FOUR in 10 workers are putting in a full extra shift every week. And they are not getting paid for the extra hours.

In strict economic terms this is an increase in the rate of exploitation. And the fact that many employers get away with it reflects the imbalance in class power.

One measure of this ever-shifting balance of power is the number of workers in trade unions. Another is the proportion of workers in the labour force covered by collective agreements between trade unions and employers or employers’ organisations.

Yet another is the level of corporate profits, which is always an expression of profit’s relationship with wages.

Just to be clear about the idea of exploitation (and to dispel the many myths peddled about it) all paid work under capitalism is exploited.

If we think of profits as that portion of the values we create with our labour that goes to the employer and not to to us, we can easily work out that if an employer cannot realise a profit from our work then that work would no longer be available.

When this happens to an individual worker it is personal problem. When it happens to a group of workers it is a collective problem. When it happens to workers across many sectors of the economy it is a class and societal problem.

An old trade union principle is grounded in the recognition that overtime — welcome though it might be if paid and and necessary to meet the rising cost of living — is always an intensification of labour and, across the economy as a whole, represents jobs lost and many an unemployed worker left on the dole.

Unpaid overtime is thus doubly destructive. It weakens the idea that work is a contractural arrangement between employer and worker. Not that anyone actually believes that employers and workers meet as equals in the marketplace.

But it also destroys any semblance of dignity at work. It is the expression in the crudest terms of the power that employers exercise in a capitalist economy.

What can we expect from this new government?

TUC leader Paul Nowak said he wants to see a realisation of the hopes raised by Labour’s election win in 2024 and Labour’s promise turned into delivery in 2025.

In fact he put it at the lowest level of expectation: “Families want to feel better off and see material improvements in their day-to-day lives.”

The Labour government wants something rather different. Anticipating an inflation rate rise of 2.6 per cent, ministers have fixed upon the marginally different figure of 2.8 per cent as the level at which they recommend pay settlements could achieve.

When Nowak says this is not a serious figure, he is giving voice to the incontestable fact that this will neither meet the expectations of workers across the corporate economy, where runaway profits underpin stock market speculation, or meet the mounting recruitment crisis in the public services.

Of course the intensive work of many in the NHS and the public services only indirectly contributes to the realisation of corporate profits but no profits would be made if every facet of our collective existence was dependent on the charity of those who live by rent, interest and the work of others.

And when both private-sector and public service workers are forced into unpaid overtime it is just one more sign that the private ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange must end and be replaced by a system where only socially necessary work is available and the product of our labour returns in the form of the social wage.