Greater efficiency could bring more holiday
Russell Lynch
which puts Greece firmly in the “working too long” bracket.
Over the longer term, Greece will struggle to afford its 37 days of holiday because it’s working longer but less productively, coming up with less for all those hours of toil.
The reason why the Germans can take an extra week’s holiday, work the shortest hours and still be the world’s fourthbiggest economy is they’re so efficient. A clear-out of regulation and looser labour laws early in the millennium freed up the jobs market.
Also, the long-term approach of its “Mittelstand” small and medium-sized companies produced lean, innovative businesses and a highly skilled work- force, aiming its exports at the world’s emerging markets.
Those exports have also done well out of a euro far cheaper than if Germany had retained the deutschmark.
It’s a better model than the French, whose 36 days a year break must be fantastic, if you’re fortunate enough to be in a full-time job.
France’s employers have had to invest to get around their incredibly restrictive labour laws, sending their productivity soaring. But the side-effect is a reluctance to hire and, hence, persistently high unemployment, which has only just fallen beneath 10% for the first time in four years.
Over here we have low unemploy- ment but low investment as well, meaning UK output per hour trails the other G7 major economies by a huge 18%.
This is the biggest gap since the Office for National Statistics started collecting the figures in 1991. We trail the US and France by a huge 30%, and the comparison is even worse with Germany, a 36% shortfall.
The longer-term productivity prob- lems for the UK, like a workforce less literate or numerate than international rivals and inadequate infrastructure, for example, are legion. The data so far show consumers weathering Brexit pretty well, buoyed by low inflation to carry on spending. But the main channel through which our EU exit is likely to be eventually felt is through falling business investment, which doesn’t spell much for the chances of eating into our huge productivity shortfall since the financial crisis.
That’s the trend we desperately need to turn around if we want to spend more time on the sunlounger: working smarter, not longer.