This week, an American survey concluded that long working hours increased an individual's chances of illness and injury. It noted that for those doing 12 hours a day, there was a 37% increase in risk compared to those working fewer hours.

Ronald Reagan was wrong, it seems, when he said: "Hard work never killed anyone." Death from overwork is not a new phenomenon in Britain but it is largely unremarked upon.

In 2003, Sid Watkins, a paediatrician who was exhausted after working up to 100 hours a week, died after injecting himself with anaesthetic in an attempt to cope with his workload. The coroner at Dr Watkins' inquest described the hours he had to work as "crazy".

In 1994, the parents of Alan Massie, a junior doctor who collapsed and died after working an 86-hour week at a Cheshire hospital, claimed that their 27-year-old son was worked to death. He had worked seven days and three nights, including two unbroken periods of 27 hours and one of 24 hours.

In the same year, British Airways pilot David Robertson, 52, died while flying. Work stress and long working hours were implicated.

The American study, published in Occupational and Environmental Medicine, points out that overtime and extended work schedules are associated with an increased risk of hypertension, cardiovascular disease, fatigue, stress, depression, musculoskeletal disorders, chronic infections, diabetes and other general health complaints. In Japan, most karoshi victims succumb to brain aneurisms, strokes and heart attack.

Professor Cary Cooper, a stress expert at Lancaster University Management School, says the risk is not just confined to those who work more than 60 hours but hits those that put in more than 45.

"If you work consistently long hours, over 45 a week every week, it will damage your health, physically and psychologically. In the UK we have the second-longest working hours in the developed world, just behind the States and we now have longer hours than Japan," he says.

Prof Cooper advocates "working smarter", not longer, and introducing flexibility into the workplace.

He acknowledges that the Department of Trade and Industry is trying to encourage business to adopt such practices, but it is a slow process.

Derek Simpson, the general secretary of Amicus, the manufacturing, technical and skilled persons' union, agrees with Prof Cooper. "UK employees work the longest hours in Europe, yet all the evidence shows that long working hours are bad for our health, equality, our families and for society. People's jobs are by far the biggest single cause of stress, and stress-related illness is the silent killer in our workplaces, impacting on workers' physical and mental health.

"As well as being bad for individuals, our long-hours culture is also bad for business because lower working hours relate directly to higher productivity. It is no coincidence that the UK has the least-regulated economy in Europe and is the least productive in the industrialised world.

"Yet while other European governments are aiming to reduce weekly working hours below the working-time directive limit of 48 hours, our government is still desperately trying to keep the opt-out."

In a survey, Amicus found that almost one in five workers was put off sex because of long hours. The union found a third of people said they didn't have enough time to spend with partners or children. Community work, socialising, personal fitness and hobbies all lost out to excessive working hours.

Earlier this month, the law firm Peninsula published a survey of 1,800 employers. It found that four out of five of them worked more than 60 hours a week and revealed that seven out of 10 got only four hours' sleep a night.

In her recent book Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives, the Guardian writer Madeleine Bunting points out that Britain's full-time workers put in the longest hours in Europe at 43.6 a week compared with the EU average of 40.3. The number of people working over 48 hours has more than doubled since 1998, from 10% to 26%. And one in six of all workers is doing more than 60 hours.

Roger Vincent, a spokesman for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents, says that overwork inevitably leads to lapses in concentration and therefore accidents.

"Between a third and a quarter of all road accidents are in some way work-related. That means that somewhere between 800 and 1,000 deaths each year on Britain's roads are to do with somebody driving or being on the road as a result of their jobs."

In 1987, the Japanese ministry of labour acknowledged that it had a problem with death from overwork and began to publish statistics on karoshi. In 2001, the numbers reached a record level with 143 workers dying. Now, death-by-overwork lawsuits are common, with the victims' families demanding compensation payments. In 2002-03, 160 out of 819 claimants received compensation.

The health and safety magazine Hazards has continually warned that karoshi does exist in the UK. It said: "In July 2003 the government proposed abolishing the mandatory retirement of 65 years. The old notion that "we work to live, not live to work" could soon be superseded by "we work until we drop".

Nose to the grindstone in Europe's sweatshop

· The UK's long-hours culture means that on average many of us are now working a 43.6-hour week. Our counterparts in the rest of Europe do 40.3 hours

· The last seven years have seen a significant rise in the number of employees working in excess of 48 hours a week, rising from 10% in the late 90s to 26% now

· Women in the workforce have also experienced changes to their work pattern. Since 1992 there has been a leap of 52% in the number of women expected to do 48 hours a week

· The number of people working a long week has also jumped. Estimates from 2000 -2002 suggest that those clocking up 60 hours a week have increased by a third, which equates to one sixth of the UK labour force.

· We may be working more hours but many of us waste the opportunity to take time off. Recent surveys estimate that only 44% of workers use up their full entitlement to annual leave. Reasons cited for not taking paid holiday often include a heavy workload or fear of upsetting the boss

· The right to take a full hour for lunch seems at odds with our modern workplaces, with 65% of UK workers not using the full 60 minutes.The average time for a break is now 27 minutes, and more of us remain at our workstation

Source: Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture is Ruling Our Lives, by Madeleine Bunting

Links:

Occupational and Environmental Medicine

Amicus on work hours