A RECENT study of working hours and paid holidays indicated that employees in Nicosia cannot complain. The Nicosia worker puts in an average of just 1,680 hours per year, the fifth lowest of all 73 cities.
Only in Lyon, Paris, Madrid and Copenhagen do employees spend less time at work than employees in Nicosia.
Western Europeans work an average of 1,745 hours per year, compared to 1,830 hours in Eastern Europe. Asia and the Middle East have the longest working hours, averaging 2,119 and 2,063 hours per year respectively. Cairo tops the list with 2,373 hours a year, followed by Seoul with 2,312.
Interestingly people work an average of 58 hours more per year than they did in 2006.
The number of paid days of holiday in each city varied considerably and seemed to have little to do with a city’s level of economic development.
In Nicosia the average employee gets 19 days of paid holiday, compared with a Western European average of 25. Lima and Rio de Janeiro has the highest number of paid holidays, at 30 days a year, compared to Mexico City which has just six.
Nicosia also ranked 27th in the list of wage levels for the 73 cities. The study measured the average gross and net wages and ranked them according to their percentage of the New York worker’s average wage.
The wage earner in Nicosia earns 56.3 per cent of the average New Yorker’s wages before tax and 69.2 per cent of their wages after tax.
Forty six cities had lower wages levels than Nicosia, with six cities earning less than 10 per cent of the New York level. Workers in Mumbai earn just five per cent of the average gross wage in New York.
Employees in Copenhagen, Zurich and Geneva had the highest gross earnings. In Copenhagen the average worker earns 125.5 per cent of the New York worker’s gross wage.
Switzerland is shown to be a very employee friendly country, with extremely high gross wages and comparatively low tax rates. No other city in the study allowed workers to take home more income at the end of the month than Zurich and Geneva.
Workers in Western Europe receive three times the pay of their colleagues in Eastern Europe. The lowest incomes in Europe are paid in Bucharest, Romania, which ranked 56th and Sofia, Bulgaria, which ranked 63rd with gross incomes just 13.4 per cent of those in New York.
The study is the latest triennial Prices and Earnings Comparison, which UBS have been conducting for 31 years
