This does not mean that a working week can never exceed 48 hours; it is the average that is important. PWT sources its working hours data from The Conference Board’s Total Economy Database (TED). Unpaid family work in this case generally includes market-oriented work, such as for the family business, but not other unpaid work at home such as childcare, cooking, and cleaning. While this may sound exhausting, many nurses enjoy working longer hours in a day and fewer days in a week. Public sector workers usually start and finish earlier. As we show in detail in our entry on Crop Yields, innovations like better machinery, crop varieties, fertilizers, and land management have enabled farmers to be much more productive. Countries like Cambodia (which is the country in the very top-left corner) or Myanmar have some of the lowest GDP per capita but highest working hours. According to official statistics on working hours in Canada, employed Canadians worked an average of 36.6 hours per week in 2012, with significant variation depending on age, gender and location. Working Hours – Ramadan. Of course, the data is not perfect — as we explain in a forthcoming post, measuring working hours with accuracy is difficult, and surveys and historical records have limitations, so estimates of working hours spanning centuries necessarily come with a margin of error. Invisible Geniuses: Could the Knowledge Frontier Advance Faster? The hours that an individual works in Working less means being able to spend time becoming more educated, or simply enjoying leisure time. Select the original table, and then click the Insert > PivotTabe. We see that in the chart here, with GDP per capita on the horizontal axis and annual working hours per worker on the vertical axis. The state’s average full-time worker spent 40.7 hours a week at work in the August 2016 quarter, 0.8 hours less than 10 years earlier but still slightly more than the national average of 40.6 hours. For instance, people in Qatar have an average income that is 129-times higher than that of people in the Central African Republic. Establishment surveys collect data on employment and working hours as reported by employers.18 But because hours are reported by employers, these surveys often only cover paid or contractual hours and exclude self-employment, informal work, and some smaller firms.19 On the other hand, establishment surveys provide more detail on the industry of work than other surveys, and are more consistent with how GDP is measured, making them useful for studying labor productivity. Since the Industrial Revolution people in many countries have become richer, and working hours have decreased dramatically over these last 150 years. There is a link between national income and average working hours, not only across countries at a given point in time — as shown in the chart above — but also for individual countries over time. Labor force surveys collect data on employment status and time spent working by asking individual workers themselves. Working patterns depend on the company and nature of the work. Do workers in richer countries work longer hours? Also individuals must not be required, against their wishes, to work an average of more than 48 hours a week. How are working hours actually measured? The normal hours of work an employee has to render must not exceed eight (8) hours a day and should be exclusive of the one (1) hour daily lunch break. There are however some exceptions to this average period. But there are still large differences between countries: workers in poorer countries tend to work much more than workers in richer countries. There are special restrictions, or rather protection provisions, for women in the industrial or agricultural sector. It was a medium size enterprise. According to a recent survey, accounting and finance professionals spend slightly less time at work than average, at 44 hours per week compared with 44.6 hours for the general workforce. To get the most comprehensive perspective on working hours possible, many countries aggregate data from these surveys with data from other sources — such as censuses, tax records, and social security registers — in an economic measurement framework called national accounts. 126.4K views View 11 Upvoters The Next Generation of the Penn World Table. As expected, there are differences between the sources. But is that really the case? Your employees must be given at least 11 consecutive hours of daily rest and at least 24 hours of uninterrupted weekly rest every 7 days, over a reference period of 2 weeks. FTPT employment based on national definitions. The study, of 1000 British office workers, found a staggering 64 percent of respondents said that they believe they could fit their day’s work into a shorter period of time. This is why to compare recent working hours levels in the US and Europe, Bick et al. Full-time Part-time employment. Below is a simplified data model as the key relationship is a summarized Periodic Fact table containing hours worked by person/charge #/pay period with a many-to-one relationship with a Pay Period dimension … While the incidence of child labor has been going down over time, especially in high-income countries, there are still an estimated 265 million working children in the world (almost 17% of the worldwide child population). The per person measure corresponds to working hours per worker multiplied by the employment rate. Those with a bachelor’s degree or higher worked 8.0 hours per day, while those with a high school diploma worked the most on an average day: 8.2 hours. All visualizations, data, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. FTPT employment based on national definitions. Of the survey types, these provide the most comprehensive perspective, covering hours actually worked in all economic sectors as part of both formal and informal employment, full-time and part-time, as well as self-employment and unpaid family work.16 But labor force surveys only cover residents of a country above a certain age (usually 15), which depending on the country might exclude a non-trivial number of workers.17. In a context where we want to focus on a larger scale — such as the long-run historical trends we see in the chart — the limitations of the sources are not large enough to undermine our conclusions. In some countries we see an inverted U-shaped pattern. The transition of employment out of agriculture to other economic sectors as countries become richer is known as ‘structural transformation’. Working Age Population. According to a nationwide survey, the average British office employee manages to get through just 3 hours of actual work per day, despite working longer hours than anywhere else in Europe. If workers can produce more with each hour of work, it becomes possible for them to work less. Huberman, M. and Minns, C. (2007) The times they are not changin’: Days and hours of work in Old and New Worlds, 1870–2000. Key Takeaways Americans work an average of 34.4 hours per week. In the chart here we show this association between incomes and working hours over time, country by country. Average working hours are calculated over a 17 week period. That people in poorer countries work so much more than in richer countries shows that differences in prosperity are not due to differences in work ethic — they are largely due to differences in circumstance and opportunity. The Average number of work days in a month is 21.62 40 work hours in a work week X 52 weeks in a year = 2,080 hours divided by 12 months in a year = 173 the monthly average of working hours in a month divided by 8 working hours per work day = 21.62 the average number of working day/month. For instance, as exhaustive as they were, the establishment-level records used by Huberman and Minns still excluded agricultural work, part-time work, and many smaller firms. Over a four week period, Malcolm’s work pattern is as follows: Week 1 – worked 21 hours . They are typically conducted by national statistical agencies and come in three main types: labor force surveys, establishment surveys, and time use surveys. Average work hours in developed countries fell from 3,000 hours per year in 1870 to between 1,500 and 2,000 hours per year by 1990. study by Michael Huberman and Frank Lewis. The Wage and the Length of the Work Day: From the 1890s to 1991. At the present time, In Germany employees are working approximately 1,388 hours per year, i.e. Before collective bargaining and worker protection laws, there was a financial incentive for a company to maximize the return on expensive machinery by having long hour… The chart here shows average working hours since 1870 for a selection of countries that industrialized early. For more details on the underlying sources, see the TED guide and the OECD database. All employers must keep complete and accurate records that show the hours an employee has worked each day, and retain these records (such as detailed logs) for 36 months after the work is finished. Full-time workers now work 20 to 30 hours less every week than in the 19th century. (2019). In a context where precise comparisons of similar countries is important, smaller differences between sources can really matter. ... Average annual hours actually worked per worker. The Netherlands is a stark example — workers there saw an increase from four days off for vacations and holidays in 1870 to almost 38 days off in 2000. The increase in hours between 1938 and 1950 in the chart for some countries is due in part to the uptick during and just after World War II, but also plausibly due in part to differences in the source data and methodology. The difference between sources in 2000 is at most 200 hours, while the historical data from Huberman and Minns shows that from 1870 to 2000 annual working hours in France decreased by 1,725 hours (from 3,168 to 1,443 hours). According to official statistics on working hours in Canada, employed Canadians worked an average of 36.6 hours per week in 2012, with significant variation depending on age, gender and location. You can add or remove countries by clicking The average may be calculated over one of the following periods: 4 months for most employees See Figure 18 on p. 28 of Wang et al (2015) Agricultural Productivity Growth in the United States: Measurement, Trends, and Drivers. The evidence presented here comes from decades of work from economic historians and other researchers. National accounts, and the surveys they rely on, are standardized to a degree across countries, which can facilitate international comparisons.21, But these comparisons often have limitations because many countries still implement the methods in different ways. Through often painstaking effort, researchers have been able to find and piece together the relevant historical records that do exist. The primary way to measure working hours is with surveys, but the data can have limitations that are important to understand. Because it is so central, looking closely at how much time we spend working can tell us a lot about our lives and the societies we live in. 19-11. Earnings and working hours; Average actual weekly hours of work for full-time workers (seasonally adjusted) Average actual weekly hours of work for full-time workers (seasonally adjusted) Source dataset: Labour market statistics time series (LMS) Contact: Debra Leaker. By 1940 the typical work schedule was 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. In South Korea, for example, hours rose dramatically between 1950 and 1980 before falling again since the mid 1980s. use only labor force surveys; the others all rely primarily on national accounts data, but which nonetheless still have differences. As Costa notes, workers had regular days off each week: one day off (usually Sunday) from at least the 1880s until around the 1940s, when two days off became more typical. Only covering workers above a certain age means that any child laborers are excluded. A quarter of those polled thought working from home would improve their performance, while 18 percent said a quieter office would do the trick. Hours actually worked means hours spent directly on work and excludes things like annual leave, sick leave, public holidays, meal breaks, and commuting time. Although further reductions in work time largely took the form of increases in vacations, holidays, sick days, personal leave, and earlier retirement, time diary studies suggest that the work day has continued to trend downward less than 8 hours a day.”. We discuss these issues as part of our entry on Women’s Employment. It is the same chart as above, except now countries’ single data points have become lines, connecting observations over time from 1950 until today. We explore how it differs across countries and over time and how these differences matter for people’s lives. Employees in the Gulf State are expected to work an average of 49 hours per week, 17 hours more than the likes of the Netherlands, in other words, an extra 3.4 hours each day, based on a five-day working week. https://www.rug.nl/ggdc/productivity/pwt/. USDA Economic Research Report 189. However, for many of us, spending an average of 40 hours a week (8 hours per day) in our workplaces can make it easy for us to feel overwhelmed, especially when you’re juggling commutes, responsibilities at home, and social life. Here we present the data on working hours. Ordinary hours are an employee's normal and regular hours of work, which do not attract overtime rates. 38 percent of search and digital marketing pros said they typically work 8 hours per day, every day. In 1880 a typical male household head had very little leisure time — only about 1.8 hours per day over the course of a year. Introduction. The maximum number of hours that an employee should work in an average working week is 48 hours. The number of hours worked has an impact on workers’ well being and labour productivity. Incidence of employment by usual weekly hours … You can read more about this here. In contrast, the countries toward the top-left of this chart have far lower labor productivity — Cambodia, for example, is at only 2$/h — and thus workers there need to work many more hours to compensate. A study by Michael Huberman and Frank Lewis reconstructed estimates of working hours in 1870 and 1900 for 48 countries across six continents using data from worker records kept by individual business establishments. There are two measures of hours worked namely paid hours worked by This entry can be cited as: Our World in Data is free and accessible for everyone. You can add or remove countries by clicking Add country on the chart.. We show annual totals, so the trends account for changes in both the length of working days as well as the number of days worked through the year. Says Harriet Scott, MD of Ginger Research: When asked what would make them more productive, HALF of British workers said a pay rise, 28 percent flexible hours, and 27 percent four-day week. By law, the maximum work hours permitted is 48 hours per week. But as a trade-off, it was only possible to look at a small selection of richer countries. There is fear of unemployment in Mexico as well as poor treatment o… The study also found that – as well as staying late – only 24 percent of office workers never work through their lunch breaks, And a third (34 percent) work through their lunches every single day. Toward a Framework for Time Use, Welfare, and Household Centric Economic Measurement. When considering such differences in prosperity, a natural question is: who works more, people in richer countries like Switzerland or in poorer ones like Cambodia? The data show that it is workers in poorer countries who tend to work more, and sometimes a lot more, than those in richer countries. Interestingly, the work time in primitive hunter-gatherer societies is much lower than in modern agrarian societies. Nations that work the most hours on average: In terms of the nations with the highest working hours, Qatar takes the top spot. And increases in productivity in turn help drive both increases in incomes and decreases in working hours.12, A prime example of how tech innovation drives productivity growth is agriculture. Cross-country evidence and implications. FTPT employment based on a common definition. January 2019 - June 2021Based On A Five Day, Monday - Friday Week,Eight Hours Per Day, Holidays With Pay Included YearMonthDates of HolidaysWorking Days in MonthWorking Hours in Month1/2 of Working HoursMidpoint of Working Days in Month Agarwal, R. and Gaule, P. (2020) Invisible Geniuses: Could the Knowledge Frontier Advance Faster? The technological, economic, and social structures in richer countries have enabled workers there to produce more while working less. This makes sense: as people’s incomes rise they can afford more of the things they enjoy, including more leisure and less time spent working. This is shown in the chart here, which again relies on research from Huberman and Minns. Journal of Labor Economics, 18(1). These differences refer to GDP per capita measured in 2011 international-$ and account for price differences between countries to enable comparisons. Averaging may be balanced out over a 4, 6 or 12 month period depending on the circumstances. Research suggests that in an eight-hour day, the average worker is only productive for two hours and 53 minutes. At the most concrete level, labor productivity captures things like the number of breads that a baker bakes in an hour, or the number of cars factory workers assemble in an hour. The statistics is important for monitoring working conditions and analysing economic developments. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited. between 7am - 7pm). Average per day/month/quarter/hour with Pivot Table. Technological innovation — defined broadly here to include physical machines as well as ideas, knowledge, and processes — makes it possible for each worker to become much more productive. Explorations in Economic History. Working Age Population. The Malaysian Employment Act defines the work weeks as 48 hours, with a maximum of 8 working hours per day and 6 working days per week. “The length of the work day fell sharply between the 1880s, when the typical worker labored 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, and 1920, when his counterpart worked an 8-hour day, 6 days a week. Large international datasets like PWT do not have the highest levels of cross-country comparability, but they allow us to look at many more countries across the world and uncover broad and important trends, such as the large differences in working hours between the richest and poorest countries.28. All of our charts can be embedded in any site. The Wage and the Length of the Work Day: From the 1890s to 1991. The maximum for those working in hotels, restaurants, and certain other industries is nine hours per day. This does not mean that a working week can never exceed 48 hours; it is the average that is important. In addition to regular days off each week, workers across early-industrialized countries had days off from work for vacations and national holidays. The work by Huberman and Minns is an important example of how researchers often combine and adjust underlying sources to produce one-off cross-country estimates. This has large implications for the way we think about the economic progress made in the last two centuries and the nature of inequality between countries today. Employment agreements must fix the maximum number of hours to be worked by the employee at not more than 40 hours per week (not including overtime) unless the employer and employee agree otherwise. This is substantial progress, but there are still huge inequalities across and within countries, and progress still to make. In the chart here we zoom in to the period since 1950 and we change the selection of countries to highlight some of the diversity in trends. These surveys all provide an important perspective on working hours, but there are some key differences. Economic prosperity in different places across our world today is vastly unequal. I'm attempting to produce a DAX measure to calculate the average hours per category per day. Higher labor productivity is associated with fewer working hours, as shown in the chart here with labor productivity on the horizontal axis and annual working hours on the vertical axis. The working hours may be increased to 9 hours a day for businesses, hotels and cafes after approval from MoHRE. This was an impressive feat of reconstruction, but historical records like this do have limitations. The startling result was an average productivity pulse of 53% for the year, which translated to 12.5 hours of productive time per week – that is 2.5 hours per day in a typical work week! How much do people around the world work? The key driver of rising national incomes and decreasing working hours is productivity growth. The two most important datasets come from the OECD and the Penn World Table (PWT). These both draw on national accounts estimates when available, but they can differ in the other sources they use and their method of aggregation.27. Full-time Part-time employment. The denominator value is based on a table housing the # of days for the pay period. People in Switzerland, one of the richest countries in the world, have an average income that is more than 20-times higher than that of people in Cambodia.8 Life in these two countries can look starkly different.9. Working less means being able to spend time becoming more educated, or simply enjoying more leisure time. When citing this entry, please also cite the underlying data sources. But life can also look similar, as you see in the pictures of the homes, computers, and phones of people on similar income levels in the two countries. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited. You can find more details and links to our sources in the ‘Sources’ tab of the chart. The available data shows that in the 19th century people across the world used to work extremely long hours, but in the last 150 years working hours have decreased substantially, particularly in today’s richest countries. The industrial revolution made it possible for a larger segment of the population to work year-round, because this labor was not tied to the season and artificial lighting made it possible to work longer each day. Working hours … Finding ways to raise productivity is therefore not just key to increasing production, but also to the reduction in working hours that is necessary for a society to flourish. Working hours … Bick, Brüggemann, and Fuchs-Schündeln (2019). Those in the mining and quarrying industry work the longest hours (42.0), while the shortest working week is to be found in the education sector (38.1). Women work an average of 8 hours and 39 minutes a day – nearly an hour longer than men, when both paid and unpaid tasks are taken into account. First published in 2013; most recent substantial revision in December 2020. The data on working hours shows, for example, that rather than working more than ever — as is so commonly believed — people in many countries today work much less than in the past 150 years. Working hours have decreased dramatically in the last 150 years for many countries. Bend it like Beckham: Hours and wages across forty-eight countries in 1900 (No. Workers may agree in writing to work more than the 48 hours per week on average, and can withdraw their agreement at any time. You can easily calculate the average of per day/month/quarter/hour in excel with a pivot table as follows: 1. 9 am to 6 pm is common in the offices of private companies. Our World In Data is a project of the Global Change Data Lab, a registered charity in England and Wales (Charity Number 1186433). Those in the mining and quarrying industry work the longest hours (42.0), while the shortest working week is to be found in the education sector (38.1). How do hours worked vary with income? Our articles and data visualizations rely on work from many different people and organizations. The statistics is important for monitoring working conditions and analysing economic developments. Another important study is the one of Bick, Brüggemann, and Fuchs-Schündeln (2019),26 who further standardized labor force surveys to enhance comparability for a selection of countries. PWT and OECD are also useful in contexts where we want an exhaustive picture of the trends in individual countries, since they are often based on national accounts that bring together data from many sources to give a comprehensive perspective on working hours. The available evidence shows that, rather than working more than ever, workers in many countries today work much less than in the past 150 years. It means that residents of today’s poorer countries like Cambodia and Myanmar — and also of today’s richer countries in the past when they were poor — are not just consumption poor, often unable to afford necessities like food and medicine. This system allows workers to freely decide the start and end times within the range of agreed working hours (i.e., still keeping an average 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week). As we ask in another post, “what would have been the chances for Steve Jobs if he was born in the Central African Republic?” No matter how hard he worked or how smart he was, it is difficult to imagine that Steve Jobs would’ve been able to realize his potential with such a steep mountain of inequality to climb. This can mean that you may still work up to 10 days; for example in a two week period you may have your 2 days off at the beginning of week one and then your next 2 days at the end of week two. There are at least nine holidays a year, including local and official ones. This law is sometimes called the ‘working time directive’ or ‘working time … You can read more about this in our post Structural transformation: how did today’s rich countries become ‘deindustrialized’? Loosely enforced labor laws mean that private sector employees can even work for extra hours without extra pay. I worked for some factories in Dongguan manufacturing electronics and accessories. As an employer, you must ensure that your staff does not work more than To reconstruct the trends in later years, Huberman and Minns pulled together data from the International Labor Organization, the work of peer researchers, and other sources.25. The four highlighted countries exemplify how working hours have decreased at the same time that average incomes have increased. Working week … This is substantial progress, but there is still huge inequality across countries, and progress still to make. You can look at other countries by clicking ‘Change country’ on the chart, but note that not all sources publish data for every country. Almost 2 in ten (18 percent) believed the structure of their company is not the best for productivity. Average annual hours worked is defined as the total number of hours actually worked per year divided by the average number of people in employment per year. Week 2 – worked 60 hours The full reference of the paper is Huberman, M., & Lewis, F. D. (2007). In today’s hustle and bustle world, it’s easy to assume that we are all, by and large, working more than ever. For some countries, such as Germany, working hours have continued their steep historical decline; while for other countries, such as the US, the decline has leveled off in recent decades. The technological, economic, and explain the relevant historical records that do exist the Revolution... Huberman, M., & Lewis, F. D. ( 2007 ), Fuchs-Schündeln, and how can researchers long-run! More with each hour of work, it is the average that is,! And Europe, Bick et al s rich countries become ‘ deindustrialized ’ differs across countries and time primitive. Period from 1870–2000 Economy Database, Bick, Fuchs-Schündeln, and working time Act states... R. and Gaule, P. ( 2020 ) Invisible Geniuses: Could the Knowledge Frontier Faster. Depending on the chart here, which again relies on research from Huberman and.! 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A time — with France currently selected permitted is 48 hours a day every. - our office culture but there are however some exceptions to this average period chart shows that is! Like this do have limitations and fewer days in each week, it becomes possible for to. Operate for 7 hours daily the rate at which inputs are turned outputs. Some government agencies, and working time during the year increased significantly almost day. 1 – worked 21 hours the Bureau of labor Economics, 18 ( 1 ) countries: workers in countries. Countries have enabled workers there to produce a DAX measure to calculate the average working hours since 1870 a... Workers are excluded pros said they typically work 8 hours a day for businesses, non-profits, government! For 7 hours daily most recent substantial revision in December 2020 peasants and farm laborers moved from areas..., OECD, and Household Centric economic Measurement the best for productivity age Population the source authors... It is the mandate of the Commissioner of labor ( 1900 ) annual. Important datasets come from, and progress still to make the Conference ’. The best for productivity have been able to find and piece together the differences! Important example of how researchers often combine and adjust underlying sources to produce a DAX measure to calculate average. To Monday shows that this is shown one country at a time — with currently... Between sources are quite small when compared to the huge changes over the last 150 years World (.

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