Average Working Hours in Europe | Hacker News Reader

Average Working Hours in Europe

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This is also a cultural thing. I come from Romania, where it is (was before the pandemic?) very uncommon for people to work part time. The expectation when having children was to have the grandparents take care of them during the week until they are independent. Otherwise to hire a full time nanny until the kid goes to kindergarten and then have the child go to kindergarten or after schools for about 10 hours per day, with kindergartens closing late in the evening.

Now I live in Germany, where there is little reliance on grandparents, children don’t stay that long in kindergarten (they close between 15:00 and 16:30) each day. This, to my understanding was because the women would assume a housewife role and would have time to take care of children. As the economy shifted and two income started becoming necessary, the society adapted to the old rules, but did not change them. Some people work part time, some work flexible schedules. For most office jobs I’ve seen, it’s easy to have a flexible schedule. My wife starts later and takes care of the kid in the morning, I start earlier and take care of the kid in the afternoon.

It would be useful (although more difficult) to know how many effective hours people put in every week.

I have a real big difficulty believing that most white-collar people can get over 20 effective hours a week, irregardless of their number of office hours. I also suspect that there's no correlation between office hours and effective hours.

Ditto. Sweden defines a working week as 40 hour. However, 1 hour of wellness and two daily coffee breaks (15 minutes) are usually included in working time. So "butt-in-chair" time is 36.5 hours per week.

Ha, come to Austria where your break times are not included in your working time, so if your contract is 38,5h per week, then that's your expected butt-in-chair time as that doesn't include any breaks.

The mandatory 30min lunch break and other coffee breaks are not included in that, but as extra in your own non-billable time, while the clock is not running, so you could easily be spending 40+h/week in the office if your company insists on keeping track of your time, which some do and also don't offer WFH so they can nickel and dime you on your butt-in-chair time which they can't if you're at home.

Another Austrian work quirk that always gets me: 14 salaries.

Yeah, you're not actually getting paid 2 extra salaries, it's just your yearly salary divided by 14 instead of 12. The only extra si you pay less tax on those 2 extra salaries so you get more money in your pocket before summer and Christmas.

I guess when the 13 and 14 was added it was essentially a pay increase in some negotiation? And stuck around? However, if the company has more money in some point of the year, it makes sense for them to pay more wage at that time.

Also applies in Germany. Infact, every contract I have(had) includes a special clauses “40 hours per week, not including any lunch or break hours…”. However, I see my colleagues spending 2-3h each day on coffee/lunch break and doing actual work for ~3-4h and then going home. Only people I’ve seen religiously maintaining that 40h/week are consultants/contractors/HR.

Honest question: as a person in-between academia and industry (sorry, I stalked you a little bit), what are your views on the percentage of actual, hands-on work happening in those 36.5 hours? I have a theory that in Sweden you must divide your work into 80/20: 80% self-advertising (bragging in meetings, etc.) and 20% actual work. Anything more and you’re wasting your time and losing the race.

I'm at the seniority in my career where I still find stalking flattering. :)))

I think in every job you need to (a) do good work, (b) make that work visible. So at least some amount of self-advertisement is good both for the individual and the organization. You would wonder how much time I spend on "stalking" engineers and making their amazing work more visible towards our customers -- giving proper credit during our biweekly demos, of course.

Unfortunately, above a certain threshold (say about 20% of your time), self-advertisement is toxic. As far as I could notice, this happens in environments where people feel unsafe. This can happen both in industry and academia. However, you might be right that self-advertisement is more present in academia, given the tendance to assess individuals over teams and given the overall "squeeze". :)

Would you agree?

I never worked in the industry, so unfortunately I don’t have a basis for comparison. But in our case (academia in Sweden) I’d say it is certainly not because of lack of safety. If anything, one of my assumptions is that it’s actually the opposite. Since we’re not being judged by merit (at least not in any significance way for better or worse), and there is no easy way to get paid more for extra time or better outcomes, people will inflate their mediocre results to find a way to work less with the same pay.

Interesting hypothesis. I think your hypothesis has some merits. The way salary increases work in Swedish academia is that the union negotiates an average increase over the whole university -- say 2.5%. Then the department head will give some below the average and some above the average.

So it's up to you to be "the loudest in the department" to get an above-average increase.

Not saying how things should be, just saying how things are.

>I have a theory that in Sweden you must divide your work into 80/20: 80% self-advertising (bragging in meetings, etc.) and 20% actual work

Doesn't that depend more on company, size and industry than on country?

In big and inefficient companies everyone dedicates most of their time to visibility to the upper echelons, instead of actual work, as that's what gets you promoted. You loose a lot if you're the one actually doing the work, but none of the bigshots above you knows about it. You might even get laid off lol, I've seen it.

In small companies your productivity is more easily seen by those in charge of your paycheck so you can dedicate most of your time to that as you know that will be rewarded

Could be. Actually I could argue that Sweden is just one big inefficient company. :) But I’ve worked in a couple of other countries and Sweden is by far the worst in this aspect. Competition and merits mean very little here because jobs are extremely safe (once you get one), salaries differ very little, and even when you’re not working you get so many benefits many people don’t even care too much. So, what happens is that the system optimises not for those who actually get things done, because that doesn’t matter too much, but for those who know how to build an interesting, believable façade.

Let me exemplify with a common interaction from my daily work. Suppose I’m working on a project proposal. Before I do anything, I need to have a meeting with 5 different people from various administrative positions in order to make sure they “allow” me to write my proposal (i.e. if it aligns with the institution’s goals, if it meets all the hundreds of rules that are in place at any given time, if there are other people that “should” be involved, etc.) After that 1h meeting, they’ll all say “ok, great! We’ve done our job. No go and invest the 50h needed to write the proposal, and don’t forget to include our names in it because we’ve helped you so much. This is your part of the job!” So I go and write the goddamned thing and put everyone’s names in it. Then the project gets accepted, these 5 people are posting this thing everywhere, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. as if they actually had anything to do with its content. They get promoted, invited for committees, and the whole shebang.

Now don’t get me wrong, I also get recognition, but my salary is almost the same as theirs. Sometimes smaller. And because it’s so obvious they got a lot of rewards with very little work, it just makes more and more people seek administrative jobs and less seek jobs where you actually get shit done. I understand; why would you care? If I was born here I sure as hell wouldn’t.

Edit: I realize maybe “very little” work is misleading. Maybe they are doing the same thing many times a day. But it’s for absolutely sure much “easier” work than actually getting the research done. It’s the kind of work that you can completely turn off at the end of the day or weekend, for example.

Permanent employment in Netherlands must be provide both full and part time options, hence to suppressant effect on mean hours worked.

Also, in most dutch both parents have a job. As daycare is very expensive for some reason, both parents work one day less to take care of their children at home.

Decent daycare is expensive, period. Think of it: if you want an employee for every ten kids (norms often don’t even allow this for toddlers), parents will have to pay ⅒ of the salary of such an employee.

Add in the cost of a daycare center (typically better equipped than the average children’s home), its administration, etc, and there’s no way daycare can be cheap.

The only way to make it seem cheap to parents is by subsidizing it.

My mother was a pioneer in the 1980s. She worked full time. In those days the government did fully subsidize day care for everyone.

But eventually as the economic goal of getting women into the workforce was reached they decided it was no longer necessary.

Yeah can confirm, both my partner and I each take a day off because day care only gives us 3 days. This is actually preferable as day care is almost a 2nd rent at just 3 days a week.

There are some policy changes in the works to more heavily subsidize day care costs, but I think they won't kick in until next year or something.

Those changes won't kick in until at least 2027, but even then, it's very questionable how feasible it is, considering there aren't enough teachers to cover the demand even at these exorbitant end-user prices.

Yeah I think we did the math and our day care costs ~11 euros an hour, which is pretty low if it was 1 person's income, but there are like 6-8 kids in the group every day, so it's something like 75/hr, which is maybe adequate: 4 groups pulls 600k/yr, you burn 360k on staff (6 nannies across 4 groups at 50k each plus an admin), rent/supplies/tech is 100k/yr let's just say, so your margin is 25%. Even if we're way off here, that's a lot of margin.

All that said, I don't really get why day care is privatized while school is public. I mean I do: it's vestigial from when we didn't allow women to work; what I mean is that if we want more women to work full time--and I know that we do because every month it seems there's yet another thinkpiece about why women in the Netherlands won't work more hours and policies floated to address it--it seems like the main things to do are give more partner leave and nationalize day care.

My partner had this great idea where both parents should get a year off with pay (maybe 70%, whatever), which is a good idea in general for couples but also would dramatically lower the load on day cares.

Either way, childcare is a huge societal enterprise; we're not gonna get out of paying through the nose for it. Basically, you can either have a low fertility rate, a very male workforce, or raised taxes for childcare; there's not really another option.

Subsidizing demand is never the solution.

The first graph in the article is a bit misleading, as it muddles together the full-time working hours and the amount and fraction of part-time work.

Fortunately, lower down in the article there's a graph that shows the full-time working hours per country.

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