Working So Hard

I just read this report by UBS entitled "Prices and Earnings 2009 (PDF)" and I think it's a fantastic report full of insights. The report is about the UBS survey of the cost of living in major cities in the globe,  from developed (New York, Tokyo, and London) to emerging economies (Manila, Mumbai, and Jakarta). While the report is full of numbers and indeces, there was one section that caught my attention and I figured is worth reflecting on.

That section is entitled "Working Hours and Vacation days" and it detailed how much hours on average people from the surveyed cities are spending for work and the number of paid vacation days each person has. Here are some excerpts from the report:

People work an average of 1,902 hours per year in the surveyed cities, but they work much longer in Asian and Middle Eastern cities, averaging 2,119 and 2,063 hours per year respectively.

European cities had the lowest working hours per year. On average, employees work 1,745 hours per year in Western Europe and 1,830 hours in Eastern Europe.

Interestingly, compared with 2006, people now work 58 hours more per year on average.

For Manila, people here average 2,032 hours a year for work and only get 10 paid vacation days. Those figures indicate that people here spend much more hours for work more than the global average, and get less paid vacation days than the global average. If you try to compute it, the average of 2,032 is much more than my estimate of 1,920 working hours if you try to compute from 240 working days, with 8 hours each.

So think about it: Here in Manila, we work an extra hundred hours for work. No wonder we're such a stressed-out society.