Your Sept. 17 news article about "overtime fatigue" correctly identifies many of the problems unaddressed by federal and state laws regulating overtime work (like employers' mandating increasingly unrealistic and dangerously excessive hours of work).
These can be further broken down into subcategories (e.g. working conditions), which can be measured by indicators (e.g. excessive hours of work).
Ms. Soyster recalled the case of a company that tracked employees' movements within the building electronically and discovered that an especially unproductive employee spent excessive hours at work.
"At present, violations of employees' rights in private firms are to some extent widespread," the federation wrote, with problems including the refusal of companies to sign labor contracts, illegal docking of wages, excessive hours, terrible work conditions and frequent injuries.
Additionally, human rights issues within the production of clothing and textiles, including forced and child labor, low wages, excessive hours of work with unpaid overtime, health and safety hazards, and lack of worker representation for negotiations with management also generate serious social and economic sustainability challenges.
Substantial opportunities for employment and income gains exist, but: "Global value chain pressures are [also] associated with increasing casualization of labour and excessive hours of work" [ 54](p. 25).
The Guardian, which interviewed workers in Dhaka, confirmed the allegations of excessive hours and poor working conditions in the report.
In this study, while half the men worked longer working hours and one third excessive working hours less than half the women worked up to full time hours, 38% worked longer hours, and only 15% worked excessive hours (Table 1).
In contrast, men with longer working hours have a mean BMI that 1.37 units higher than those working up to full time, and increasing in stepwise fashion, those working excessive hours have a mean BMI that is 1.88 units higher than those working up to full time.
