In Greece, people work more days than anywhere else in the European Union, with an average of 42.3 hours per week, according to Eurostat. In the EU, the country with the most weekly hours recorded is Romania, which had an average of 40.5 per week. In second place is Bulgaria, which averaged 40.4 hours per week. That said, both Romania and Bulgaria fall in the highest positions on the chart above.
The longest working week was in Greece (42.3 hours) and the shortest in the Netherlands (30.3 hours), including full-time and part-time employment. When only full-time employees were taken into account, those in the United Kingdom spent most of their time on the job (42.3 hours), followed by Cyprus (41.1 hours), Austria (41.4 hours) and Greece (41.2 hours). Romania, the United Kingdom and the Czech Republic have the largest number of employees in stable jobs. Romania, the United Kingdom, the Czech Republic and Germany ranked first, while Croatia, France, Spain, Poland and Slovenia had the highest number of people in short-term employment.
As we can see, the country that works the most hours per person is Greece, with 39 hours. As some of you have pointed out below, a better indicator of the work done may be productivity, and that does show a different picture. If we look at productivity per hour worked, through Eurostat, the United Kingdom is in the middle, with Greece much lower in the group. The leaders are Luxembourg and the Netherlands, and France and Germany are in the first division.
Last month, Amazon announced plans to test a program in which a few dozen employees will work only 30 hours a week. In return, they will receive 75% of their normal salary and keep all benefits. Finally, the report revealed that Africa has the largest number of countries in which more than one third of the workforce works more than 48 hours per week. The proportion of people in precarious employment was also high in the EU candidate countries, Montenegro and Turkey.
Therefore, the OECD report does not provide any information on working hours in non-OECD countries. European countries establish legal rights to at least 20 days of paid leave per year (some even increase to 25 or even 30 or more days). Using the same method, Marian also calculated how many hours were worked in other countries outside Europe. The BBC report mentioned above also found that 34% of countries in the Americas and the Caribbean do not have a universal limit on weekly hours.
In contrast, workers in low- and middle-income countries in Asia, Africa and the Americas not only work longer hours, but also suffer lower wages, greater job insecurity (higher unemployment rates), “labor poverty” (poverty despite regular employment) and have fewer guaranteed leave. Most countries in the world have laws that set the maximum length of the working week, except for the United States. Many countries, such as India, also do not have a legally guaranteed minimum amount of annual leave, a factor that affects the average annual hours worked by people in the workforce. A new working paper, detected by Quartz, analyzes the average annual working hours per person in 18 European countries and the US.
UU. These figures contrast sharply with those in Europe, where most countries have legally stipulated that a working week be limited to 48 hours. Like Germany, workers in the Netherlands and 4 in the highly developed Nordic countries of Iceland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden also enjoy short working weeks of 27 to 28 hours. However, the United States is one of 13 countries that do not guarantee paid time off, and employers are allowed to provide leave.
At the other end of the scale, data show that the Dutch, famous for having the best work-life balance in all OECD countries, have the shortest week, recording an average of only 30.3 hours. When considering countries outside the EU, Turkey, which stretches between Southeast Europe and West Asia, has the longest working week, recording a staggering 49.4 hours per week on average. . .
