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Ehh, Americans, Western Europeans, and some rich Asians are very efficient. I am an IT guy and worked in Eastern Europe and sometimes would monitor the amount of work that was done. They had to work 5.5 days a week but they didn't really do anything...had coffee, took long breaks, etc.
Americans will read the paper online, maybe pay a bill and send a personal email or two but they generally are productive. The people in the 2nd and 3rd might send two work related emails per day and then call it a day.
I heard Spain and France rank pretty high. Hours worked per day? Days worked per week? Vacation days per month? Ect? Any personal knowledge?
Holidays in Spain are typically 30 days per year, pretty average for European standards, but people typically work longer hours than in many other countries.
Depends on how you look at it (per day or per yr), but overall: Denmark, Germany, France, Netherlands, Finland, Norway. US is quite high per year, closer to Mexico and South Korea in total hours worked. Canada isn't much better and supposedly Australia is around the same range.
Um, the problem with Europe is that more and more people are sitting on their asses and expecting fewer and fewer people to subsidize them, and subsidize them more and more.
This is partially true in some countries. The government doesn't want to be unpopular and cut social services, but at the same time they want to lower taxes and not do much to increase domestic production. This has been especially true during the reign of the center-right/right parties over the past 10+ years. To help subsidize their poor governing methods, they make deals with crooked banks and other countries and pile on more and more debt. Then there's direct corruption, where government officials helps businesses using tax payer money or money borrowed from banks, like in Greece.
On the other hand, if you look at Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, they are doing quite well and have kept social services, their working hours and holidays the same.
The average worktime a week is between 37,5 h and 40 h. We have 4 weeks of vacation by law but most of us have more days of. The average employee has about 6 weeks of vacation.
How many Americans in their 20's and early 30's are getting the old 40 hours a week, plus 4 weeks vacation anymore? I think the majority in that age group are underemployed, working part-time jobs with no benefits nor paid vacations, if they can even get those. They're just waiting for the boomers and X'ers to retire to get into the dwindling career jobs left.
And as someone mentioned above, it would be nice to work for the government, except the government keeps cutting jobs as well. All this austerity nonsense, in some of the richest countries in the world, is really destroying people's futures as well as the competitiveness of their country. That's what happens when companies and banks with no true national allegiance run the governments. Meanwhile developing countries with far less money are booming.
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