UPDATE: this now includes productivity figures for each country, too

As Europe's leaders gather to discuss how to rescue the mediterranean economies and safeguard the single currency, it's tempting to resort to crude national stereotypes of prudent, hard-working Germans and lazy Greeks.

But the Office for National Statistics seems to be on a mission to rescue us from our own prejudices. New data published this morning shows that Greek workers actually put in longer hours than anyone else in Europe — 42.2 per week, compared to just 35.6 in Germany. If you look at full-time figures, it is even starker.

There are the usual caveats about the reliability of Greek statistics; but that looks like too large a gap to be explained away by dodgy number-crunching. With youth unemployment at 43.5%, Greeks these days must feel lucky to hold on to a job at all; but the news that they've been grafting away, helps to explain why the Greek general public don't feel they should be blamed for causing the crisis.

Workers in the UK are in the middle of the pack, working 36.3 hours, about an hour a week less than the EU average; but the ONS points out that's because of the growing prevalence of part-time work, as flexible hours have become more common. If you look at full-time work, it puts us the top of the biggest economies in the region.

As some of you have pointed out below, a better indicator of work completed may be productivity, and that does show a different picture. If you look at productivity per hour worked, via Eurostat, then the UK is bang in the middle, with Greece much further down the pack. The leaders then are Luxembourg and the Netherlands and France and Germany are in the top division.

The figures also show that our working hours have reduced, too.

Looking at full-time jobs alone, workers in the UK are chained to their desks (or more likely stuck on a building site, since the occupation with the longest hours is crane driver), for a miserable 42.7 hours a week.

The key data is below. What can you do with it?

Data summary

EU working hours Click heading to sort table. Download this data Country All in employment Full-time employment Productivity index per hour worked (EU=100) EU 37.4 41.6 100 Austria 37.8 43.7 115 Belgium 36.9 41.7 134.7 Bulgaria 40.9 41.3 41.7 Cyprus 40 42.1 80 Czech Republic 41.2 42.3 70.1 Denmark 33.8 39.1 119.2 Estonia 38.6 40.8 61.1 Finland 37.4 40.3 111.3 France 38 41.1 132.7 Germany 35.6 42 123.7 Greece 42.2 43.7 76.3 Hungary 39.4 40.6 59.2 Ireland 35 39.7 125.6 Italy 37.6 40.5 101.5 Latvia 39.2 40.8 47.1 Lithuania 38.3 39.7 55.7 Luxembourg 37 40.5 189.2 Malta 38.8 41.4 81.9 Netherlands 30.5 40.9 136.5 Poland 40.6 42.2 53.9 Portugal 39.1 42.3 65.4 Romania 40.5 41 41.7 Slovakia 40.5 41.5 78.4 Slovenia 39.6 41.8 80.2 Spain 38.4 41.6 107.9 Sweden 36.5 40.9 115.5 UK 36.3 42.7 107.2

• DATA: download the full spreadsheet

More open data

Data journalism and data visualisations from the Guardian

World government data

• Search the world's government data with our gateway

Development and aid data

• Search the world's global development data with our gateway

Can you do something with this data?

• Flickr Please post your visualisations and mash-ups on our Flickr group

• Contact us at data@guardian.co.uk

• Get the A-Z of data

• More at the Datastore directory

• Follow us on Twitter

• Like us on Facebook