Recent international studies have highlighted considerable variations in hours of work between countries as well as the high percentage of people who are working excessively long hours.

As demographic changes bring about the aging of populations in most developed countries, employers will increasingly come under pressure to offer terms and conditions of employment that meet worker preferences. One of these preferences is for shorter working hours – studies conducted in the late 1990s revealed that around 50% of workers in Europe and the U.S. would like to work fewer hours, and a 2006 study of 16 European countries found that employees wanted to reduce their average working hours by 3.7 to 34 hours. There has been a decline in working hours in many countries in the past few decades. But this has slowed in recent years, and there have even been recent increases in average working hours in a few countries including the U.S. and Sweden.

The Numbers

Among OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries for which working time data from 2006 are available, South Korea stands out as having by far the longest average weekly working hours, at 48.8, followed by Greece with average weekly hours of 43.2. In contrast, the Netherlands had the lowest average working week at 30.7 hours, followed by Norway at 33.8 hours. Most Western European countries had average weekly working hours of between 36 and 38.

Average annual hours are sometimes regarded as a more reliable comparative measure of working time since these take into account differences in paid leave provision between countries. On this measure, South Korea again ranked most highly among OECD countries with an average of 2,305 hours. The U.S., which ranked sixth out of 27 OECD countries, had the highest average annual working hours of all western countries at 1,804, while Japan came in ninth with 1,784 hours, Canada thirteenth with 1,738 hours and the UK sixteenth with 1,669 hours.

Of course, average figures often conceal wide variations in average hours worked within individual countries. According to a recent International Labour Organization (ILO) report, more than a fifth of all workers globally, or over 600 million workers, are regularly working more than 48 hours a week either because of their own financial need or the demands of their employers. Peru and South Korea were the countries with the highest rates of long-hours working – around half of all workers in these two countries were working in excess of 48 hours per week. Among developed countries, the UK was reported to have the highest percentage of workers working more than 48 hours a week, at 25.7%, while the corresponding figure for the U.S. was 18.1%.

What is becoming more common is for employers to allow their workers more flexibility in the times at which they start and finish work within a specified range of core working hours. A recent U.S. study reported that more than 42% of employees can choose their own working hours within a specified range of core working time, representing an increase from 29% in 1992. Within the EU, it is reported that around a quarter of employees have some flexibility in their hours of work.

Laws and Customs

Average working hours in different countries are influenced by a number of factors including employment legislation, collective agreements and cultural traditions. For example, the relatively low average hours worked in many Western European countries and the small range of variation between them can be largely attributed to the impact of the EU Working Time Directive (1993) which imposed a maximum 48-hour working week and mandatory rest and leave periods and to the extensive use of collective agreements in European workplaces. The longer hours worked in the UK compared with many other European countries reflects the fairly low coverage of collective agreements there. South Korea, where working hours are longest, is an example of a country where cultural traditions are very influential, especially the authoritarian work culture in which it is unacceptable to leave the workplace before one’s boss.

Working time legislation has been used in the past as an economic policy tool to tackle unemployment and boost economic growth, notably by France where a 35-hour maximum working week law was passed in 2000. The rationale behind this was that working time restrictions would encourage employers to create additional jobs to meet their operational needs and boost output. However, there is little evidence that working time restrictions have any impact on unemployment and economic growth; some researchers have explained this in terms of the unknown relationship between working hours and work effort or the question of whether worker productivity is higher when hours of work are shorter.

Some observers have linked the higher productivity increases experienced by the U.S. compared with other developed countries in recent years to long working hours. Yet there is no clear association between productivity and average working hours either: for example, in a study of the Group of Eight (G8) nations, although the U.S. was ranked most highly in terms of productivity, it was followed by France, where average working hours are significantly lower.

Part II, to be published tomorrow, will examine trends and international differences in the use of non-standard working arrangements such as part-time and temporary work and fixed-term contracts.