From: Charlie Stross (charlie@antipope.org)
Date: Sat Sep 01 2001 - 02:59:22 MDT
On Fri, Aug 31, 2001 at 10:37:19PM -0700, Olga Bourlin wrote:
>
> SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER STAFF AND NEWS SERVICES
>
> U.S. workers have increased their substantial lead over Japan and
>all other industrial nations in the number of hours worked each year,
>according to a report issued yesterday by the International Labor
>Organization. It found that Americans added nearly a full week to their
>work year during the 1990s. They worked 1,979 hours on average last year
>-- that's 49 1/2 weeks.
>
> That's 137 more hours or 3 1/2 weeks more per year than Japanese
>workers, 260 hours (about 6 1/2 weeks) more per year than British
>workers and 499 hours (12 1/2 weeks) more per year than German workers,
>the report said.
Deeply questionable figures. Let's take 50 working weeks in the year,
and 5 days per week; we get 250 working days. 1979 hours a year then
gives us an average 7.9 hours per working day.
Now let's look at the UK figures. 1979 - 260 = 1719. 1719/250 = 6.87
working hours per day, or (6.87 x 5) an average 34.4 hour working
week.
Huh?
Official figures in the UK suggest the average working week has been
creeping up, to more like 45 hours. (We keep getting bombarded with
earnest op-ed news features about it, along with hand-wringing about
workplace stress and the way people make more errors when they work more
than 44 hours a week.)
So either the British are deeply, pathologically, ill -- taking 25% of
their worktime off sick -- or these figures are Just Plain Wrong.
Given that the whole spin of the article eerily mirrors the aren't-we-
working-hard articles published in the UK, I suspect we're being
subjected to dubious figures on all fronts.
-- Charlie (who, being self-employed as a writer, can't tell
whether he works 80 hours a week or 20 hours a week;
it all depends on whether you count posting on the
extropians list as "work", but as he's gotten whole
novellas out of ideas he picked up here ...)
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