I don’t know what goes on at your work, but we don’t get much done after 3PM on most days Fridays.

Judging by the traffic heading out of the Cape Town CBD around that time, neither does anybody else, but maybe South Africans are making those hours up elsewhere?

If you’re after some insight then we best look at the Total Workforce Index, released last week by international workforce company, the ManpowerGroup.

That index “uses a proprietary algorithm to measure the relative ease of sourcing, hiring and retaining a workforce in competing labour markets around the world”, but let’s turn attention towards South Africa in particular.

Business Tech below:

South Africa ranked 24th out of the total ranking of 75 countries internationally, and 14th in a ranking of European, Middle East, and African countries. It ranked highly for cost efficiency and regulation, but lost points due to poor market maturity and availability of skilled labour.

The report also found that the country’s workforce still has a number of hurdles to overcome to be more competitive, globally, with just 50% of the workforce being proficient in English, and only 27.6% considered to be white collar or “highly skilled”.

Let’s take a closer look at the South African workforce – you can click on each of the images below for an enlarged version.

The green info below is South Africa, and the blue is the EMEA (African, European and Middle-Eastern ) countries against whom we are compared:

I’ll spell it out for you – South Africans are working on average nine hours a day, for a total of 45 hours per week.

Must be you guys up in Jozi putting in the hard yards?

Some more stats that may be of interest:

South Africans are also cheaper to pay than their EMEA counterparts, with an average monthly wage of $1,353 (R18,230), compared to the regional EMEMA average of $1,904 (R25,654) and the global average of $1,979 (R26,665).

We’re working longer hours and getting paid less – bloody outrage.

Never hurts to have some bargaining power next time you chat to your boss about that raise, right? Keep an eye on ManpowerGroup and their workforce insights – it’s kind of what they do.

By the way, we have just welcomed ManpowerGroup SA on board as a 2oceansvibe Partner. 23 successive years on the Fortune 500 list, listed on the New York Stock Exchange, and named one of the World’s Most Ethical Companies for the seventh consecutive year.

Casual – you can read about that HERE.

[source:businesstech]