My advisor used to say that the twin curse of being a theorist is that, first, you can never stop working, because whenever you’re thinking, you’re working, and second, that nobody can ever tell when you’re working.
Right on! My MIL thought I was a lazy bum because all she saw was that I was sitting on the couch doing nothing.
A colleague of mine told me about the time a neighbor knocked on his door and asked his wife if would like to come out and play softball. “Oh no, he’s working” she answered. “Nonsense, he’s been sitting in the window unmoving for at least an hour.”
I’ve seen this sort of thing multiple times in this thread, that the number of hours per week is an average over a long period of time. Is there a reason why it’s not over a full year? I have very busy periods at the same time every year, and I work long hours 6 days a week for a few months, and then work less than 40 hours the rest of the year such that I tend to work far less than 2,000 hours a year (though maybe that many of paid hours due to 150% for overtime). It is somewhat draining in the late winter and early spring to be working so many hours, but it’s all mental work and not physical beyond typing, and a lot of it is really easy. Perhaps these countries have their tax and accounting deadlines such that there’s more time to get things done without penalties. Please don’t tell me that your taxes are easier to do - most of the time issue is dealing with small (often one-person) businesses with terrible records. That’s not going to change with a more streamlined tax system; you still have to figure out how much money the business made, and they’re not making it easy. The only thing that might be true is that the barriers to being a small business are greater in other countries, so only those that know what they’re doing go into business for themselves, and thus there are no clients so far on the terrible scale.
It’s a really good question, and it gets to the heart of the tradeoff between the public policy objectives of the Working Time Directive and the need to allow flexibility.
For exactly this reason, the Directive allows each country to set its own averaging periods, and within any country that can vary by industry. For example in Ireland, it’s normally averaged over 4 months but in my industry and in agriculture, it’s 6 months, to allow for the seasonality of workload in those industries.
The law allows for the averaging to be done over a year, but with significant controls and oversight to prevent the obvious potential for abuse (I employ you for 6 months working long hours, then fire you).
Yes, in the accounting world there are particularly busy times of the year (and the month) when practitioners typically work long hours.
There are various exemptions for employees that set their own working hours, family employees, etc., that address some of the concerns raised above.
The Directive is primarily intended as a health and safety measure. But it has a number of ancillary benefits, including making space for participation in family and community life (volunteering, coaching, etc.), and helping with gender equality both in home life and in the workplace.
Managers are employees as well, so differentiating “managers” and employees is not correct for this differentiation. In the US, the division is between “exempt” and “non-exempt” employees. The exemption being called out is from the Fair Labor Standards Act, so it is not necessarily an unadulterated privilege.
Exempt employees are generally salaried (versus hourly) employees, which includes, but is not limited to managers/supervisors. For example, in my company, all engineers are exempt, even though the majority don’t have anyone reporting to them.
Exempt employees are allowed to be members of a union, unless they are managers. (What employee categories are excluded from a union bargaining unit? (shrm.org)), so the “individual performer” engineers at my firm would be allowed to form or join a union if they so desired.