Australia might be one of the best places in the world to live, according to OECD data released this week, but it is also one of the most unequal when it comes to working hours.

The latest census data shows Australia has become an increasingly divided nation between those working too much and those working too little.

An analysis of working hours shows the overall amount of full-time hours Australians work has slightly decreased since 2004 with Australians working an average of 32 hours a week. But these figures hide growing inequality in the labour market between overworked and the underworked.

Kirsty Leslie, director of the labour market national statistics centre at the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), told Guardian Australia: “The average hours have decreased slightly in 10 or so years but it’s not a large decrease. There is a marked difference in distribution. A greater share of people are working long hours of 41 plus and, similarly for those working fewer hours, of 15 hours or fewer.”

One in six or almost 1.7 million employees work 49 hours or more each week according to the ABS.

“If you are looking at long-term trends in underemployment and overemployment, currently more people are under-employed than unemployed. They [the underemployed] say they want to work more hours and are available to work more,” said Leslie.

Prof Mark Wooden of the University of Melbourne has spent his career studying Australia’s working habits.

“[Currently] Australia has a polarised pattern. There are quite a lot of people working long hours. Now it’s much harder to record working time as people take work home. Every Sunday I log on to my work computer and check my uni emails. I almost see this as leisure,” he said.

Knowledge workers, the white-collar employees whose working hours can be extended through technology are more likely to be victim of overwork. “Lots of white-collar workers have creeping working hours. Some people have lost control of their working lives due to technology,” says Wooden. Often this work is unpaid.

In Melbourne, Ashleigh McInnes returns home after an 11-hour working day, bringing with her “my Ultra Book computer and USB”.

She will make dinner and then do some further work, before taking her laptop to bed with her.

“It’s a bad habit but if I stir during the night, I check my emails. But I’m worried if I focus too much on my emails then the light on my phone stays on and its harder to get to sleep,” said the 28-year-old, who works in PR.

Her work hours, which bleed across timezones, are in excess of 65 hours a week.

Meanwhile, Kate Carson, 38, is doing the rounds of cafes in the Caulfield area, putting up handwritten signs: “VCE tutoring from university teacher.”

Her hours teaching communications at a Melbourne University were recently cut. She did the sums and this year she’ll be lucky to clear $15,000 from teaching. She’s hoping to make up the shortfall by taking on private students, but she’s worried about the precarious position she’s found herself in: not working enough to make a full-time wage, not unemployed and therefore eligible for benefits.

At Job Watch in Melbourne, staff field calls from workers unsure about their legal rights and entitlements at work.

Zana Bytheway, the managing director of the community legal centre, said Job Watch received around 600 calls a year from Victorians who have had their hours slashed.

“It’s been a consistent and recurring problem,” said Bytheway. That morning Job Watch received a call from a driver who works for a wholesaler. His case is not unusual: he came back from holidays and found his hours had been reduced from 45 hours per week to 32 hours.

Wooden said unskilled workers were more likely to work standard hours. He added: “They are also more unhappy about working increased hours.”

Long working hours are more pervasive in Australia than Europe, according to Wooden. “If you go to a German university,” he said, “no one is there at 5-5:30pm. When we compare ourselves to Europeans, Australians are strivers.”

Why? Wooden threw his hands in the air. “Australians want stuff! I think that we are very materialistic.”

The growth of working hours within households – that is the combined hours of both partners in a family – “is only making things worse with income inequality”, he said.

There has been a cultural and organisational preoccupation with “work/life balance” in Australia over the last 15 years. But mention the phrase to Sputnik – an Adelaide-based boss of an advertising agency – and he scoffs and says: “It’s a unicorn.”

“Clients don’t think anything of texting me at 9pm at night. Now I don’t feel as if I ever really switch off. In Nepal last year I was running an ultra-marathon. It’s 212k and we go to the mountains and I lost a signal on my phone and I was worried because I couldn’t contact people about a project.”

Sputnik said an increase in working hours was due to technology and as a result of structural and legislative changes, as well as shrinking margins.

“Everything from governance to the administrative side has multiplied over the years. Budgets are tighter and competing for smaller jobs has been harder,” he said. “It feels like we are working more hours for less money.”

To work fewer hours, or be less available, would be dealing himself out of the game.

Frederic Chanut, a 29-year-old who runs a tech business from Sydney said instead of seeing long working hours as a problem, we should embrace the slog as it makes us more competitive.

“The majority of Australians don’t take their job seriously,” he said. “At 5pm they turn off their computers – no matter how bad the business is doing. The majority of Australians don’t realise that every person will be judged on a global scale. I am able to hire a PhD from India for $3 an hour.”

Frederic, a French-born Australian citizen estimates he works more than 60 hours a week.

“The reason I overwork is because I struggle to delegate but also because the cost of labour in Australia is so high,” he said. “It makes more sense for me to do the extra hours than to pay for someone. I will burn my margin and spend more time looking after the person.”

But is he looking after himself?

“My big hours are taking a toll,” he admitted. “I have put on 10 kilos because I’m not going to the gym or rugby training. I’m eating at my desk, working extra hours at night. I have a second dinner to keep me awake. It’s taking a toll on my body, I can see that.”

He may see his girlfriend for a couple of hours in the evening but “my toll has been social life. Friends have been asking, ‘where the hell is Freddy?’”

“I might be a bit of a workaholic,” he said with only the faintest hint of understatement.

Ashleigh McInnes believes that long hours are the path to freedom – both financial and in terms of career options. The resumes that pile up at the PR agency serve as a sort of warning of what life could be like if she wasn’t such a striver.

She is inundated by keen graduates biding their time in barista jobs or in retail, desperate for professional experience or an internship that will get them out of the underemployed, over-qualified rut.

So maybe it’s time we stop demonising over-work?

“For most people, work adds an incredible amount of meaning in their life,” said Wooden. “People’s whole sense of being is based on it. You meet Australians in a social setting it’s ‘What do you do?’”

“You have a two-speed economy, now you have a two-speed competitiveness environment,” said Chanut about the divide between the overworked and the underemployed. “You have people who have been trained and worked in long hours and can do it and are willing, and you have another group who will just not cut it. There is an issue with the attractiveness of the country within the region. Look at South Koreans and Japanese: big working hours are part of the culture. Aussies are smart but choose the path of least resistance when it comes to long hours. Within the new dynamic of the Asian century that might be a problem.”