Brian Bebek is lucky he loves his job because he’ll likely spend much more time doing it this year. The materials inspector employed by a Burnaby engineering firm worked an average of 55 to 60 hours a week in 2013. He expects these hours to increase in 2014 as activity ramps up at the large Vancouver building projects where he monitors structural and material quality. As he drives his pickup from site to site, Bebek is accompanied by Skye, his miniature Australian Shepherd. Bebek, 39, is nominally the one who gets paid for the job. But two-year-old Skye appears to believe Bebek can’t handle the long days unless he comes along. “He gets mad if I don’t take him with me and he lets me know it,” Bebek says. Bebek sometimes feels as if he’s “the only person who spent their professional life running a marathon with no sign of the finish line in sight.” But he and Skye won’t be the only B.C. residents to work like dogs this year. Workplace experts predict Canadians will spend more time on the job as workloads mount, people remain nervous about their jobs and employers increasingly expect employees to answer emails and texts at any time of day. WORKING LONGER AND HARDER Welcome to 2014, a year in which many of us, from employees to business owners, will work longer and harder than ever. When 2013 ended, almost 70 per cent of North Americans had not taken all of their vacation time, says Right Management, which ­advises companies around the world on workforce issues. A separate survey by Expedia.ca found that 52 per cent of B.C. residents have cancelled vacations because of work, making them the most likely group of Canadians to do so. Right Management spokeswoman Margaret-Ann Cole predicts that the big chunk of North Americans who abandon vacation time in 2014 will remain the same. During the 2008 recession, when companies were laying off large numbers of people, fearful employees felt they had to be tied to their desks, Cole says. “It became a habit in which fewer and fewer people take vacations. Social media makes it really hard for those who do to turn off and cleanly go on vacation,” Cole says. “People are working longer. They may not be physically in the office but they are taking work home. If you did a poll and asked people, they would answer ‘yes,’ they are working longer.” Overall family work hours have been on the rise, according to StatsCan. The combined weekly work hours of Canadian couples jumped to 64.8 in 2008 from 57.6 in 1976 — the equivalent of almost another full day of work per week, the federal agency says. Still, overworked Canadians with good jobs may wish to count their blessings. Carleton University business professor Linda Duxbury says Canada’s workforce is splintering into three groups: knowledge workers (professionals and managers who work long hours); lower-end service-sector workers who cobble together several part-time jobs; and jobless people displaced by automation or outsourcing, unable to find any work for which they’re qualified.

The upper and lower ends of the pay spectrum are both working longer, Duxbury says. At the low end, workers stitch different jobs together to make ends meet. “My data says one in five Canadians has more than one job,” she says. “That tends to be people with lower pay who need every available hour to survive.” People at the upper end of the pay scale are not only working longer, they’re working harder as employers’ demands become more complex, Duxbury says. Employers want workers to be available throughout the day and night. Work increasingly leaks into family time, forcing parents to “outsource” family responsibilities. They pay for child care, buy meals instead of cook them and send kids to camp rather than take vacations as a family, she says. GREATER DEMANDS Work is intensifying as employees are expected to constantly upgrade their skills, whether or not the company trains them, Duxbury says. And they are being overloaded with difficult tasks. “We’re being expected to do too many things at the same time,” she says. “I hear all the time from people that tell their employers, ‘You asked me to do A, B and C and all are due tomorrow. Which do you want me to do first?’ “The answer is: ‘I want you to do all of them.’ ” Employers’ inability to set priorities and boundaries for employees carries a cost for organizations and individuals, Duxbury and other experts warn. Work-life balance expert Beverly Beuermann-King says the consequences of stress caused by overwork range from headaches to heart attacks. “We see higher rates of burnout and depression and mental illness,” Ontario-based Beuermann-King says. “It can also be something as simple as people being more moody, more edgy, not using the social niceties at work. That can lead to more conflict and that, in turn, has impacts on productivity and absenteeism.” Christian Codrington, a senior manager with the B.C. Human Resources Management Association, suggests that many people have become obsessed with work — and obsessed with appearing to work hard by emailing late in the day or in the wee hours of the morning. Both of these obsessions blur the borders between work and family life, hurting personal and organizational well-being, he says. Codrington’s association offers organizations the ability to track employees’ absences for health or personal reasons. “Since the inception of the service in 2009, there has been a consistent increase in the average absence from 5.8 days a year to 7.1 days in 2013,” Codrington says. “We estimate that for every day lost it costs employers an average of $371/day in direct labour and benefit costs.” WORK CONSUMES LIFE Robert (his name has been changed to protect his privacy), a mid-level tourism industry worker in Vancouver, says work has consumed his life. In the busy spring and summer season, he works 60 to 90 hours a week. Even a brief vacation is out of the question. His employer has begun to track his email activity to make sure he remains logged in during his “off” hours.