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An IMF survey found that young people, who are putting more time into their studies, are also the ones who are cutting back on working hours. Less hours worked per week are associated with wealthier countries.
In Madrid, on January 16, 2024, at 22:28 CET
When people in Spain want to get to the bottom of their recent job records, they often bring up the topic of total hours worked. The most recent Active Population Survey found that the Spanish labor market employed 21.27 million people, a record high; nonetheless, the total number of hours worked (608 million) has not broken any records either. These two facts have coincided to spark this discourse. There has been a 3.5% increase in employment and a 3.8% decrease in hours worked as compared to the third quarter of 2008. This indicates that, on average, fewer hours have been worked by each employee throughout the years. This, however, is not unique to Spain, as shown in a new report on European labor markets that was released by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Additionally, it highlights that the obvious culprits in this trend of fewer hours worked are men and students.
The authors of Dissecting the Decline in Average Hours Worked in Europe note that while employment and total hours have fully recovered three years after the coronavirus crisis, average hours per worker have not. The study compares current figures with those from the pre-pandemic period and also looks further back. “It seems unlikely” that this tendency will be reversed in the future, and they conclude that it is “primarily structural, extending the long-term trend that predates Covid-19” rather than cyclical.
According to the Eurostat study, total European working hours are already at or below 2019 levels. However, the median weekly working hours of little under 37 hours show no signs of improvement. There has been a long-term trend of decreasing working hours in developed economies since the 19th century, with Germany’s average working hours cutting in half between the 1870s and the 2000s. This decline in hours worked follows decades of the same pattern. Moreover, from the 1870s to the early 2000s, the average working hours across OECD nations fell by approximately 0.5% a year.
Young people, males in general, and fathers in particular are the demographics hardest hit by the decline in average working hours. The decline among young people may be explained by the rise of part-time workers who are simultaneously enrolled in school. The drop affects men regardless of whether they work full-time or not, especially those with small children. According to the IMF report, this conclusion holds true for all European countries. According to Diva Astinova, Romain Duval, Niels-Jakob H. Hansen, Ben Park, Ippei Shibata, and Frederik Toscani, “the fall in actual hours has come alongside a fall in desired hours.” They believe that these reductions are a result of personal preferences among various categories of employees.
Although “this gender gap has shrunk over time, and so did the gender gap in the employment rate,” the data shows that males still put in more hours at work than women do (34.7 vs. 39.9 hours). The fact that women still, often out of guilt or duty, take on the majority of childcare responsibilities is the root cause of this situation. And women’s hours worked have gone up a little bit over the past year. Women constitute 73% of the bias in Spain, despite the fact that they only constitute half of the labor. In the workforce, 89% of those who work part-time do so because of caregiving or family responsibilities. Also, 71% of the total have not been able to secure such arrangements; therefore, they do not work a whole day.
To broaden the scope, the IMF report notes that workers aged 55–64 and 65 and up “have seen an increase in their employment shares as effective retirement ages rose across most European countries, but average hours also dropped for them.”
Reductions in working hours are more severe in wealthier nations compared to those with lower GDP, according to the study. “These findings corroborate what is commonly known in the literature: that the income effect, rather than the substitution effect, is the primary factor influencing the amount of labor available at the intensive margin.” This is demonstrable by examining the current tense statistics provided by Eurostat: whereas the average workweek for a Serbian is 42.2 hours, for a Dutch person it is 31.1 hours.
The analysis concludes that average working hours will keep falling in Europe, although the degree of decline will differ from country to country based on economic convergence routes, productivity, and wage growth. “Economic activity is anticipated to experience more severe contractions in proportion to the level of productivity and added value. Reducing hours would also be considered “modest” because, “in the medium term, most economic forecasts, including the IMF’s, foresee modest productivity gains for economies that are close to the technological frontier, namely advanced Europe,” the study states. According to the International Monetary Fund, AI and the actions taken to combat climate change will play a pivotal role in the years to come.
As part of their coalition agreement, the PSOE and Sumar parties in Spain have pledged to cut the standard workweek from 40 hours in 2019 to 38.5 in 2024 and 37.5 in 2025. Although the 40-hour work week is still the most common, Spain would join a number of European countries that have formally lowered the length of the working day if this were to happen.
