Saturday 29 June 2024

Greek Work Week Just Got Longer

I vaguely remember being told in school that it was the Babylonians who set the week at 7 days to coincide with the Moon's 28 day cycle and the days were named after a hotch-potch of Norse Gods (Tyr, Odin, Thor, Freya, Saturn) before the religious crowd picked it up and attributed the invention to God who worked a six day week and then took Sunday off to put his holy feet up.
The idea of a work week and the weekend came about not out of some compassion for workers in dangerous 19th Century factories but was to ensure that staff would be available for work sober on Monday morning after a heavy Saturday night but while the idea of a four day week is being tried out in the UK, Greece has gone the other way and are introducing a 6 day work week.
The legislation is being introduced to fill holes in the labour market and other countries have been tinkering with the work week with some squeezing the 40-hour week into four days with 10-hour days which would be a luxury in Bhutan who according to the International Labour Organization (ILO), work a 54.3 hour week, the longest work week in the World.  
The longest hours worked in Europe are the people of Montenegro who work an average 42.7 hour week, then Albania on 42.6 and then Serbia on 39.6.  
Indians work an average 46 hour week, China 45, Russia 38.1, Japan 36.7, United States 36.4, Australia 32.8 and the United Kingdom work week averages out at 30.7 and the nations with the average lowest amount of hours in a working week are Norway on 27.1, Syria 25.3 and the workers with the most free time are those of Yemen who do a 25.4 work week.     
While workers in Yemen and Syria could feasibly have their work week reduced by their workplace being bombed, i foresee the Norwegian Embassy being deluged by Greeks looking to emigrate.

1 comment:

Liber - Latin for "The Free One" said...

Hmmmmmm, is being at work the same thing as working. If is operating a register at a store with a low volume of customers, and is mostly just sitting, is that work?

My last few years in the corporate world here is what i saw from a typical young IT turk:
- 07:30 arrive at work
- 07:45 enter the company fitness center
- 08:00 workout and shower
- 09:00 get breakfast taco at company cafeteria
- 09:15 get to desk and gripe about traffic and having to come to the office (so unfair)
- 09:30 check email and social media
- 10:00 begin creating code (actual work, but hardly road repair, fence work, or coal mining)
- 12:00 eat lunch and play a card/dice based role playing game
- 01:15 back at the desk to recheck social media
- 01:30 begin creating code again
- 03:00 coffee break (we had 3 starbucks in our home office)
- 03:30 back at the desk to create code
- 05:00 stop working and yak about how hard their job is while traffic dies down a bit
- 05:30 go home

hours at work: 10 hours
hours working: 5 hours, 30 mins (includes bathroom breaks, casual chatter, team meetings)