2005-06-24 India Japan Switzerland

Tintin provided a link to some unemployment figures for India as we were discussing the average work hours per week in Switzerland, France, and Japan. The Unemployment in India page says:

Unemployment in India

• Sixty per cent of India’s workforce is self-employed, many of whom remain very poor. Nearly 30 per cent are casual workers (i.e. they work only when they are able to get jobs and remain unpaid for the rest of the days). Only about 10 per cent are regular employees, of which two-fifths are employed by the public sector.
• More than 90 per cent of the labour force is employed in the “unorganised sector”, i.e. sectors which don’t provide with the social security and other benefits of employment in the “organised sector.”

As for Japan, I found 2003 Japan Law: Unpaid Overtime:

2003 Japan Law: Unpaid Overtime

• One example discussed is a nursing home: “As per the terms of the Labor Standards Law employees are to be paid overtime if they work more than 40 hours per week and any work above that should be paid 25% more than usual rates. It was reported that on average the employees at the nursing home put in 50 hours per month of unpaid overtime and in some cases it reached as much as 100 hours.”
• Rengo, the Japan Trade Union Confederation, one of Japan’s largest labor organizations, said matters were reaching near crisis levels. [...] Its 2002 survey of 23,000 union members found that nearly half were putting in 30 hours a month of unpaid overtime work. The same survey found that about 3% of workers in their 30s were putting in nearly 3000 hours per year of work, levels defined by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare as highly likely to lead to “death from overwork” of “karoshi” in Japanese.

In Switzerland all I can say is that theoretically we have a 40h week, but the law makes exceptions for executive staff, doctors, etc. What some companies try to do is to give you an “executive staff” work contract, wherein your overtime will forfeit at the end of the year. In such a situation, the pressure is on the individual to keep working hours low enough to not accumulate overtime. I’ve heard rumors from people in our company with 300h of overtime. Assuming these numbers were for January to May, we can assume extra 60h per month, and at the standard rate of 22 working days per month, and five working days per week: 60 _ 22 5 ≈ 14h overtime per week._

One source I found on the internet said that the average work time in 2002 was 41.5h per week. If you are interested in the sources, you need to check the site of the Bundesamt für Statistik. The study on Swiss labor fource is called Schweizerische Arbeitskräfteerhebung (SAKE). The results are available as well – as Excel sheets. 🙁

source

Bundesamt für Statistik

Schweizerische Arbeitskräfteerhebung

results

​#India ​#Japan ​#Switzerland