« The Poverty Gap | Main | That British Understatement »

July 17, 2007

Working Hours

Oh dear, another report making a fundamental error:

Family life is under unprecedented strain because increasing career pressures force couples with children to work longer hours, a report has found.

Nearly two thirds of parents believe they get insufficient time with their children, while half say they have to put their job first - even if it affects their family life.

...

The survey was conducted among 1,148 adults by GfK NOP for the Children's Society and follows a Unicef study which found that British children were the unhappiest in the West. "These results reflect the dilemmas over child care British parents can feel when trying to juggle the many demands of modern life in a country that already puts in the longest working hours in Western Europe," says the report.

Full-time employees in the UK work an average of 43.5 hours a week compared with 38.2 and 39.9 in Germany.

The error is that leisure hours have been rising, as they have been for the past century. So how can people have less time for their children if in fact they actually have more time for them?

This report, like all too many others on the subject, fails because it only counts paid working hours. It does not include unpaid working hours in the home. The basic pattern right across the western world has been that male paid and male unpaid working hours have been falling, female paid rising and female unpaid falling (for a net fall in female working hours) pretty much since records were first kept.

I agree that this is a comparison of Germany with the USA but I think it's generally accepted that the UK has a pretty similar pattern of working hours to the US? Indeed, that this is part of the complaint, that we do, rather than the slightly more relaxed hours of our continental cousins?

So how to explain this?

The conventional view is that Americans work longer hours than Germans and other Europeans but when time in household production is included, overall working time is very similar on both sides of the Atlantic. Americans spend more time on market work but German invest more in household production.

In fact, the average German housewife works 1.5 hours a week longer than her US counterpart.

So the most basic analysis, that we are in fact working longer hours than our forefathers, or that we are working more than the continentals, is flawed, perhaps even wrong. Which makes something of a mockery of whatever it is that they suggest should be done about it, no?

July 17, 2007 in Economics | Permalink

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:

https://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341c2d3e53ef00e008d98ec38834

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Working Hours:

Comments

The bit you quote says:

Nearly two thirds of parents believe they get insufficient time with their children, while half say they have to put their job first - even if it affects their family life

Yet much of the difference in 'unpaid work' between Germany and the US was looking after children, wasn't it? A large chunk of the rest was 'eating'.

Posted by: Matthew | Jul 17, 2007 9:03:04 AM