Based on the total number of days’ leave workers are offered from country to country, including public holidays, the report, er, reported that Estonians enjoy just 26, in contrast to union leaders Sweden (yet again) with 42. I'm not quite sure how this works, since we get 28 days' paid holidays per year here, and while there aren't all that many public holidays, there are still enough to push the overall number well up into the 30s. Perhaps it means that most Estonians don't take all of the holidays owed to them and work some public holidays too? If that's the case, it is admirably enterprising of them.
The report (which, appropriately enough, was issued from Ireland, crowned the hardest working of the 'old' EU member states) also saw Estonia debut with a bullet at number one in the chart of the number of hours worked annually. With an average of 1872, Estonia came in 304 hours ahead of bottom-of-the-table France - meaning that workahoolikud eestlased put in roughly 8 working weeks more every year than their vin-quaffing French colleagues.
The question you have to ask yourself at this point is: what have they got to show for it? According to its website, "The European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions is a tripartite EU body, whose role is to provide key actors in social policy making with findings, knowledge and advice drawn from comparative research."* I wonder if they compared the fact that Estonia is the hardest working country in the EU with the fact that it is also the most miserable and apparently also the one in which people are most likely to meet a violent end - completely indisputable facts also revealed in the last week or two - and drew any interesting conclusions to share with these key actors they are accountable to.
*For the grammar nazis among us, note the redundant use of the comma after 'body'.
2 comments:
Whatever. I am so tired of all these studies.
Yes, I think they're nonsense mostly. But it's interesting how much power they wield in terms of how easily countries like Estonia get labelled by them.
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