are barely able to cope with serious OHS matters, much less run a campaign against overwork.

Rather than have some Mickey Mouse ‘Go Home on Time Day’, workers should be going home on time every day, unless there’s a damned good reason. Miserliness of one’s employer is not such a reason.  The GFC was always likely to encourage employers to intensify their exploitation of staff. And rather than relying upon the benevolence of employers in order to finish work on time, workers should consider staging a ‘Tell the Boss to Fuck Off’ day.