It’s no surprise to anyone that workers in the US have been trailing other high-income countries in work-life balance for years. Greater numbers of US workers put in more than 40 hours per week compared to workers in countries like Switzerland, Canada, the UK, and Germany. The American response is that Americans are more productive. Still, productivity metrics related to output per hour are often comparable to high-GDP European nations like Germany and Norway, so where is this extra productivity coming from? Simply put, Americans work more throughout the year compared to their counterparts in other high-GDP nations. They work more days out of the year and longer hours each day. The problem with this, though, is that they do this at the expense of […]
