THEY work every hour God sends. We all know someone that old saying applies to.

Sometimes, it’s by choice. If you are one of the lucky ones – as I have always been – with a job that’s useful and fulfilling, putting in the extra hour or squeezing in the extra meeting isn’t a chore. Whether the people who have to work with you think the same is another story, of course.

But some people don’t have a choice. People in low-paid jobs often have no alternative to working long hours for little reward. Ironically they are the people who do the jobs the rest of us rarely think about that prevent society grinding to a halt. They are the people, to use another old saying, who know the meaning of hard work.

One recent survey suggested the average working week was now 41 hours with one-inseven doing 11 hours overtime a week – most of it unpaid. I am pretty sure necessity drives those people back to the office, factory or shop floor night after night.

While they’re there they are probably too busy to think about some newcomers to the working community – the underemployed.

It’s an odd word and you probably won’t have heard it too often, but I suspect that as the economy continues to flat-line, it’s one we will become more familiar with. Maybe we’ll even experience underemployment.

Basically, it means that there are a lot of people – around one-in-ten workers – who have a job, but are contracted to work fewer hours than they want to. Again, these three million are the cleaners, the cooks and the caterers doing the essentials for the minimum wage.

There are more of them because a lot of firms have cut hours rather than sack people and this, I believe, is a humane and sensible way of dealing with the hard times we face. But, make no mistake, there are other reasons too.

Flexibility is a word that’s mentioned time and again when we’re talking about jobs these days. We have to adapt to survive, be more competitive, be more like the fabled “tiger economies” of the emerging world. We get a lot of these lectures these days, mainly from people whose own output, work rate and productivity wouldn’t bear too close inspection.

Because flexibility means different things to different people. It is no good telling someone they have to work harder and then limiting the hours they can work or condemning them to a series of short-term, low-paid insecure jobs that give them no security, no prospects and, worst of all, no dignity.

Dignity. That is a word that’s almost disappeared from the working dictionary. We should all be doing something to reinstate it.

Like it or not, for most of us the secure job that lasted a lifetime is a thing of the past.

We are in new territory. Whether we make that a civilised and fair place to live or a dogeat- dog world is up to us. It needs employers, particularly the bigger ones who set an example, unions and the Government to bring some order to what is becoming a free-for-all.

People don’t forget. Images and memories of days when casual labour blighted this and other regions, and men begged for work at factories and docks, still haunt many communities.

No amount of fancy words or sermons will prevent those days returning unless the new world of work signs up to a fairer deal in which workers at the margin are treated better.