Albanians, most hardworking people on continent with minimum wage

During 2016, Albanians spent an average of 2109 hours, and their work cost employers an average of $331 per hour. Compared to 2012, so four years ago, the cost of the Albanian employer increased by 11.8%, or by an average of 3% per year, suggesting a tiny salary increase over a relatively long period of time.

In some sectors where qualified workers such as banks are needed, the cost of a worker's working hour was 700 bucks per hour, while most Albanians working in industry where unqualified or semiqualified workers are needed costing nearly three times less, despite working hours longer than qualified.

The Institute of Statistics published on Wednesday a job cost survey, a survey conducted near businesses during 2016 to measure the cost of work and the number of hours spent by Albanians at work.

Counting the number of hours and cost of work per hour is one of the economy indicators measured since the 1950s in developed countries with the aim of creating statistical information in the function of government labour market management.

Various governments change the work codes depending on these statistics, if, word comes, they want to increase the number of employees by limiting allowed working hours to workers or vice versa.

Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, O The ECD, which is part of the group of the world's most developed countries, regularly publishes statistics on the length of the work in member countries as well as other countries where there is available data.

In its latest report, France, with its strong employment and protection policies, resulted in one of the countries where people spend fewer hours at work.

The French worker spent an average of 1,472 hours working during 2016.

Despite the reputation for a very hardworking population, Germany was even lower, with an average of 1,363 hours at work.

Relatively poor countries such as Greece or Poland hold the record in the Europe area with 2,035 and 1,928 working hours per year respectively.

Albania seems to exceed all these countries by 2,173 hours.

Given that a year's work has formally been around 210 days of work, Albanians turn out to work with over 10 hours a week.

These are figures that include the public sector simultaneously, where there is generally more respect for official holidays, weekends and annual holidays, as well as the private sector, where the work code and the principle of 40-hour work week is rarely respected.

Thus, in the majority and retail trade sector, Albanians worked for 2215 hours, while in the extracting and processing industries the past working time was even higher, 2,231 and 2,222 hours respectively.

In practice, although legally the work week should have five days of up to eight hours of work a day, these figures show that Albanians mostly work six days a week with more than eight hours a day. Long-term work does not mean higher productivity for workers, but mostly reflects disrespect for their legal rights.

The cost of labour in Albania has increased since the latest survey of this type of INSTAT, with 11.8%. In 2012. And in 2016 a working hour in our country cost $3351, in 2012 it cost $345, or only 12% less. Nearly 85% of the labour cost consists of salaries for the worker, while the rest is the share of the employer's social and health insurance contributions. This does not mean that the Albanian was paid as much as 85% of the $3351. Of this amount, employers are entrusted with their social and health insurance, which removes another 15%, as well as personal income tax, which is kept according to income.

In total, the average cost of full - time workers was approximately $62,000 a month, with the financial sector at the highest cost of $150,000 a month on average, while the Akomoding and Food Services sector had the lowest cost of only $41,000 a month.

Taken by Reporter.al.