Salon - Gallup reveals the American 40-hour workweek is actually far closer to 47 hours — nearly a day longer than it was 35 years ago.
Americans don't just work more than they have in the past, they work more than most of the industrialized world. A 2004 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found Americans work "50 percent more than do the Germans, French, and Italians." More recent data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development found that in 2014, Americans outworked several expected other countries, among them Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Finland, Switzerland and Austria, all countries that .... rank higher than us on the most recent World Happiness survey.
We have surpassed Japan, long stereotyped by Americans as a society far more workaholic than our own, in annual hours worked by a tally of 1,789 to 1,729. ...
Yet Japan, at the very least, demands a legal minimum of 10 paid vacation days (though many employers provide more) along with 14 weeks of maternity leave. France goes even further, offering 30 days of vacation and 16 weeks of parental leave, while Scandinavian countries and Australia and New Zealand top even the French.
Then there's the United States, where workers have no legal guarantee to any amount of vacation at all — or sick days, for that matter, despite a report finding all those sick people at work ultimately cost the country $160 billion in lost productivity each year. The U.S. has the distinction of being the world's only industrialized, not to mention rich, nation with no national legislation demanding employers offer maternity leave. And paternity leave? That's not even part of the national discussion
