Thai working hours 'too long'

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Thai working hours 'too long'

Ungelesener Beitragvon KoratCat » Sa Jun 09, 2007 2:49 pm

ILO GLOBAL REPORT
Thai working hours 'too long'


Agency also finds Kingdom's annual holidays among Asia's lowest

Thailand ranks third in a list of countries where people are working excessively long hours - and its manufacturing workers have longer hours than anywhere else in the world.

Nearly a century after adopting its first international standard on working time, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) estimates in a new study that one in five workers around the world - or over 600 million people - are still working more than 48 hours a week, often merely to make ends meet.

Among the countries for which the UN agency's survey has data, Thailand ranks third, with 46.7 per cent of people working more than 48 hours per week. This includes one in three salaried employees.

Peru topped the list with 50.9 per cent of workers, followed by the Republic of Korea with 49.5 per cent.

In addition, the minimum legal entitlement for annual holidays in Thailand is also among the lowest in Asia, at 10 days or less. That is lower than the entitlement in Cambodia, Indonesia and Vietnam.

The study, "Working Time around the World: Trends in working hours, laws and policies in a global comparative perspective", says an estimated 22 per cent of the global workforce, or 614.2 million workers, are working excessively long hours.

It examined more than 50 countries and for the first time explored the implications for working-time policies in developing countries. For the most part, it shows the distribution of working hours in developing countries to be highly diverse, with some individuals working very long hours and others working short hours.

Average working hours in the manufacturing sector across the world largely range between 35 to 45 hours per week, but are significantly longer in a number of developing countries, including Thailand, which is the only country where the hours of work in manufacturing average over 59 per week.

Thailand is also the only country where the hours worked in manufacturing are longer than those in the service sectors.

But in some types of services here, employees are also working 50 hours or more, including transport, storage and communication (50 hours a week), real estate and business (50.7), financial (52.9) and health and social work (53.4).

Informal employment is another major source of longer working hours. Nearly 57 per cent of all self-employed workers in Thailand are working more than 50 hours. Very few self-employed people (only about one in eight) work less than 35 hours.

Almost 80 per cent of the Thai self-employed are aged over 41 years old; in the other Asian countries for which data was available (Indonesia, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) the majority are in their 30s or younger.

Shorter working hours, the report says, can have positive consequences, including benefits to workers' health and family lives, reduced accidents in the workplace, greater productivity and equality between the sexes.

At the same time, the study says, a considerable number of short-hours workers in developing countries may be underemployed, and thus more likely to fall into poverty.

"The good news is that progress has been made in regulating normal working hours in developing and transition countries, but overall the findings of this study are definitely worrying, especially the prevalence of excessively long hours," said Jon Messenger, senior research officer for the ILO's conditions of work and employment programme and a co-author of the study.

Attempts to reduce hours in these countries have been unsuccessful for various reasons, including the need of workers to work long hours simply to make ends meet and the widespread use of overtime by employers in an effort to increase their enterprises' output under conditions of low productivity.

The report notes that, generally speaking, laws and policies on working time have a limited influence on actual working hours in developing economies, especially in terms of maximum weekly hours, overtime payments and their effect on informal employment.

The Nation June 9, 2007
Es gibt nichts Gutes, ausser man tut es! Erich Kästner, 1899 - 1974

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