DATE: Thursday, March 6, 1997               TAG: 9703060530

SECTION: BUSINESS                PAGE: D1   EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY LON WAGNER, STAFF WRITER 

                                            LENGTH:   44 lines

VIRGINIANS ARE WORKERS OVERTIME, BUT AFTER-HOURS LABOR MAY SUFFER

Virginia workers during the past couple of years have been clocking longer hours and collecting more overtime pay than ever before.

The state's average manufacturing worker in December labored through work weeks that were 42 minutes longer than just a month earlier, according to the Virginia Employment Commission. The 43.4-hour average work week was an all-time record.

But a new survey suggests some of those extra hours are less than productive.

Sixty eight percent of workers surveyed recently by The Gallup Organization said they were most productive during regular work hours. Only 14 percent said they were most productive before regular work hours, and 11 percent said they were more productive after regular hours.

Workers younger than age 29 were more likely to do a better job after hours (18 percent) than were employees more than 50 years old (6 percent), according to the Gallup survey done for the ``Profiles of the American Worker'' series.

The survey's margin of error was plus or minus 4 percent, Gallup said.

The work week in Virginia has been getting longer since the state's economy started recovering from the 1990-1991 recession, said William F. Mezger, senior economist at the VEC.

``The normal pattern used to be that when you started to come out of a recession, the work week would increase because employers were testing the waters before they went out and hired new workers,'' Mezger said.

That's no longer the case. The state and national economies have been in recovery mode for 6 years now and companies seem to have settled on working their existing employees longer, he said.

One reason: in the early part of the recovery the cost of health care benefits was skyrocketing. Companies concluded it was cheaper to pay employees overtime than to add to their payrolls and pay fringe benefits.

There's also a possibility that workers need the overtime pay - whether they're logging their most productive time or not.

Wage increases during this economic recovery have hovered slightly between 2.5 percent and 3 percent annually, Mezger said. That's only slightly higher than the inflation rate.

``Since wages haven't gone up as fast as in previous recoveries,'' Mezger said, ``workers are more willing to work overtime.''

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