John Messinger
speaker
35 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2012
last heard May 2012
John Messinger’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Well, it's tough to name one particular country, but what you'll find in general is that Asian countries tend to work the longest hours on an annual basis.
They also tend to have the highest proportions of workers worldwide.
who are working what we would say are excessively long hours of more than 48 hours per week.
Korea particularly sticks out because it's a developed country that's working long hours.
Normally, it's developing countries like Bangladesh, like Malaysia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, countries like this that are working very long hours.
What's being measured is the average annual hours actually being worked during a year for every person in employment.
And the situation is really one in which you had a country that was developing, working very hard to raise its standard of living, has reached now the status of being a developed country, and yet has developed this pattern of
of long hours working, which is in fact becoming counterproductive, not only in terms of their ability to continue to advance.
The people who are working very long hours who are in the workforce, actually it's viewed as preventing others from having an opportunity to enter the workforce if the hours were shorter.
The Korean government has actually undertaken a number of initiatives, including reducing the standard work week, but also specifically requesting that companies cut working hours in order to try to
increase employment in that country.
Yes, we do.
And generally speaking, long working hours are associated with lower labor productivity per hour.
In many cases, what you're seeing in developing countries, and it's mainly a developing country phenomenon, is a
workers working very long hours in order to achieve some minimum level of output and also to earn some minimum amount of wages because, frankly, they're not very productive.
What you've seen in terms of historical patterns, for example, over the last century in most developed countries, you've seen a reduction from very long working hours, nearly 3,000 hours per year,
at the beginning of the 1900s to by the turn of the 21st century, most developed countries were under
1,800 hours, and indeed some of the most productive countries were even lower than that.
There's a number of countries that really fit that category.
Japan is certainly one.
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