But I would be ahppy enough if at least the raw data would be unbiased.
A pleasure I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men's minds without their being aware of the fact. Levi-Strauss, Claude
The best way to have an accurate measure of the employment rate would be to calculate it in full-time equivalent jobs. "Ne te courbe que pour aimer..." René Char
The whole debate about employment is tied up with different framings. The standard framing is that low numbers of people working is a bad thing because it means that the economic resources of the country are being under-utilised. From the point of view of individuals the picture is very different.
Second measuring the hours worked is tricky, because not all the real hours worked are recorded and overtime is not taken into account in some countries.
And only the hours worked per year make sense, because you have a wide spectrum of working time schemes, some of them making people work 50 hours a week in summer and 20 in winter, or any other combination (and, believe me, there are many of them!). "Ne te courbe que pour aimer..." René Char
From the plutocratic point of view the useful measures are:
The irony is that disposable income and leisure time are two of the biggest drivers of individual spending, and an economy which is strong in both has a good chance of being strong in more traditional ways.
But it's long and I haven't found the table you mention.
And I also don't think there's a final word on annual hours worked. And wouldn't trust that report to deliver it, anyway. When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind
Mostly it looks solid enough. It shows, however, 100 more hours a year per employee worked in the UK than in France. The justification for this is in Item 4, where about a hundred hours difference is made on the basis of RTT (Work Time Reduction in which employees catch up on extra time done in other weeks or periods).
The footnote to this says the European Union Labour Force Survey data understated RTT and were corrected. (No further explanation).
Sources are cited as (mostly) EULFS and calculations by the authors. The latter obviously refers to the RTT hours, but no calculations are offered.
In this way the report avoids the conclusion that annual work hours in France and the UK are roughly similar. When locusts move on, they leave nothing behind
