Yeah, it seems unbelievable but that’s the word around. Australians are the hardest workers in the world, according to a new book, “How Australia Compares”, by Rodney Tiffen and Ross Gittins. Australians average 1855 hours of work a year, ahead of the Americans on 1835 hours and the Japanese on 1821.
Some main reasons for this change of sorts are:
1. Annual hours of work have actually been falling since about 1980 in most developed countries. Apparently annual hours have declined only fractionally in Australia, whereas they’ve fallen by 2.5 per cent in the US and by 14 per cent in Japan.
2. Australia has the second-highest proportion of part-time workers, 27 per cent – after the Netherlands. This implies that some full-timers must indeed be working very long hours each week.
3. With an increasing number of part-time workers (immigrants, expats, holiday-workers, international students etc.) around, many Oz’s may be working harder to keep their job.
The real question is, are the Australian’s also the world’s most productive workers? Spending hours on work is different than actually being productive in whatever one is doing. There “still is” a difference between a smart worker and a hard worker. Anyways, its weird how I cannot find the original news item on this subject, at CNN.com or Reuters.com. All links point to a ‘document not found / invalid’ page. Censorship?