BEERG Newsletter 31 - Europe: Working Hours

According to Eurostat in 2022, the usual working week for people aged 20-64 in the EU averaged 37.5 hours. Significant differences among EU countries are visible. The longest working weeks were recorded in Greece (41.0 hours), Poland (40.4), Romania and Bulgaria (40.2 both). 

By contrast, the Netherlands had the shortest working week (33.2 hours), followed by Germany (35.3) and Denmark (35.4). Responding to new Eurostat figures, ETUC General Secretary Esther Lynch said: 

“Europe has a growing job quality crisis. Despite today’s figures showing a rising the employment rate, the total number of hours people work has most recently fallen. “That points to an economy being built on poor quality and precarious work which doesn’t offer the hours, pay or conditions on which people can build a decent life.  

“The Commission should help make Europe a better place to work by making collective bargaining, preferably at sector-wide level, a prerequisite for public funding. That is the way to ensure people can negotiate for secure hours and incomes."

Meanwhile, the economist Mariano Mamertino notes that European workers have been working fewer hours “and we don’t really know why”. He draws attention to an analysis by Bert Colijn which links tighter than usual European labor markets with a fall in average hours worked since the pandemic. This implies that to "supply" the same number of hours worked in the EU today 3.8 million more workers are needed (vs pre-pandemic).
 
 No single factor (such as higher female participation, aging workforces, change in sector composition or higher prevalence of sick leave, for example) would seem to fully explain this trend. There also seems to be some correlation between the level of unmet demand in a sector (i.e., the vacancy rate) and the tendency of workers in that sector to work fewer hours since 2020.

BEERG COMMENT

See the BEERG Reflections #3 circulated with this newsletter on the question of sectoral collective bargaining. The ETUC demand that public funding be conditional on collective bargaining agreements is unreasonable when you consider that, at best, about 15% of the EU workforce in the private sector are union members. 

Does this mean that 85% of all EU-based companies should be excluded from tendering for public sector contracts because their employees choose not to be union members? Such conditionality would exclude almost every company engaged in cutting edge developments in such areas as AI, biotechnology, and green research. The unions should not expect the EU to recruit members for them if they cannot do it themselves.