Hours worked

Governments of some OECD countries have pursued policies to make it easier for parents to reconcile work and family, and some of these policies also tend to reduce working time. Examples include the extension of annual paid leave, maternity/parental leave and workers’ options for working part-time schedules or, albeit less frequently, the reduction of the full-time workweek.

Definition

For this table, the total numbers of hours worked over the year are divided by the average numbers of people in employment.

Employment is generally measured through household labour force surveys and, according to the ILO Guidelines, employed persons are defined as those aged 15 years or over who report that they have worked in gainful employment for at least one hour in the previous week.

Estimates of the hours actually worked are based on household labour force surveys in most countries, while the rest use establishment surveys, administrative sources or a combination of sources. They reflect regular work hours of full-time and part-time workers, over-time (paid and unpaid), hours worked in additional jobs and time not worked because of public holidays, annual paid leave, time spent on illness and maternity leave, strikes and labour disputes, bad weather, economic conditions and several other minor reasons.

Comparability

National statisticians and the OECD secretariat work to ensure that these data are as comparable as possible, but they are based on a range of different sources of varying reliability. For example, for several EU countries, the estimates are made by the OECD using results from the Spring European Labour Force Survey. The results reflect a single observation in the year and the survey data have to be supplemented by information from other sources for hours not worked due to public holidays and annual paid leave. Annual working hours reported for the remaining countries are provided by national statistical offices and are estimated using the best available sources. The data are intended for comparisons of trends over time and are not fully suitable for inter-country comparisons because of differences in their sources and other uncertainties about their international comparability.

Data cover dependent and self-employed as well as full-time and part-time employment.

Long-term trends

In the large majority of OECD countries, hours worked have fallen over the period from 1992 to 2005. However, this decline was not particularly large in most countries, as compared to the decline in earlier decades and some of the decline in average hours between these two years may reflect transitory business cycle effects, since labour markets generally were more buoyant in 1992 (near the end of a long expansion in many OECD countries) than in 2005.

The average hours worked per year per employed person fell from 1 784 in 1992 to 1 719 in 2005; this is equivalent to a reduction in hours worked of more than one 40-hour workweek. The table shows that working hours fell in a majority of countries; hours increased in only Denmark, Hungary (more markedly), Mexico, New Zealand and Sweden. Reductions in hours worked were most marked in France, Ireland, Japan and Korea. With the exception of France, these were all countries that had rather high numbers of hours worked at the beginning of the period.

Although one should exercise caution when comparing across countries, it is clear from the table and chart that actual hours worked in the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, Korea and Poland are above the average for OECD countries as a whole and that actual hours worked are relatively low in Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Norway.

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Source

• OECD (2006), OECD Employment Outlook, OECD, Paris.

Further information

Analytical publications

• Durand, M., J. Martin and A. Saint-Martin (2004), "The 35-hour week: Portrait of a French exception”, OECD Observer, No. 244, September 2004, OECD, Paris.


• Evans, J., D. Lippoldt and P. Marianna (2001), Trends in Working Hours in OECD Countries, OECD Labour Market and Social Policy Occasional Papers, No. 45, OECD, Paris.

Methodological publications

• OECD (2004), "Clocking In (and Out): Several Facets of Working Time”, OECD Employment Outlook , Chapter 1, see also Annex I.A1, OECD, Paris.

Websites

• OECD Labour Statistics Database, www.oecd.org/statistics/labour.