Europe: Who Works Hardest?

The Germans’ reputation as Europe’s Arbeitstiere, or workhorses, is hardly deserved. So indicate recent surveys of European working hours, vacations and holidays released by the Stockholms Enskilda Bank of Sweden and the International Labor Organization. The Germans now work 15% fewer hours than they used to, and have signed agreements to reduce their present 44.7-hour week to 40 hours by 1966. In fact, the trend throughout Europe is clearly toward shorter hours for the workers.

Laborers in Switzerland, France and Italy work longer than the Germans, and the French and Italians work longest—an average 45-to 48-hour week. In Britain the work week has been reduced from an average 47.4 hours in 1960 to 42 this year. Europe’s shortest work week is in Norway, where laborers spend an average 39.6 hours per week in the factories. But most other European nations have a way to go before they near the 40.4 hours put in by the average worker in the U.S.

Most of Europe is catching up with—and sometimes passing—the U.S. when it comes to vacations and holidays. Italians now take off an average 36 days per year, and the Germans 33. Though the British work shorter hours, their 18 days of vacation and holidays per year is the shortest vacation period in Europe. The U.S. does not always provide a model for others to imitate. The Italians, for example, steadfastly oppose an American eight-hour work day; they complain that it would give them only an hour or so for lunch instead of the traditional three-hour midday siesta at home and, more important, would cut into the overtime they often pile up by staying at work until 8 or 9 in the evening. When the Italian government tried to institute a day with no siesta break, the employees’ union blocked the plan by arguing that it would tear men away from their families.