Supplementary memorandum by the British
Hospitality Association
Working Time Directive Opt-out Survey
INTRODUCTION
At the end of January/start of February 2004,
the British Hospitality Association, the national association
for the hotel, restaurant and catering industry, circulated a
brief survey to members, seeking information on their use of the
"48 hour opt-out." The survey is reproduced as an attachment
to this note.
With a short timescale for completion, responses
were inevitably mostly from single site businesses. In all, 176
useable responses were received from businesses with a total of
84,588 non-agency workers, about 4.7 per cent of the hospitality
industry's 1.8 million workforce; several other responses were
either illegible or did not give answers to certain questions.
OPTED-OUT
OR NOT?
Of the 176 respondent businesses, 42, with a
total of 6,153 employees answered "nil" to question
2—they did not have any opted-out staff. The other 134 businesses,
with a total of 78,435 employees, had opted-out staff. The total
number who had signed opt-outs was 29,327.
OVER 48 HOURS
OR NOT?
Of the 134 with opted-out staff, 35, with a
total of 5,739 employees, of whom 4,684 had signed opt-outs, stated
that nobody consistently exceeded 48 hours. The other 99, with
a total of 72,696 employees, of whom 24,643 had signed opt-outs,
stated that some of their staff did regularly exceed 48 hours,
but this only applied to 6,039 of them.
THE WHOLE
INDUSTRY
In other words, of the 84,588 workers covered
by the survey, some 29,327 (34.7 per cent) had signed opt-outs,
but only 6,039 (7.1 per cent) of these were consistently exceeding
48 hours. Making no allowance for sample bias (with businesses
with opted-out staff more likely to respond), this would gross
up to about 127,000 hospitality workers (out of 1.8 million) consistently
exceeding 48 hours. This is consistent with a Summer 2002 survey,
carried out jointly with the British Beer and Pub Association,
and Business in Sport and Leisure, in which 19,854 (7.3 per cent)
of the 271,415 employees covered by the survey in hospitality,
brewing and leisure regularly exceeded 48 hours.
As around half of the hospitality workforce
is part-time, these figures suggest that around 14 per cent—one
in seven—of hospitality full-timers consistently exceed
48 hours.
However, it appears that, while around one-third
of the hospitality workforce (equal therefore to two-thirds of
full-timers) has signed an opt-out, fewer than a quarter of those
opted-out exceed 48 hours.
SIGNING THE
OPT-OUT
Of the 134 respondents with opted-out staff,
51 issued the opt-out for employee signature in the standard contract
of employment, 33 issued with the contract as a separate document,
24 issued it during the induction process, 25 issued it on an
ad hoc basis when individual need was identified and 1
issued it "via a work representative."
RECORDS OF
WORKING HOURS
Of the 134 respondents with opted-out staff,
115 kept records of working hours for all employees (whether opted-out
or not), two kept records only of those who had not signed the
individual opt-out, 15 kept records of hourly paid employees,
one did not respond and one indicated that no records were kept.
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