Untangling the myths of working time
How long is the European working week?
Almost all collective agreements set basic weekly working hours for full-time staff at between 35 hours and 40 hours a week, whilst in many countries such as Spain and Sweden there are statutory limits of 40 hours for normal weekly working time. White collar workers across Europe continue to work less hours than blue collar workers, although this gap is narrowing over time. Every EU country permits certain levels of overtime to be worked in addition to regular hours, but not all recognise the 48 hours per week maximum limit established by the EC Working Time Directive.

Data from the EU Labour Force Survey for Q4 2007 appears at first glance to confirm this general pattern, but closer investigation suggests that the reality may be quite different for many employees.

For each country, the published figures for the average weekly working hours of men and women do not exclude part-time workers from the sample. If adjustments are made to represent the hours of full-time workers alone, these figures increase by an average of 4.4 hours to give an average of 42.1 hours across the EU. This is still likely to be a low estimate, however, as it includes the time of those who may have been absent for most of the reference week and does not reflect undeclared time worked on second jobs.

The adjusted figures for each country reveal that many employees work well in excess of 40 hours a week, even in countries such as France where hours are strictly regulated and the 35-hour basic week remains the standard.

Social benefits and their effect on working time
Why does the average full-time employee have to work so far beyond their basic hours? One of the most important reasons is that in some countries more than 25% of employees are not actually at work at certain times of the year.

Since 1988, when the European Union began to activate its social agenda, a wide range of measures have been introduced to establish a minimum safety net of protection for employees. These have included strict controls on working time, improved entitlements to annual, maternity and parental leave and opportunities to work on a part-time basis. The governments of many EU member states have further enhanced these entitlements and created additional rights such as paternity leave, sabbaticals, sick leave arrangements and leave to care for dependants. Legally enforceable collective agreements have also gone beyond basic statutory rights to introduce even more opportunities to take time off work, and double holiday pay received by workers in some countries makes it more financially rewarding to be on annual leave than at work.

These changes, introduced for the benefit of employees, have had an effect quite contrary to that intended. Although additional time-off rights might be seen as an opportunity to generate extra jobs, the fragmented nature of absence due to such factors as sickness, emergency childcare or attendance at ante-natal clinics has meant that the cover required varies from day to day. No jobholder can be expected to have the skills to work in the accounts department on a Wednesday, meet with a technical sales representative on a Thursday and then end the week acting as secretary to the production director. By increasing the scope for people to be absent from work, policy makers have placed greater demands upon those who must cover for them. This has also increased overall levels of stress in the workplace and left employers in a difficult practical position.

These factors may begin to explain why the UK, which has the most liberal working time regulations in western Europe, has an average workweek and employee absence levels that are only slightly higher than the overall EU27 average.

Although there is far less non-productive time in eastern European workplaces, additional factors are causing working time to be sustained at high levels. There is a clear tendency for employees to seek additional working time in order to enhance their modest monthly wages and salaries. All companies in the new EU states are having to face up to increasing organisational demands as they seek to adapt to the requirements of the EU's vast internal market. The former state enterprises also suffer from poor levels of capital investment and high levels of bureaucracy, both of which place extra demands upon individual employees.

Conclusions
The split in social philosophies at the heart of Europe between libertarian 'American-style' values pursued by the UK, Ireland and many new EU states and the more welfare-orientated 'social model' maintained by many continental western European states such as France, Sweden and the Netherlands has recently come to a head over the issue of the UK's continued opt-out from the maximum working week.

The real problem about working time, however, is not the imposition of statutory upper limits, but a social framework that makes it impossible for companies to operate efficiently within these limits. Rather than preventing those who wish to work longer hours from improving their income levels, the focus for EU policymakers should be on increasing the proportion of the employed workforce that are available to carry out their jobs. This means taking a long hard look at how much employee benefits are creating a 'time off' culture and providing financial incentives to spend too much time absent from work.

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