La durée de travail dans huit pays de l'OCDE

Length of the Work-Year in Eight OECD Countries
This article is complementary to the paper by Boulin and Cette on European work sharing policies. It makes more clear for us the evolution of work-time conceived as an annual figure, in eight OECD countries. After a cautionary note on the nature of the indicators employed, it shows that important disparities exist among the countries, in trends as well as levels.
It underlines the rise of organisational structures which are supposed to offer more flexibility to employers, in labour management particularly:
– development of part-time work, for men as well as women, which is increasing everywhere except in Sweden or the U.S.,
– more or less intensive and unequal recourse to over-time work and to sharing work-time on an annual basis,
– the subtle increase which seems to be taking place in shift work, particularly in the manufacturing sector.
The authors report finally on some recent surveys of wage earners, concerning their preferences for the amount of time they spend at work and their remuneration.