The Organisation of Working Time Act 1997 (OWT Act) is arguably the most difficult piece of employment legislation on the statute book to fully comply with and it troubles Operations Managers, Human Resource personnel and lawyers alike in terms of both monitoring and arguing such compliance. Whilst it provides a wide range of minimum entitlements to employees, it simultaneously potentially qualifies some of these rights by allowing for a number of exemptions and instances where exceptional circumstances may be argued by an employer to present as a justification for not adhering to its terms. This legislation is possibly best known for imposing a maximum number of weekly hours that an employee may be asked to work, averaged over a reference