this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2026
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These are a bit too left-leaning for European centrists. Especially the 32-hour-workweek, even in the most "socialist" European countries this is a position only taken by dedicated "leftist" parties.
In France we have a 35 hours workweek, and our centrists fight that with all their might.
My day job is unionized and it's 35 hours per week. 🇨🇦
Imagine being so In love with the billionaires that you want less free time
In the UK I think it averages 37.5 hours for salaried jobs. I haven't looked that up.
I'm in the UK, 35 hours a week, with a compulsory 1 hour lunch break. University life... It's flexible though 08:00-16:00 through 10:00-18:00. As long as you get seven hours in.
That’s pretty good, though legislation says they only have to give you a 20 minute break, and only if you work over six hours. Otherwise, 37.5 tends to be standard.
Is it? The average work week in the Netherlands is 30 hours. That is the current status quo, not even what the "left-leaning" parties propose for the future.
It's a skewed bullshit metric though and you can't compare it to most other countries.
It's quite normal here to have one member of a household working 40 hours and the other part-time, for example 20 hours. That's 60 hours of labour for a family and indeed 30 hours on average.
Unfortunately most statistics only include people who actually work, instead of the total potential workforce. So a traditional family where dad works 40 hours and mom stays at home will have a combined total of 40 working hours vs our 60. But because mom doesn't work she is ignored and the family counts toward the average for 40 hours. So they go into the books as hard workers and we are just lazy sobs.
The cherry on top: statistics often cut off around 60-62, while we can't retire until 67+.
Remember: there are lies, damned lies and statistics.
If it's about the same as Germany, then the reason for that is that there are a lot of part time workers, who often don't get enough money to be able to live off it on their own (e.g. married people, single parents who also get government assistance to make up the difference). That's very different from declaring the full-time work week to be only 32 hours.
It's somewhat similar to Germany, yes, though Germany has fewer part-time workers. In Germany (where I also live) the default options are 35 or 40 hours, though it's becoming more common to have options to work less even in "full time" type of jobs.
Anyway, I doubt the "democratic socialists" in the USA want to ban working more than 32 hours, they just want people to have the same option people have in rich European countries.
They want 32 hours to be legislated as 'full time' -- meaning that employers legally must pay overtime (1.5x normal wage) for any amount of time worked over 32 hours per week.
This is already the case for 40 hours, but they want to reduce the number to 32.
If this is what they want, it's really not very well thought through. Employers can just pay the same amount for 40 hours (paying less for the initial 32 and more for the subsequent 8), and employees will have greater incentives to keep their working week at 40 instead of having more flexibility for work-life balance. This would discourage 32-hour work weeks except for those jobs where employers can easily hire more people to compensate for the 8-hour shortfall (and those jobs are very few in number).
In fact, in Europe it's usually the opposite, where overtime is more heavily taxed, so both employers and employees have incentives to keep the work week within sensible hours. In addition, overtime tends to be restricted by collective wage agreements, which, in contrast to the USA, often apply to non-union members.
In this case the median would be a lot more interesting than the average. Few do more than 40h (legally) but many do less -> the average always under 40. Similarly, in average men have less than 2 testicles, but >99% have 2.
If the median is 40, then it still means that over half the population have 40h weeks meaning it's the standard.
The median employee in the Netherlands is just barely at the threshold of working full-time (defined as 35 hours or more). Few of those who work full-time cross 40 hours, and part-time can be well below 30; the average comes out to about 30.
Of those working part-time (less than 35 hours), about 12% would like to work more but has no suitable work available, so these are underemployed people working part-time.
Stats