Despite the pandemic, employees in Germany worked 1.67 billion hours of overtime last year.

This emerges from a response from the Federal Government to a request from the left in the Bundestag, available to the German Press Agency.

The number of overtime hours has decreased compared to the previous year, as can be seen from the data from the Institute for Employment Research.

At that time it had totaled 1.86 billion.

But little has changed in terms of overtime as a percentage of the workload.

It was 3.2 percent.

That was only 0.3 percentage points less than in the previous year.

More than half of the overtime - 892 million - was unpaid.

While paid overtime decreased by 15.4 percent compared to the previous year, unpaid overtime only fell by 5.8 percent.

According to the figures, the share of overtime in the volume of work for part-time employees is 3.6 percent higher than for full-time employees with 3.1 percent.

"Overtime for free"

The left-wing MP Jessica Tatti, who had requested the figures, told the dpa: "The employees simply have more work on the table than they can manage in the contractual working hours." Year after year, employees worked overtime for free.

"It pays off for employers. You save tens of billions in wages every year."

Tatti called on the federal government to make the recording requirement mandatory.

“It cannot be that some work until they drop, while others are stuck involuntarily part-time or cannot find a job.” The reduction in the maximum weekly working hours is therefore also indicated.