Who isn’t? And what is our mental image of the work environments in those locales? To validate those fears, our jobs are being outsourced to cheap labor in those countries. It’s been drilled into our heads that we are lazy compared to emerging market counterpart workers in India, Mexico, China, and other parts of Asia.And the more we work, the more we get paid. We love money, we want more of it, and we think money can buy happiness. Cultural value of money over everything else.That rate has been trending downward for decades. has the 3rd lowest trade union participation rate of OECD countries on record, at just 9.9% of the workforce. The decline of labor unions has led to less paid time off and other leave benefits.American workers generally don’t fight for our working rights.The merits of the “free market” and “meritocracy” are continually drilled in to our brains. American workers tend to undervalue and are insecure about the worth that they provide.Our companies fairly ruthlessly fire and lay workers off with “at will” employment laws protecting them.American Workers are the OutliersĪnd, if all of this data tells us anything, it’s that we are the outliers, not the norm, in the working world. And there are few things that stress us out on a consistent basis like work does, especially when it takes away from all of the other things that life has to offer. Stress is the #1 cause of health problems – mentally and physically. If you genuinely love what you do and are doing it for the right reasons, you are more than entitled to spend all of your waking hours plugging away and tie your identity nearly 100% to your job.īut, for many of us, more work leads to more stress and a lower quality of life without time to unwind, take care of our homes, spend time with our loved ones, enjoy our hobbies, connect with friends, and generally live a more balanced life. In France and Finland, they get 30 – an entire month off, paid, every year. In every industrialized country except Canada and Japan (and the U.S., which averages 13 days/per year), workers get at least 20 paid vacation days, on average. Then there’s this depressing stat (graph below) on average paid vacation time in industrialized countries.

remains the only industrialized country in the world that has no legally mandated annual leave. There is not a federal law requiring paid sick days in the United States.Why isn’t this happening? Someone is profiting, it’s just not the average American worker.Īmerican Paid Vacation Time & Sick Leave: One way to look at that is that it should take less than one-quarter the work hours, or less than 10 hours per week, to afford the same standard of living as a worker in 1950 (in other words: our standard of living should be over 4 times higher than it is). BLS, the productivity per American worker has increased 434% since 1950. Of all OECD countries, only the workers in Chile, Mexico, Greece, Korea, and Costa Rica average more hours worked per year. This is 442 more hours per year than German workers, 294 more hours per year than United Kingdom (UK) workers, 301 more hours per year than French workers, and 184 more hours per year than Japanese workers. workers work an average of 1,791 hours per year versus an OECD country average of 1,716. would work an average of 2,152 hours per year. would work an average of 2,353 hours per year and full-time female employees in the U.S. Without vacation/holidays, full-time male employees in the U.S. work an average of 8.28 hours per day, while full-time employed males work an average of 9.05 hours per day. According to BLS time-use surveys, full-time employed females in the U.S.joins only Australia, New Zealand, and the UK with no statutory maximum length of the work week. That is, except for the United States.Īmerican Average Hours Worked Per Day, Per Year, Per Week, & Productivity: Zero industrialized nations are without a mandatory option for new parents to take parental leave.The average is over 12 weeks of paid leave anywhere other than Europe, and over 20 weeks in Europe. is the only country in the Americas without a national paid parental leave benefit. I don’t care who stays home and who works in terms of gender (work opportunity equality should be for all – which gender stays home is a family choice), but when all adults are working within a household with children, that’s a huge hit to family and free-time in the American household. Furthermore, 71.2% of mothers of children age 18 or lower work today. On work and family life balance, “Among married-couple families with children, 96.5 percent had at least one employed parent in 2021, and in 62.3 percent of these families both parents were employed”.American Work-Life Balance (Labor Participation Rate & Parental Leave)

Average work hours per year