I know that Greece has had economic woes for some time, but I was surprised to learn that the average Greek worker puts in more hours per year than the average American and significantly more than the EU average. With the recent approval of six day workweeks in Greece, while conversations about shifting to four day workweeks are occurring elsewhere in the world, I’m curious as to what has led to this situation occurring?
In: Economics
Actual labor hours are notoriously difficult to measure with any specificity. They’re based on surveys that tend to ask people how many hours they work in a week. The standard answer for a full-time worker is “40,” regardless of their actual situation. This is especially difficult with white-collar, salaried workers who are not paid based on their hours and are instead expected to complete whatever their job demands of them using whatever time they can find. This creates one bias towards high recorded work hours in countries with less economic development. When your typical worker is putting in long hours at the factory, those hours are precisely measured. When your typical worker is up late in their home office to finish a report, they likely aren’t.
Another bias towards high recorded work hours *per worker* is the balance of full and part time workers in the economy. Naively, having more full time workers than part time workers means that your people are working harder overall, but this ignores the possibility that some people simply aren’t working. Going to the statistics on labor force participation, Greece has among the lowest in Europe at just over 50%. If we’re interested in total labor productivity *per person* (of working age) rather than *per worker*, Greece starts to look much like its neighbors with about 1,000 hours per person. This is close to the figure for Germany, which despite having the lowest hours per worker has among the highest labor force participation rates. Thus it seems that the main difference between Greece and Germany is that Germany spreads its labor across nearly its entire working-age population while Greece concentrates it in just half. I don’t know enough about the Greek economy to make claims about why that might be or what it might mean.
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