Ottawa, December 13 - Does the perfect workweek exist? Is it possible to find the perfect amount of working hours that lets a country’s population have a healthy work-life balance while optimizing productivity? The key is balance, and this journalist aims to explore how workweek lengths vary around the world along with different factors affecting it such as productivity and compensation for overtime work.

Around the world

The World Population Review states that,

“Around the world, the average workweek can range from less than 40 hours in length to close to 50 hours. High-income and/or developed countries with a cultural emphasis on work/life balance and adequate leisure/family time generally have shorter official workweeks (some as short as four days) and more vacation days. These countries also trend toward more generous overtime compensation, more worker-friendly regulations, more favourable parental leave laws, and an increased chance of landing on the list of the world's happiest countries. By contrast, countries with longer workweeks, fewer worker protections, and reduced amenities often rank as hard-working countries, but also tend to have a populace that is less happy and possibly overworked.”

This is exemplified by the existence of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). This is a group of 38 countries, most of them in Europe and have a high quality of life. These countries are often able to blend short workweeks with high productivity. One example of this is Denmark, which also ranks as one of the happiest countries in the world, with other examples being France and Germany.

The countries with the longest workweeks tend to be economies that have yet to fully mature (Average Workweek by Country 2024). Within these cultures, there is a mentality that a hardworking attitude and working long hours are the only way to escape the poverty of the last generation. Thus, workweeks in low-income and least-developed countries are likely the longest. However, obtaining reliable data for these regions can be challenging due to the limited resources available for data collection (Average Workweek by Country 2024).

(World Population Review, 2024)

The 9 to 5's Origins

Made popular by Henry Ford of Ford Motors in 1926, the 9 to 5 working week became the new standard. The businessman borrowed concepts from watchmakers, gun makers, etc., developing the moving assembly line for automobiles in 1913. Ford workers objected to the never-ending repetitive work of the new assembly line, resulting in Turnover being so high that Ford had to hire 53,000 people a year to fill 14,000 positions, aided by the manufacturers continuing to overwork their employees (Kulakov). As an attempt to prevent this, Ford doubled wages to $5 per day (Henry Ford - Visionaries on Innovation).

After World War II, the 40-hour working week was implemented in society as a whole, with employers today testing out a variety of working hour schemes to boost productivity including the 9/80 working schedule and 4-day work weeks (Kulakov).

Productivity

Longer hours can lead to higher productivity if workers have fixed unproductive time during the day. Productivity appears to decrease as working hours increase. However, shifts at irregular times such as nights and weekends tend to be shorter and more effective. When measuring working time that includes breaks, one could conclude that output is proportional to working time and that there is no fatigue acquired from work. However, the evidence on the relationship between effective working time and productivity shows that this would be misleading (Marion and Sauermann).

As stated in The Productivity of Working Hours, "[...] employees at work for a long time experience fatigue or stress that not only reduces [their] productivity but also increases the probability of errors, accidents and sickness that impose costs on the employer.” (2073). The amount of fatigue depends on the type of work and the individual. An argument could be made that reducing work hours or increasing breaks is a way to increase efficiency and create a positive work environment. Cutting work hours reduces costs of wages but also cuts operating costs during the workday (The Productivity of Working Hours, 2073).

Health

Evidence to support a correlation between long work hours and negative effects on health is either not strong or significant in a traditional office setting. However, in high-intensity positions such as medical fields, many studies have shown that “of hospital staff nurses, shifts longer than 12 hours and working weeks longer than 40 hours were associated with significantly heightened probabilities of error that raised questions about patient safety. In another study, medical interns were significantly more likely to be involved in motor vehicle crashes if they had just worked extended shifts. Similar reports have been made about airline pilots, police officers, truck drivers and soldiers.” (The Productivity of Working Hours 2074).

Unpaid overtime

Each country has laws for overtime work, either paid or unpaid. In Canada, the Canadian Labour Code requires a 50% premium rate after 40 hours worked in a week. Managers, superintendents, and employees who carry out management functions are exempt from the overtime pay provisions. In the U.S. the Fair Labor Standard Act (FLSA) requires a 50% premium rate after 40 hours worked in a week with exceptions for executive, administrative, professional, or outside sales roles. In Japan, the standard work hour is 40 hours a week, 8 hours a day. Overtime work hours are agreements of an extension of the standard work hours between an employer and a representative of employees. The rate of overtime pay is typically 25%, except for those who have supervisory or managerial status. In Germany, maximum working hours, including overtime work, are limited to less than 10 hours a day. Overtime pay is regulated by industrial collective agreements (Mizunoya). 

Unpaid work has also been investigated over the last decade. Only in the U.K., Germany, and Canada can data on unpaid overwork be obtained by nationwide surveys. In Japan, employees work a considerable amount of unpaid overtime, but there are no official surveys on this (Mizunoya).

Although there is correlation between the amount of hours worked and overall happiness of a population, this does not imply causation. There are other factors such as general weather patterns, pollution, GDP per capita and others to consider in the overall happiness of a population. And countries that are trying to grow their economies may be less likely to prioritize population happiness and health. If an ideal length of the work week is found, governments need to determine the desired outcome, and companies need to establish values in determining the number of hours their staff should work.

For further reading, see

“OECD Countries 2024.” World Population Review, https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/oecd-countries. 

“Most productive countries 2024.” World Population Review, https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/most-productive-countries. 

“Happiest Countries in the World 2024.” World Population Review, worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/happiest-countries-in-the-world. 

“Ford’s Five-Dollar Day.” The Henry Ford, The Benson Ford Research Center, www.thehenryford.org/explore/blog/fords-five-dollar-day/. 

Works cited

“Average Workweek by Country 2024.” World Population Review, worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-work-week-by-country. Accessed 8 Dec. 2024.

Collewet, Marion, and Jan Sauermann. “Working Hours and Productivity.” Labour Economics, 28 Mar. 2017, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0927537116302445. Accessed 8 Dec. 2024.

“Henry Ford - Visionaries on Innovation.” The Henry Ford, The Benson Ford Research Center, www.thehenryford.org/explore/stories-of-innovation/visionaries/henry-ford/. Accessed 8 Dec. 2024.

Kulakov, Mike. “Average Working Hours Explained: Key Facts and Figures.” Everhour Blog, 12 Nov. 2024, everhour.com/blog/average-working-hours/. Accessed 8 Dec. 2024.

Mizunoya, Takeshi. An International Comparison of Unpaid Overtime Work Among Industrialized Countries, Hosei University Graduate School, Economics of Social Science Division, 2001.isiproceedings.org/pdf/263.PDF. Accessed 8 Dec. 2024.

Pencavel, John. “The Productivity of Working Hours.” The Economic Journal, vol. 125, no. 589, 2015, pp. 2052–76. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24738007. Accessed 7 Dec. 2024.

van der Hulst, Monique. “Long Workhours and Health.” Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment & Health, vol. 29, no. 3, 2003, pp. 171–88. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40967287. Accessed 6 Dec. 2024.