While productivity increased to as much as eight times since 1930, reduction of working hours have not followed suit in similarly significant fashion. In fact, recent studies show that employers have been regaining the working hours lost since the time Keynes made his essay, thanks in no small part to the pandemic and the digital shift it has helped accelerate. Our World in Data, which charted average working hours per year by a laborer since at least 1870, noted that the United States and Germany have reduced annual working hours from 2,316 and 2,128 hours in 1929 to 1,757 and 1,354 hours in 2017, respectively. Assuming 20 working days in a month, the average working day in the United States and Germany went down from around 9 hours to nearly 6 hours. Some nations, such as India, reported as high as 40 percent increase in working hours during the pandemic according to the World Economic Forum. The Philippines, for one, may well rank among the most overworked in the world. As of 2019, the Philippine Statistics Authority found that, as of 2019, Filipinos worked 43 hours a week on average, amounting to over 2,246 hours for the entire year. This is way above the prescribed 8-hour work day in the Labor Code of the Philippines, and greater than any of the nations ranked by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Read more in our articles including "4-day work week, Hybrid Work, Work-from-Home, 4-hour work day: Which one works for you?" and "Apple Holiday Gift Guide: iPhone, iPad, Mac and more!".
