Irish workers spend less time on the job than most of their European counterparts according to a new survey.
Official figures from the European statistical agency Eurostat show that only the Danes work less hours per week than the Irish.
The Eurostat figures, from a survey conducted across all member states, show that full-time employees in Ireland spent an average of 38.4 hours in the workplace last year.
Those working in Ireland’s education sector had the shortest working week as they put in just 31.5 hours, six hours below the EU average for the sector and slightly below the time spent at work in 2008.
Teachers in Greece and Italy are the only ones with shorter working weeks with hours longer in the other 24 EU member states. British teachers work the longest weeks with more than 42 hours.
According to the Irish Times newspaper, Irish employees in all other sectors, including public administration and health, are much closer to EU averages.
Not surprisingly, agricultural workers averaged the longest hours at more than 42.5 hours a week.
The report also states that the working hours gap between the sexes in Ireland is the second largest among the 27 EU countries.
It says salaried Irish men work 3.5 hours more than women. Only in Britain is the gap bigger. Men work longer hours in paid employment in every country.
The report says that self-employed workers in Ireland work much longer hours than their salaried counterparts with an average of 48 hours a week, in line with the EU average.
1 Comment
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Switch to the desktop site to post a comment.O'Hanlon | Oct 07, 2012, 08:44 AM EDT
Sure there's a hard, whip cracking lesson to be learnt in there somewhere. Seeing as Denmark's unemployment rate is currently 3.8% lower than the UK's and that Denmark's fiscal position remains among the strongest in the EU not quite sure what it is though. With those figures you'd think the UK were proud of their teachers. Wouldn't know it to read their daily rags who place nurses and teachers on or around the same level of 'validity' as hoodies, shoplifters and villains. The worker has been made just as much a scapegoat there. What are these figures supposed to tell us then? That if Ireland would just pull up its bootstraps the rentier class and their Anglophile cronies in the media might just get away with scapegoating the Irish people again instead of standing accountable for their encroached corruption and "launder your money here" ponzi scheme sabre rattling.