Staying Late

"Can you stay longer today?" What do you say when your boss asks you that question.

According to a new study by the Institute for Labor Market and Career Research (IAB) in Nuremberg, many Germans are either too chicken to say no, don't have anything better to do instead, or truly are die-hard workaholics.

Sure, Germans may be known for their diligence, but c'mon: Three billion hours is a really long time. It's the equivalent of 125,000,000 days, 17,857,142 weeks, or 342,466 years.

Things start looking even worse when you think that 1.5 billion of those hours were practically done on a volunteer basis.

It sounds like a recipe for a strike (see this week's news). But -- surprisingly -- it's not the public services or transportation sectors that are affected, rather the employees in retail shops, restaurants, banks and insurance companies and no one's striking there.

Still, who'd have thought that 1.5 billion hours of unpaid exploitation takes place in one of the world's most expensive labor markets -- and nobody's complaining!

Maybe it has something to do with those 30-some vacation days that most Germans get every year.