Saw this and found it interesting that Poland has such high working hours, particularly in comparison to Germany. However I do know Germany has a very high percentage of part time workers, which brings that number down quite a bit. Although it might explain why Poland has outpaced Germany in growth for the last decade.

by B3stThereEverWas

35 comments

  2. It’s easier to grow from low to high than from high to higher.

    Poland, Baltics played catch up intensively and it showed up as growth. Its highly possible the growth will stagnate same as the richer countries

  3. It will stop very shortly if polish people continue to use r/poland instead of working

  4. Poland has tragically low wages and at the same time rather good education. In IT world it is held in quite high regard. Also, anecdotal but still, I’ve worked with people from around the world and can comfirm, disparity is tangible

  5. Are jobless migrants living on benefits counted into this? That would somewhat explain why France, the UK, the Netherlands, and Germany look like that.

  6. No, it’s because we ware poor, and getting a lot of money from EU

  7. My experience is really opposite. In Poland I used to work 8am-4pm and go home. I am now in Germany and me and my friends are all working easily from 9-6 and more if needed. It’s just crazy how different it feels than this map. In Poland, 8h is 8h. In Germany, 8h is actually 9h because of unpaid lunch break. And guess what – people in Poland are not running around hungry.

  9. When I saw this post in r/Europe Germans said that it was this low because people who in the rest of europe are normally unemployed like mothers ,day time students etc are working at least partially like 2-4 hours a day lowering the average

    It’s the Opposite of Greece where there aren’t that many working people but those who have work have to maintain the rest of society and work overtime

    In Poland we have a mix between these two

    Those who have a job work Overtime

    And everybody who can goes to work

  10. There are many reasons for Poland’s economic growth, and certainly the number of hours Poles work is one reason. This could have negative long-term consequences though, since [long working hours seem to reduce fertility rates](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2093791121000585) – meaning fewer workers and taxpayers in the future.

    In any case, in economics it’s always a mistake to focus on just one thing. Economies are extremely complex and have many moving parts. Number of hours worked is just one factor. We could imagine two farmers – one with just a shovel, the other with a tractor and all sorts of other modern equipment. It’s obvious that the second farmer will get far more work done in far less time than the first farmer.

    Other things helping Poland’s growth is certainly Poland’s proximity to and close economic ties with Germany (the world’s third largest economy after the US and China), relatively low starting point (it’s easy to grow at 3% when your economy is much smaller/poorer than advanced Western economies), monetary sovereignty (keeping the Polish złoty) which has allowed Poland to avoid the problems of countries such as Greece, net positive balance with the EU which funds a lot of large investments in Poland (the EU spends more money in Poland than Poland gives back to the EU), cheap but relatively well-educated labor force which attracts many Western companies, etc.

    A lot of these things will likely change in time – for example, when Poland has a larger economy, it won’t be so easy to just adopt Western solutions to problems and grow at 3-4%, because those solutions will already be implemented in Poland. Also, a larger/richer economy will mean that we will have to pay more into the EU than we receive, which will also slow growth. In addition to all of this, a larger/richer economy will likely mean higher wages – taking away Poland’s advantage of having a large, cheap labor force that Western companies desperately want.

    Here, we could also add the adoption of the Euro in the future as a potential danger – giving up our monetary sovereignty means we won’t be able to dictate our own interest rates or inflate away debt when necessary. Everyone talks about Greece here, but even top ten economies like Italy have suffered as a result of giving away their monetary sovereignty. Hopefully, though, the EU reforms in a way that will mitigate these problems in the future (more centralized debt/spending from the EU).

    We can also touch on the fertility issue I mentioned earlier. Falling fertility rates mean an aging society – so, right now, we don’t pay much for schools and child care, because there aren’t that many children, but in the future we will have fewer workers/taxpayers supporting more and more retirees/pensioners. I don’t believe this will be as disastrous as some others think (increases in productivity mean we don’t need an ever-increasing number of workers to support retirees), but it will slow economic growth to some extent for sure.

    Other potential dangers in the future include a low investment rate – IIRC, Poland invests about 18% of its GDP, whereas the norm in OECD countries is somewhere above 20%. That’s a bit like that farmer with the shovel refusing to invest in a tractor or other modern equipment – you can work hard, but without capital goods (like that modern farm equipment), modern technology, etc. you just won’t be as productive as you could be. A lot of people in Poland now are focusing on CPK (the central transportation hub near Warsaw) but honestly that’s just a drop in the bucket compared to what needs to be done – better roads and railroads all over the country, better funding for schools and higher education, more funding for research, more investments in the energy grid and more power plants that will give us independence from volatile natural resources like oil and gas, etc.

    Long story short: Poland is growing for many reasons, but it faces many challenges that could slow that growth drastically in the future – meaning things will have to change if we want to keep this growth rate going well into the future.

  11. My friend works in West Germany. Warehouse, every level job, everyone is immigrant, most with only basic language. Almost everyone takes at least 30 days sick leave in a year as additional holiday. It’s normalised, no one is making fuss about it.

  12. No, on the contrary. But it will probably even out more over time.

  13. No. This is why large part of our society is overworked and frustrated

  15. Long working hours =/= long-term productivity. It usually is the opposite.

  17. Poland has good education, bad wages and quite good everyday technological level in use which makes it easier to grow. While Germany still only accepts paper for all matters, you can easily do most of basic government things online in Poland. Also in industrial processes we are more likely to implement new technologies while German companies are more likely to stay in what they already know. source: brother working in Germany

  18. It also says a lot about efficiency/productivity. Western countries produce more goods per worker.

  19. We will have 250 working days in 2025. So, the average person working full time will spend 2000 hours in work.

    Annual hours worked in Poland are not high because we work a lot of overtime, but because we work mostly full time.

  20. This doesn’t necessarily mean people work long hours. It could just mean they take less vacation or there are less state holidays than the neighboring countries.

  22. “Economic growth” means nothing if the people don’t feel it. Working long hours just to get by is NOT a symptom of prosperity.

    You could cut down every tree in your country and turn them into chairs, and your GDP would increase greatly, and yet the country would suffer just as much.

  23. I would say that it’s a small factor contributing

    Poland is known in western Europe for their hard working mentality 

    But Poland has grown mostly because it’s economy has strong links to Germany,Sweden
    And it had a big economic gap to fill with it’s neighbour’s

    It also received 100 billion of European subsidies over the last decades ,
    And made strong military investments at the right time 5 years ago…

    It’s a rather big country, so it has scale advantages if managed very centrally ( which it has been over the last 10 years)

    Basically, Slovakia and Hungary could have made the same leap forward 
     if it wasn’t for their corruption and scale issues

  24. This country is a slave factory.
    They jacked up the flat prices by injecting public money directly to developers, also we have the highest percentage for flat/house loans – if you want to pay 300k you have to actually pay 900k.
    People even in large cities take out a 20-30 year loan and then slave away for the rest of their life with fear of foreclosure. Most work places are hostile with mobbing and people don’t fight back because they’re worried about the loan.

    I saw the comments saying that working a lot of hours doesn’t mean being productive – true but as far as our quality/cost ratio goes(at least for IT) check out the hacker rank for each country, Poland is 3rd worldwide and 1st as a western country.

    [https://blog.hackerrank.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Screen-Shot-2016-08-23-at-8.42.39-AM.png](https://blog.hackerrank.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Screen-Shot-2016-08-23-at-8.42.39-AM.png)

  25. That number is way higher in reality since it only shows registered hours worked

  26. I am not sure how these hours work….lots Companies don’t have an official lunch break in Poland but people have ( unofficial ) breaks for lunches. So it is like paid break.

  28. How tf Germany is working 1400h per year??? How is that even possible?

  29. Lol no, we work so much because salaries are shit and to be able to live you are forced to do overtime. It’s hell.

  30. Not at all.

    Polish always have been aspiring. They are always unhappy with what they have, look up to their neighbours (next door and next border away) and invent genius what’s to improve. I have never met a Pole that was happy with the status quo.

  32. In 2025 there are 1992 hours that we work in a full-time job.
    It’s 166h a month, or 20.75 days a month. That’s the norm.

    So 20h overtime in a year isn’t much. Nothing special in the photo in our country. What’s much more interesting is Germany with their 1386 hours.

  33. Define the highest.
    Because if we talk about “since transformation” then Romania by % beats us.

  34. Nah. We’ve been overworked since forever, both in times of growth and stagnation.

  35. If you work in a corporation, get a job objective-based rather than timesheet-based. I work 6 hours per day and could even work less than that.

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