Sure, we've all had moments in our sewing circles when talk has turned from the latest innovative crocheting method to bitching about our day jobs. It's inevitable, nay human, that people need to vent about coffee hogging, bathroom politics, and the big one: just how overworked they are, and how long their days have been. Well, it's time to face the reality folks: according to a new study, Americans do work more than many people in the developed world...but we still don't come close to Mexicans or Japanese.
According to the OECD's "Society At A Glance" report, Americans work 30 minutes more in combined paid or unpaid jobs than the world average, and clock in eight-and-a-half hour work days generally. Of the 29 countries analyzed, Mexico has the longest workdays for both paid and unpaid tasks, which clocks in at 10 hours. Mexicans do the most amount of unpaid work (which they say is mostly housework) with three hours a day on average, while Koreans do the least, with one hour and 19 minutes on average. Belgians enjoy the shortest work days, only seven hours.
Some other interesting findings from the report: Americans spent the shortest time in the kitchen cooking, about 30 minutes a day—in comparison, the Turks spent the most time cooking and cleaning, about 74 minutes a day. We spend the third lowest amount of time eating (one hour 14 minutes per day), but one third of Americans are obese, the highest rate in the OECD. Also: people in the United States have a life expectancy of 77.9 years, lower than the OECD average of 79.3 years, despite having the highest public and private spending on health at 16 percent of GDP, considerably higher than the OECD average of nine percent.
