Longest working hours in Europe!

Britons are among the hardest working people in Europe, with only Romanians and Bulgarians putting in longer hours, according to a new report.

Workers in full-time jobs put in an average of 41.4 hours every week last year - almost two hours more than the average among the 15 original members of the European Union. Only workers in Romania and Bulgaria work longer at an average of 41.7 hours a week.

That's from this report by an EU funded pressure group. The result is vaguely interesting I suppose but only vaguely. For they've entirely left out a huge part of working life.

Almost all of us work both in the formal economy, which is what they are measuring above. However, we also do a great deal of work in the unrecorded economy: that work that we do unpaid in our own homes.

We cook and we clean and we wipe the baby's bottom and all that sort of stuff: maintain the car, dig the allotment, clean out the gutters and so on.

If we want to know about the true working week then we need to look at both the paid work in that formal economy and the amount of unpaid work that is being done in the home. As this report doesn't in fact look at that other side, there's not actually much useful that we can say about the true working burden.

The importance of this? If we look purely at the paid working hours then German women (to take an example) work shorter hours than do American. If we also account for the domestic hours then American  women actually work fewer hours than the German. They work more for cash and then purchase (usually via technology rather than the labour of others) that domestic labour.

Until people start measuring work and working hours properly it's best to ignore their bleating.