ILO Sets To Launch New Study On Working Time

ARE people working more or less hours, and where? What is the status of the 40-hour week? In what jobs, and where, do people work longer or shorter hours? Who works longer hours, women or men, and why?

These and a host of other issues are the subject of a new report to be launched on June 7 by the International Labour Organisation (ILO). The new study, the most comprehensive of its kind ever published, examines working time in over 50 countries around the world, and explores the implications for working time policies in developing and transition countries for the first time.

Working Time Around the World: Trends in working hours, laws, and policies in a global comparative perspective (Note 1) by Sangheon Lee, Deirdre McCann and Jon C. Messenger, will be formally launched at the Patek Philippe Museum in Geneva by Jon C. Messenger, co-author of the study, and Thierry Guillermet, Maître de réadaptation au Centre d’intégration professionnel and Antoine Pradas, Coordinateur Horlogerie au Centre d’intégration professionnel.

For the last five decades, there has been a global shift towards a 40-hour weekly legal limit on working time, although substantial regional differences and uneven progress in reducing hours are apparent. The study examines what influence legal standards may have on actual working hours in a number of countries. It also examines working hours in the service sector and its subsectors, such as wholesale and retail trade, hotels and restaurants and transport, storage and communications, as well as in the growing informal economy. The book also considers how gender and age may help determine working time.

The authors also provide a set of policy suggestions that preserve health and safety, are family friendly, promote gender equality, enhance productivity and facilitate workers choice and influence over their working hours.

However, delegates to the 96th International Labour Conference are considering a new international labour standard that will revise the seven existing ILO standards on fishing adopted between 1920 and 1966. The discussions are focusing on living and working conditions of some 30 million people who work in the global fishing sector, one of the world’s most dangerous.

Much has changed in the sector since the last ILO standards were adopted some 40 years ago. Among other things, the sector is increasingly globalized. A new ILO standard would reflect these changes, and provide protection for a greater portion of people, particularly those working on smaller vessels.

The new fishing Convention would cover more than 90 per cent of workers in the world’s fishing industry, the vast majority of whom work on small vessels in developing countries. The existing Conventions cover only a fraction of all fishing industry workers. The instruments aim to address a variety of aspects of fishers’ lives, from their initial recruitment through when they return home, from when they are young until they retire.

ENDS

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