Hoo boy. This makes my whole body sore just talking about it.

South Africans may be some of the hardest workers in the world, as they’re three times more likely to work 60 hours a week than Americans, according to a report made by Quartz.

Eish. That’s pretty hectic.

Per the report:

On average, South African employees work 43.3 hours per week, the fifth hardest working country in a sample of countries by the Organization [sic] for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Turkey has the employees who work the most hours, followed by Colombia, Mexico and Costa Rica. Comparatively, Germans, Danes, Norwegians and Dutch worked the fewest.

Nearly 12% of the South African workforce spent more than 60 hours per week on the job. This is despite the fact that South Africa’s labor laws prohibit more than 45 hours per week and no more than 10 hours in overtime.

Gulp. Doubly hectic.

This graph is a good illustration:

You might be thinking right now “well, at least we’re not living in Turkey”.

Thing is, it’s still a bleak statistic. The hardest workers in South Africa are black men younger than 45, are in a semi-skilled occupation, and are lucky enough to have a permanent job in a country with high unemployment.

There’s also been a steady increase in the number of formal employees who work more than 40 hours a week, as well as an increasing gap between hours worked in the public and private sector:

Bottom line: if you’re in the mining industry, you’re overdoing your hours by o,3. Social services keep the bar low with 40,8.

And if we’re going by provinces, working hours differ a LOT:

Working hours were also shorter in the economic capital, Gauteng province and the Western Cape, which has a concentration of highly-skilled workers. The average working hours in these more affluent provinces is affected by migration from other provinces. The Eastern Cape also had some of the lowest working hours, but that was because so few people had permanent employment in the impoverished province.

A closer look at working South Africans’ work habits reveals that women are also likely to work shorter hours, because they tend to be more educated and work in the professional sector.

That doesn’t mean that South African women have it easy. Taking into account informal types of work from domestic work to being a housewife, women spend 23% of their day working, as opposed to men at 19%.

For women who don’t have a housekeeper, they spend 183 minutes per day on housework, as opposed to 75 minutes for men.

Oh, but it gets better (read: worse). Women living with children also spent an average of 87 minutes per day taking care of them, compared to men, who spent seven minutes.

Unbe-bloody-lievable.

And if you are in the informal work sector, what about your work hours? Quartz explains:

The OECD and Bosch studies exclude the informal sector, such as agriculture, domestic work and other low-income jobs. These forms of work, like farmhands and maids, are a huge source of employment in South Africa, albeit precarious and poorly paid. They are ignored by these surveys, which rely on formal employment data.

In other words, if you’re not working in higher-income, professional fields, you and your hours are pretty much not worth thinking about.

[source:quartz]