A recent intellectual tussle between presidential candidates has helped to re-ignite a debate – are Americans working too little? While many Americans work hard, the citizens of many other nations work even harder, or at least for longer hours. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, in twenty thirteen, the U.S. ranked sixteenth among thirty eight advanced nations in terms of average hours worked annually.
That year, the average American who worked toiled for one thousand seven hundred and eighty eight hours. That year, the labor force participation rate was sixty three point two percent in the U.S., ranking us thirteenth. Who worked the most hours among these thirty eight nations? Why that would be Mexico.
The average Mexican worker contributed more than twenty two hundred hours of effort, followed by South Koreans and Greeks, who worked an average of two thousand sixty hours. However, Greece’s labor force participation rate was only fifty two percent, which ranked thirty-sixth among the thirty-eight nations. At more than eighty one percent, the highest labor force participation rate is in Iceland.
