Mark's Blog

That's a lot of hours. At a lot of places in the U.S., you would be getting 3 weeks of vacation (probably need 10 years at many companies to get 4 weeks) and 6 to 10 paid holidays a year. If we figured only 6 paid holidays, you come up with 240 work days and at 8 hours per day that equals 1920 hours. Of course that assumes the worker missed no work days during the year and while many people, especially men, do not miss a single work day, a surprisingly large number of people find it astounding that anyone would show up every day. And while the majority of salaried workers in the U.S. work longer than their nominal work day fairly often, there are a significant number of salaried workers (such as Neil) who do work exactly the number of offical hours. You are 241 hours over this 8-hour day figure which happens to be exactly one hour each work day in the year. That would give you almost exactly 9 hours per day or 45 hours for each five working days. My guess is that this would put you two hours or so more per week than the typical American salaried worker.

I kept track of my working hours my last five work years. By contract, I had a nominal 6.66 hour work day (plus up to two required one-hour meetings a month) and a required 187 work days which would give a work year of 1270 hours. My biggest year was the next to last one when I worked 1909 hours. I counted all the time I was at the school building minus 30 minutes for lunch plus added all work done at home (which was very little except for finishing grades every six weeks.) Every year out of the last five, I worked more hours than the year before except for the last year. The last year went down to something like 1790 (about the same as the first two years I kept track.) This was partly because building construction cancelled some normal activities (after school rehearsals, ISSMA contest) and I also missed 4 days of work -- two for skin operations, one for medical appts., and one because of "camping out" at the Ad. Bldg. the night before turning in our retirement letters to keep my place in line (only the first 25 people were going to be offered the retirement package.)

Here in France, my pay slip says I have 31 paid vacation days total, not counting the 12 days for réduction de temps de travail, and probably about 10 legal holidays. Theoretically, we work something like 217+/-2 days per year. It seems to me we're supposed to have 11 hours of time off work each day, and one stretch of 36 or 48 hours -- I cannot remember exactly -- during each week.

It's similar to the situation in the US, where people nominally work 40-hour weeks, but in fact there's significant variation. I'm probably roughly average at Sun in France, except for the folks who are paid by the hour. My guess is that people in software typically work a few more hours than people in manufacturing and so forth. We tend to be less efficient than the typical worker operating according to Taylorized processes.

Some of the time counted happened outside normal working hours. Just like teachers, we can work from home for some of what we have to do. I'm surprised your heaviest year was 150% of the nominal work load. I'm only at 142% of the nominal 1519 hour year (217 days at 7 hrs/day or 35 hrs/5 day week). I'd've expected our industry, with it's tradition of long hours and lack of labor organization, would definitely have us doing more hours than anybody in the public sector.