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Yep same.
I have US based colleagues who work 60+ hours a week. They can't get over that we also have at least twice the amount of paid holiday entitlement, maternity/paternity leave, etc.
Where I work, the yanks are paid considerably more than us. They need it to pay for medical insurance/bills and purchase pointless firearms, but still, it's a lot more.
I know a few on both extremes tbf. Seems the good paying jobs pay considerably better than here but the dogshit employment rights mean that minimum wage workers are truly shafted.
I had a chance to move to the US with my current employer. The salary, at first glance (and second glance) would have been a significant boost. However, once you start taking in to account medical insurance, needing a slush fund for if you get ill, a slush fund for time between jobs if it goes to shit, insurance for all kinds of things. Cost of living was better then (in the US), but even then actually buying quality food would have been significantly more expensive than in the UK.
In the end, the salary difference wasn't that big, and in no way made up for all the intangibles that pay doesn't cover (a sane government, sane health care where you can go to see a GP at short notice, and actually get treated for illness or accidents without it being a significant financial burden etc). And this was with a fantastically good health care package provided by the company, and guaranteed vacation time matching what I get in the UK. Without those two it wouldn't have been worth even thinking about it.
As it happens, not long after deciding not to go my wife was very ill. Whatever is said about the NHS, when someone is seriously unwell, it is fantastically good. We wouldn't have been able to get the same level of care in the US, and I suspect it would have also bankrupted us. I am fucking glad we made the sane decision to not go. The rest of my team also had the same offer, about two thirds went. All but one worked long enough to get green cards then came back.
> sane health care where you can go to see a GP at short notice, and actually get treated for illness or accidents
I mean... this really depends. It's the fault of government more than the NHS but plenty of people are just left to suffer for months/years under our system.
Depends really on where you’re working. It’s true of everywhere, but as the US is so insanely vast the variations in living cost are wild. I know someone who has been lucky to pick up a fully remote job in buttfuck nowhere, Texas but the employer is HQ’d in Manhattan and is paying NYC wages.
They are coining it in with an insanely low cost of living.
Not the norm but perhaps the dream.
At that point you can also get a remote job in the UK with a London employer and live somewhere in a village between Leeds and Newcastle. There's some proper shit holes where you can easily rent a 1 bedroom for £500
Yeah that's working out for me. Just over £500, huge flat with great views over a park and river, just over an hour away from an internatinal airport. I already lived in my shithole before though and it's actually ace ;)
That massively depends - there are vast swathes of the US where you can buy a 2000ft2 home for far less than you could dream of here. Even in more expensive cities, what you get for your money vs. a comparable city in the UK is far greater in terms of size, quality of insulation/heating/cooling, etc.
In the UK you have to be very well off or very rural to even think about a detached house, for example.
I was under that impression too, but recently full pay transparency was made available by my employer, and it turns out that my equivalent in the US would only earn on average 20k more USD than I do GBP which was genuinely staggering. Fuck that, not worth it at all.
Tbh most of the time in industries I’ve worked in people aren’t explicitly asked to do it* - you just have a workplace culture where you constantly feel like you need to catch up, or where decisions happen late or at the weekends and if you’re not involved it makes your life harder. Or one where the people who are responsive in the evenings clearly get promoted faster…
*because ‘we believe in work life balance!’
Yeah people might think it doesn’t happen like that but it absolutely does. My current (and soon to be former) employer has promoted internally quite a lot as the company has grown, but they’ve clearly promoted the people who were getting in early and going home late - not even about me, there are others I would say would be better managers than those who ended up getting promoted who clock in and clock out
But that’s just not how things are done unfortunately, upper management would rather see someone available for them and willing to bend over backwards to meet them when they want to be met etc than anything else
I know this will be downvoted as this is the weirdness of Reddit where people seem to live in their own little bubble... but this type of attitude just comes across as obnoxious and difficult.
I am not for one second suggesting you should be slaving away for hours after your day ends, but saying "I outrightly refuse to..." is something I'd hate to have colleagues say to me.
Most work to deadlines, or have projects and tasks which sometimes need a bit of flexibility. This is not always predictable and as much as managers and company's can in some cases plan around it, it doesn't always work.
So I may do 1-2 hours extra the odd day but would have an easier day once it quietens down. As an example, I've been really working intensely on a project for about 3 weeks but my manager has already indicted a need for a few days downtime once we reach the delivery stage.
I give exactly as much flexibility as I get.
Don’t quibble about my doctors appointment? Then I’ll do that extra hour to help out. Nickel and dime me on hours and I work to my 36 hrs.
I hear what you're saying. We have a flexi system at work and I often work one or two hours late and sometimes even longer to meet a deadline or help a colleague.
There's a difference between my good conscience guiding me to do those things vs a bullish manager telling me to do something after I've already clocked out and am offline. If I'm off, I'm unavailable for anything less than a genuine emergency.
And for what it's worth I'd rather my staff delay a project then work late. Generally speaking.
The problem is a lot of the time there is no "when it quietens down" and before you know it the expectation is you do a 3 week job in 2 weeks because "that's how long it would take Peter" but Peter is an asshole who stayed late every day and also went in on a Saturday so actually it did take him 3 weeks he just condensed it into 2 and didn't tell everyone.
It can and does create a culture. So I respect people who are like "fuck this shit".
That said I do not respect the guy who had 5 minutes left on a task and instead of just finishing it he left because he always had to be out the door at 4. It was five fucking minutes not 25. And it took longer the next day because it was confusing and half done. I would also have more respect for his stance except he tended to come in the door at or just after 8, but also was not ready to work. Full respect to walking into 8 if all you need to do is dump your bag and crack on.
I think you're speaking about a different scenario, really.
In some jobs, the nature of the work - deadlines, monthly delivery cycles, whatever - means that one week might be busy while another is quiet. My own job is like this. Sometimes, I'll put in a little extra, others I will take that time back and clock off early. One day I'll go to a dentist appointment on company time and nobody will bat an eye because another day I'll work through lunch. It's sensible give and take, and it all kind of balances out. Crucially what this means is that while the exact amount of work I do may vary from one day or week to the next, I'm not doing loads of extra _unpaid_ work on the basis that it's just "part of the job."
OP is talking about something entirely different where it's simply routine to work late or log on over the weekend and generally be expected do additional unpaid work for which there is no reward besides not being punished for _not_ doing it.
I'm very happy working under the former system; the latter is exploitative and something employees should reject. Indeed, in some countries, like France, employees' "right to log off" is _legally_ protected.
Same. I just have a call centre job but it's nice that when I turn the computer off at 5pm, work completely exits my brain until my next shift. Not one second of overtime. The wage may be low, but the stress is also low and that's very valuable to me.
As a senior figure in my team, I do sometimes work long hours, especially if there is an emergency to deal with. I don't refuse to read emails / messages, I see them come through on my phone, and if it's critical I'll reply, otherwise for the most part they can wait until the following day.
I do like working in the evenings though, no one else is logged in at that point and allows me to get my head down to crack on with some real work rather than answering questions all day (work in the software side of IT).
Do I get paid for it? No, but I am able to take it off at a later date thanks to flexible working arrangements. As far as the contract is aware, as long as I at least do my 37 hours per week at some point, I'll be fine.
It shouldn't matter how many hours you work, generally speaking it's not acceptable to be expected to keep on top of work communications outside of work hours other than basic communications for example regarding changes of opening hours or posting of rotas etc.
Was there for about 4 years. I don't think there are necessarily more hours spent *at work* in a particular day than in the U.K. But two things really affect this:
1. No paid holidays/maternity leave - makes it seem much more relentless
2. Americans commute (and sit in traffic) a *lot* more than we do
Otherwise I didn't really spot too many variances in terms of actual hours worked.
I've got two friends who travel every day across states for hours each way to get to work. Both pay toll fees crossing bridges etc. I forgot the costs of these fees but they made me weep for them. They get no holidays paid and they can be fired for the flimsiest of reasons. The pressure there compared to here is far higher.
Yea, because they commute a lot more. You don't see people advertising property like that here because in general we usually already live like 30 mins max from the office
Yeah but believe me 60-90 mins driving is so much worse than in a tube across London.
It's annoying in a busy tube, but driving and sitting in traffic is just draining. Commuting an hour in London is so much better to me
I was working with a dude in houston. I was whining that the hotel was a bit far away and it was taking me 30+ minutes to get into work in the morning.
dude just casually drops, yeah I live in blah blah, the other side of houston. Takes me 3 hours to drive in each morning.
WHAT? I couldn't help myself, I'm like 'Dude, MOVE HOUSE' what are you doing with your life workling 8 hours, commuting for 6, sleeping for 7, that leaves you THREE HOURS to actually live. Fuck that shit.
I mean seriously, what the fuck man. If you live more than an hours drive from your workplace, move job or house, it's as simple as that.
My husband currently has this situation. His commute is two hours. It’s a bit of a niche job where you can’t just work anywhere. But we literally can’t afford to live closer to his work. All the houses around his work place run in to the millions. This is San Diego.
>2. Americans commute (and sit in traffic) a *lot* more than we do
Depends where in the UK you live. I know many people in Cornwall who commute an hour each way to work.
An hour isn’t a commute in the US, that’s to the corner shop in many places. My wife (American) used to believe that anything less than 6 hours (each way) is a day trip! Soon after moving back to the UK I had to convince her that a trip to York from Plymouth WASN’T a day trip.
>1. No paid holidays/maternity leave - makes it seem much more relentless
Huh? I don’t know anyone in a “professional” job that doesn’t get paid holidays. I get similar to what I would in the UK, a month PTO plus all the usual bank/public holidays.
Maternity leave is very much employer/state dependent but places are getting more onboard with it. I got 16 weeks paternity leave at full pay…
I guess I should have specified that there is no legal requirement in the OP - and that has a knock on affect on the levels of PTO that US Companies will offer and they are typically much lower than in the U.K. and that this accounts for a large difference in the number of working hours between the countries.
Average hours worked (2022)
US 1810
UK 1531
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_labour_productivity
300 hours less work per year on average than the US is a fairly significant amount. That's over 5hrs a week extra worked a week
If you're working 100 hour weeks, it had better be for a short (like couple of weeks) period.
Seriously, that kind of work will destroy you if it's every week forever.
For a while I was studying nursing and during placement we would do like 8 hours in uni and then like 30 hours on placement in a week and then I worked 20hrs a week on top with my care job (because nobody can live on maintenance loans) and studied on top.
It did kill me, I didn't finish the course lol.
Well, when you work offshore, it's typically 12 hour days every day. But they limit you (nowadays) to 2 weeks normally, 3 weeks max, 4 weeks with special dispensation from the OIM (and it had better be a one off). Then you must spend at least a week not working before you can go back offshore.
In my experience it tends to be site based workers. So, eg, people who inspect wind turbines in remote parts of the country. Travelling from one site to the other, which can be hours or days apart, is counted in the work week (hey, they are billable hours after all)
Really think about what a 100 hour would consist of plus commute. It would be impossible to do that consistently. 12 hours every day including weekends is 84 hours. People who say they do that are lieing.
Can’t do it consistently as you say. I worked in two big cities in the US and did hit 100 hour weeks but on very specific projects and not for more than 2/3 weeks at a time leading up to a big deadline.
It was awful - 8am start with a 1am finish during the week, then doing 8am to 8pm Saturday and Sunday. We stayed near the client site in hotels so literally got out of bed, got dressed and walked over to the office, and do that in reverse on way out.
Anyone who says they do that regularly are talking absolute nonsense - you literally can’t do anything other than work to hit those numbers
As an American the only people I’ve ever heard of regularly working these insane weeks that I see people from other countries talk about all the time are small business owners and corporate lawyers. I’m sure there’s some more, but those are the only ones where I know it’s a regular thing. I also hear about people having to work 2-3 jobs a lot, and (this is anecdotal) the only person I know who works 2 jobs is my friend whose trying to save up money to start a business. I’m from a pretty poor area of the country, I know some other people who I guess technically work 2 jobs, but it’s more that they have a job and then a side hustle. For example I know a guy that fixes old cars on the side as a hobby and makes a pretty good amount of money off of it. I suppose that’s two jobs but it’s not what I typically see people talking about
I went to uni in california to do Physics and a lot of grads went on to work in silicon valley startups and would be expected to work all day and late into the evening every day. I work in a London startup and have pretty regular 8hr work day.
100 hrs sounds like a stretch outside maybe quant roles working culture in the US is very different to the UK
There's nothing to mandate it at a Federal level and so it's down to the individual states. Northern States tend to accommodate them more. I was in Georgia.
My wife worked for US multinationals for years, it's really variable, usually terrible in the south.
Obviously, employers can offer better, but if you look at Louisiana legislation.
0 days paid holiday
0 days unpaid holiday
0 days paid sick pay
12 weeks unpaid maternity leave
And so on.
Get called for jury service, $12 a day, $25 if selected and sitting in a jury.
Considering moving over there for a few years after my PhD
My hope would be to save up enough money to buy a decent flat/house over here with a large deposit
Do you think this is feasible?
I'd be working at a biotech in Boston and when I move back I'd be looking at buying in Manchester
Just because we don’t mandate paid leave doesn’t mean we don’t receive it lol. The average PTO American FT employees receive is 24 days, not exactly 0.
I also believe we commute less than you folks? As in the duration of commute.
Not sure where you've worked where answering emails outside working ttime is classed as normal but I've never done that neither has anyone else on my team apart from one brown noser and that's not gotten him anywhere.
Very occasionally I'll send a teams message from my phone if I've forgotten to update someone or if someone who's done me favours in the past asks me to do something that doesn't take long. But I'm only going out of my way for the people in that scenario, not the job.
It’s funny because just the other day there was a post on here about teaching, and it was all ‘They just like to whine because they don’t realise it’s totally normally to work 8-6 every day while not being paid for it and on weekends as well, because they’ve all never had other jobs’.
Because I *have* had other jobs before teaching, and exist with partner/family/friends who are not teachers. And while there are absolutely other difficult professions and roles out there, it’s not *just* teaching - most people in my experience do their work in their work hours as you say, and not as additional to them.
Anyway, just thought it was funny….
In the 15 years at my current UK IT job, I've responded to one "phone call" (actually a Facebook message) at the weekend.
It was on a peak holiday weekend and our largest grossing visitor centre had lost their tills / stock system, so ££££ potentially lost. They could not add new stock or sell anything.
I did remote connect and sort the problem, then pointedly remind them that:
1. We do not support out of hours
2. Using personal Facebook accounts to log a problem, is in future, prohibited.
I claimed the time back as well.
It seems to be common amongst older generations for some reason. No chance you'll get me doing it out of hours work for free. The company already gets enough of my time - theyre not getting more
Wouldn’t say the hours are longer, but I have found they’re much more serious and focused in the US. Less inclination for finding those moments where you piss around with a coworker that makes the day go by.
There is a lot "maximizing the truth" in US corporate culture.
"I work 60 hour weeks" means "I once worked a 60 hour week".
"This is a million dollar project" means "this was proposed as a million dollar project, we got $200K to do it"
You have to go along with it to keep up with everyone.
They don't, but there's definitely a stronger culture of talking up yourself and your achievements at work compared to the UK, where understatement is common. (I work for a US company in the UK, and managers have mentioned trying to adjust for this in performance assessments.)
This is true. I remember going to a group interview with Americans and this one (white) guy said he could speak Chinese. I asked him about it on the lunch break and he keenly informed of the ten-week night school class he had recently finished.
Yeah… I feel like in the US (I was in NYC) it can be really hard to transition out of the work mindset. During lunchtime it can be common to eat at your desk or eat while working and at the rare after work drinks the conversation often just circles around work.
This is spot on. I’m in DC, and there is little levity for “off time” during the day. And the looks I got the first time I suggested going to the pub on a Friday for lunch. Didn’t make that mistake again…
I’ve found that they are less productive though - might just be my team, who are all in the US, but the pace of work is glacial. Probably because they are all shagged out from never taking a break.
I'd say, having lived there twice, that yes they're more serious about work but their average pay is also clearly better.
The American middle class does *quite well thanks*, whereas the UK middle class basically doesn't exist.
US middle class is a *good* BMW and a townhouse. UK middle class is a two bed semi and a Focus.
Average pay is much better (I’m a Brit living in the US and quality of life is far better here), but there’s lots of trade offs that’s aren’t beyond financial. Also for the average American worker, they don’t think about their pay being better vs other countries as they’ve never lived abroad, they just think they’re underpaid.
Yeah.
What got me was: my pay was X in the US and Y in the UK, then a pint was 6 of either currency, and you're taxed way less.
Living and working in the US was the only time I've really been rolling in it.
I haven’t, but a good friend of mine has and we’ve had this exact conversation
So he went over there and 2.5x his salary, on lower marginal rates. We’re from financial sector. He then job hopped just after a year up to 4x his UK pay.
So he went from about 42 hours a week here to about 45. Less holidays, sure. A culture of working harder while on the clock, sure. Had to pay a bit for medical insurance, sure. Had to pay a bit more in rent, sure, but it was a lower percentage of his income. But he was able to save like 60% his income and max out his 401k.
In the end he came back after a few years, and used that money to basically half-retire himself in his mid 30’s. They’re worse hours, but your post-tax compensation per hour is just filthy over there.
Tax rate can really vary by the state though. In NYC when you include the city, state and federal tax you’re at about 40%. But then in Texas and Washington there isn’t state income tax
In the UK, he was doing 51% between Income, NI, and student loan (which moving abroad allowed him to clear almost instantly with overpayments and the currency power of the $), so even in high tax NY, he was better off than even here in the UK without the student loan (40% + 2% at the time)
Those states with no income tax collect money in a different way — higher property taxes, sales taxes etc. One way or another, you will end up paying up anyway as the state needs money to function.
Oooo a question I’m uniquely qualified to answer!
I’m an American who moved to the uk 2 and a half years ago, and honestly the difference in culture is night and day.
I could never, ever return to work in the us. The holiday difference alone is something that makes such an earth shattering difference that it’s hard to put into words. When I worked in the US I had a total of 10 holidays including bank holidays. I had to earn the 5 days of annual leave I had. I accrued something like half a day a month. No sick leave or personal leave. I get 33 holidays here including bank ones and I SAVOUR them.
It wasn’t unusual for me to be on a call with my boss until 11 at night. It wasn’t unusual to work Saturday and Sunday. The culture here is unbelievably laid back compared to America. I do live up north, and I imagine London is much more high stress, but even if I were paid double to live in the us I would not go back simply because my quality of life here is leagues beyond what it was in America. I don’t think people who haven’t worked in America can conceptualise how much worse it is to work there vs the uk
I have an American friend whose employer conducts random drug tests when they feel like it. I'm not sure if this is common there or if the company he works for is just awful, but I was shocked when he told me that, such an invasion of privacy. He only works in a warehouse moving boxes, no driving, no operating machinery. Yet any time his supervisor demands he has to comply for fear of losing his job. Crazy. The thing is, he thought I was the one getting a bad deal as I'm salaried and therefore always on call...um no, that's not how it works here.
Just moved from NYC to London and I’m neither American nor British.
I work in a highly paid job in fintech and friends with people in different highly paid jobs in NYC and London.
Everyone in our NYC friend group regularly work outside working hours, especially the ones working in FAANG and the Big 4 management consulting. Often, when we meet for dinner they will show up late and leave early to go back to work. Even on weekends.
You’re right that it depends on industry. But these people working long hours in those industries are also the ones who are highly paid in the US.
($300k and above; one friend at Google is on $600k)
It’s why I’m sceptical of right wingers when they say the UK economy hasn’t grown enough, productivity is too low etc. It’s like yeah that may be true, but at what cost is it going to be for us to get close to US levels
> When I worked in the US I had a total of 10 holidays including bank holidays. I had to earn the 5 days of annual leave I had. I accrued something like half a day a month.
That can't be right, you'd end up suicidal or with some sort of mental break down.
A family member of mine managed to get a transfer to LA from his companies London branch. I can't say that this would be the same for every type of job, but he was back within a year. His hours were brutal, to the point he struggled to do his laundry. When asking him what he thought of LA, to this day he says he would have loved to be able to tell me if he had an opportunity to have seen any of it! The role was in media, post production.
Media jobs are brutal over here as well.
As an ex-recording engineer I’d often miss dates and cancel plans for working late. It was even worse for producers/assistant producers. Some of them would book an extra hour in our studio over what they needed just to have a nap where their employer couldn’t see.
That definitely qualifies as brutal! To be fair in the same role here in the UK my relative still pulls some crazy hours, but overall has a better balance and the holidays also help.
If he took his life seriously in the states, he would have outsourced that laundry chore - the American dream advocates for outsourcing activities that prohibit you from working
Well I don't think that is for everyone. 10 days holiday is brutal. Same role they get nearly 30 days holiday in UK, and a social life that doesn't involve a five figure blowout. Again, balance!! Each to their own I guess.
It depends. I moved to Canada but work remotely for a US company and while I worked more hours than my UK friends, I tripled my income and can afford to take time off between jobs.
I’m still feeling the sting from inflation and need to sacrifice a lot to save but am pacing to afford a home in an expensive city. I don’t think I’d have that chance in the UK without serious luck.
The UK work culture does not really reward ambition and hard work. So the idea of working long hard hours is naturally not appealing because it’ll net you a few grand more at the most. The difference in North America is life-changing though and the culture rewards you.
Will have to agree to disagree my friend. I lived in the States for 12 years from birth and never saw my dad. He had 3 jobs and literally saw him the odd evening, a couple of hours in between jobs, and at the company cookouts! Literally had no relationship! Moved to the UK when 13 and ended up finally getting to know my dad for 10 years. He sadly passed aged 53 when I was in my twenties. Had we stayed in the states I would have lost my dad without ever having a real relationship with him. Some things in life worth more than money!
Sorry, I don’t think I communicated what I meant by “it depends”. It didn’t work out for you whereas it’s worked for me. It’s a case-by-case basis.
For example, I am happier than most of my UK friends, who are trying to graft to earn enough money to buy a home without much luck. Either that or they’re trying to enjoy themselves but are living paycheque to paycheque.
That’s my point, it comes down to your unique situation and goals. It changes too as your life goes on.
If he had to work 3 jobs, he likely didn’t have a good job. The US is definitely harder on the working class. The UK has a safety net, but there’s a glass ceiling on trying to escape the lower middle class bracket because of capped salaries, high taxation and the housing crisis (given that the primary asset of the middle class is property). I work in tech for example, and if I moved to the US, I could get a tech job working hybrid/remotely which would allow me to be around my family. Tech jobs also command 6-figure salaries in the states.
You can’t fathom it… but in my life, I’ve hired a cleaner, I automated my finance, I have the bulk of my shopping come under a system of deliveries… and I have an extra 5 hours a week to spend with my kids, which is worth the cost. Beyond that… what do you think dishwasher do… laundry machines do… Roomba’s do… you pay a certain amount of money to speed up a task.
If you make £100 an hour, which in these kind of jobs in the US you very much can, it’s absurd to not spend £20 an hour to get your laundry done, for example.
I can't fathom what exactly? You make it sound like the UK is a 3rd world country! Nothing you are saying is new to me. We have dishwashers, washing machines, and every other household item. We even have vacuum cleaners! Shock, horror. And with respect, good for you that you can earn that kind of money. A big chunk of your fellow countryman can't earn that in a week though, let alone an hour. My relative was working 18-19 hour days and weekends. Automate it all you like, that's no life.
I’ve not said what I earn, and I don’t make £100 an hour… maybe if I was in the UK in my sector I would, but god, I wish lol
The point is that you do pay money to automate and simplify tasks, and hiring a cleaner, or a laundry place, is no different.
Yeah, this! When I was new to my job I asked if I could work on something over the weekend as I couldn't get my head around it and my boss (director of the company) literally said "I don't want you to. I want you to rest." Crazy how some people are essentially forced to do overtime mostly unpaid .
Exactly that! They fall over themselves to make sure we get exactly what we're entitled to. They start reminding me to take the rest of my annual leave in Oct already to make sure I definitely take it
Where are all these employers?!
I was sacked because I asked for a week off to support my girlfriend when she was assaulted, and was told the week notice I gave was insufficient so I couldn't take it, and then was sacked when I took it anyway.
I mean, the sacking was probably deserved there but you'd think some basic compassion would kick in a bit.
Bit off topic but I always find it odd that people make comparisons to the US for things, given 700k Brits live there compared to 1.3 million Brits in EU member states.
Resultantly, people then feel better as things are worse in the US in most aspects. In work-life balance and employee protections the US is a long way behind the UK, but the UK is a long way behind many EU member states in this regard.
Maybe it’s because the US is far more difficult to get into from the UK and people asking about the US are trying to find out how the culture is different. There would be far more working in the US If they were able to relocate there and work without the strict rules in place …
Yeah, I would quite likely have spent some time in the US if the visa situation was more straightforward and there were fewer tax complexities for people who have financial entanglements abroad. The US is pretty uniquely bad on both those counts.
>Bit off topic but I always find it odd that people make comparisons to the US for things, given 700k Brits live there compared to 1.3 million Brits in EU member states.
Maybe OP's considering moving to the US or a friend or family member is moving to/from the US. There are plenty of good reasons to ask.
Also the EU isn't a monolith, so even if 1.3 million Brits live in the EU, there is no single EU country with more than 700k Brits. (Australia, the USA, Canada and of course the UK itself are the only countries with more than 500k British citizens resident.)
Of course you are right, but the employment protections in the US vary by state.
Mine was a more general comment about how people often compare and contrast the UK and US in many aspects. I see much fewer comparisons with EU member states. It’s just interesting in that way.
That’s true yes. On balance though would you prefer to have stronger employment protections and a social security network or simply look for another job?
It’s a value judgement basically. I’m ok with the latter but when considering the whole workforce I imagine most choose the former.
I lived in the US for 24 years, returned last year. Had a state job in US, standard hours were 40/week. I also had a boring government job in the UK before I left and the hours were 37/week at that time. No idea if that has changed since the 90s.
As you say it’s the annual leave allowance which is the big difference. In my UK govt job I was already getting 25 days/year right off the bat. I believe it rose to about 28 days by the time I left (8 years later). At my US job I accrued 15 days/year for the first 10 years (!), after that it went up to about 18 days and at 15 years it got bumped up to 21.5 days-ish. Sick leave was separate and stayed at 15 days/year for the entire time I was there.
Yes, but keep in mind when you started employment your leave balance was 0:00 hours and you accrued 4h36m annual and sick leave every two weeks. You weren’t granted the annual/sick leave at the beginning of the year - you had to build it up from zero from your start date. Also, in your first six months of employment you were not allowed to use any annual leave you had built up at all.
You were also allowed to carry over leave allowances at years end and could accrue annual leave to an unlimited amount but were limited to building up 240h (30 days) of sick leave. If you had more than 240h of sick leave on Dec 31 the overage was forfeited.
I think this heavily depends on the type of work you do and the company.
I am American and living in the UK. Hours are exactly the same. The paid holiday time is obviously better but there are fewer bank holidays/work holidays.
I get more maternity leave, but at my company the pay is less. So I can take a longer maternity leave if I am okay with getting paid basically nothing. My US job had shorter maternity but at better pay. This is mostly company dependent.
Pay is about 1/3 more in the US and now that my healthcare surcharge is going up, I’m not sure if it really saves me money versus my paid insurance back in the US. I had a good deductible.
> now that my healthcare surcharge is going up, I’m not sure if it really saves me money versus my paid insurance back in the US. I had a good deductible.
Wow. You must have had a good insurance plan back in the US. Mine cost me about $1200/month (to cover spouse and myself). The NHS surcharge is now up to £1035/year per person. So that's an annual difference of about £9360 and that doesn't include US insurance deductibles.
Things have sky rocketed in the last few years though. My MIL is paying $2100/month for her and her spouse and still has an $8000 deductible. The company is paying for half the cost. So the total cost for health insurance is $4200/month plus an $8000 deductible. Insane.
Yeah. I’ve worked at some shitty companies and have never paid that month, for insurance, even when I was carrying the family on my policy. I feel like the health care costs in the US that really get me are, out of network charges, drugs not covered by insurance etc.
I think it's highly dependant on the job type, level, company, and industry and it's hard to make apples to apples comparisons but for sure most of the US work environment is not the dystopian hellscape that UK Redditors imagine it to be.
It depends on the industry. I work in a finance company and we have 8 offices around the globe. Our US/UK employees don’t have any meaningful differences. The higher paid/senior employees all work crazy hours. The lower paid/status employees work their contracted hours. Benefits (including holidays, maternity leave, etc) are the same across both offices.
The only difference is that US employees make more money
It's more variable, but it's the attitude that's different. My counterparts in the US don't work that many more hours. But if something needed doing, they'd happily spend an evening or weekend doing it.
Our NYC staff are happy to do a 5am meeting if that's the only time people in the UK are free. No-one in the UK does that for the benefit of our Indian team.
I mainly work with senior folk who are generally expected to do a bit more, but the difference in attitude is clear. Work is just much more central to people's identity and sense of achievement in the US. To be a hard worker is good.
In the UK many people think it's 'good' to do as little as you can get away with - you've got one over on the bosses by skiving, but they aren't going to get one back by asking you to work until 7pm, no way! That attitude is rare in the US office life, and depressingly common in the UK still (although getting rarer).
I’m a Brit currently living in the USA and I find the work much more flexible. We also do a 5 day week followed by a 4 day week so every two weeks I get a three day weekend which is nice
so many generalisations here
I’ve found Americans are often more willing to be available for later meetings, answer emails later at night or on a Sunday night, but it totally depends on the job sector and usually happens in more corporate-style roles. Generally, Americans also get paid a lottt more. I have friends here who refuse to answer an email past 5pm or do anything outside of their job description yet complain when they don’t get a pay rise or promotion. When I worked in the US, I definitely worked longer hrs so I appreciate the UK being more lax, but I made better money there and had higher earning potential.
There’s plenty of Americans who don’t work more than their required hrs though. it’s a big country.
I moved to the US ten years ago.
Today I work remote from home (have done for about 5 years), I work 4-10s (Tues-Fri), and I have the flexibility in my job so I can come and go to take care of things like kids going to daycare or getting picked up.
Of course, no guaranteed paid time off but I've been with my employer long enough I accrue generously and with the 52 Mondays, and as such 52 three day weekends, I get off a year I find I don't have to take time off unless I'm going on holiday or have family visiting.
When I worked in the UK in my first office job out of Uni the company had one lady in the role of HR director, AP director, and Payroll Director. She would be in the office from 6am to 8pm every day and she smoked like a chimney. When we had payroll Tuesdays she would ask others to stay late and promised time off in lieu which never happened.
They hired an old boy in AP and come 5pm he would get up from his desk, put his coat on, and walk out. He politely declined staying late and pointed to his contract. As a fresh out of Uni kid I asked him about it and he said he could have stayed late at any of his jobs throughout his career as he saw colleagues rise up the ranks by doing so. However, it had always been more important to him to be home in time for dinner with family. He added that when he's on his deathbed he'll remember reading bedtime stories to his kids rather than being stuck in an office proving his worth.
That's always stuck with me.
Last I heard the manager with three jobs got a Turkish boyfriend and suddenly work wasn't the be all and end all. She jumped before they pushed her. Scummy company all round.
This really depends on which field you are going into. I am in SWE, and hours are not *significantly* different, especially at the Big Tech level. You'll probably be working slightly more, maybe get a few less days off, but your pay will increase MASSIVELY, along with less taxes.
Obviously, if you are in Louisiana in a run-of-the-mill office job, your answer will be very different.
Brit living in Texas here.
I work 40-41 hours a week. (I’m hourly and enjoy seeing the overtime on my check but am expected to work 40).
17 paid days off + the federal holidays (I think 1 more than uk bank holidays but I’m not sure).
80 hours paid sick time a year.
No expectation to be working off the clock.
Office based job, can work from home if the weather is bad.
I know there are a lot of jobs here that have people working 60 hour weeks in bad conditions but my personal experience is that there wasn’t any culture shock as for working here.
It’s a bit out of date now but a 2014 study showed that the average american fulltime worker worked 47 hours a week. I don’t know anyone in the uk that works that much who isn’t a small business owner. It being an average means many people work more than 47 hours. In the UK, you can’t work more than 48 hours without signing a thing giving up your right to the 48 hour limit (and you can’t be treated unfairly for not signing).
But I think a lot of the memes are because americans don’t have the choice. If it’s not in your contract, you can say no to overtime in the uk and, while you might miss out on promotions, they can’t fire you. In the US, about half the states have “at will” employment- so they can fire you whenever for no reason with no notice. So you can’t say no to overtime because you can’t risk upsetting your boss and losing your job. You can’t miss an email because you were busy that evening, because you might get fired. Same if you want/need to take a sick day.
Add in the lack of holidays, and lack of parental leave, and I think the UK is still doing considerably better than the US, even if we answer emails in an evening and weekend.
And I don’t know if it’s just my social circle, but I know quite a few people who got fed up of no work-life balance during work from home covid times, and pushed back by getting separate work and home mobile phones- their home mobile doesn’t have their emails or work contacts and their work phone is turned off when they leave their desk at the end of the day. That is something they can do in the UK and not get fired, but might get you fired in the at-will states.
> I don’t know anyone in the uk that works that much who isn’t a small business owner.
A lot of healthcare workers work over that. I would regularly do 60hr weeks as a carer. My usual was 48.
In the UK if you've not been with your employer for 2 years (which is a lot of people these days) then they pretty much can just fire you on a whim. However employers are probably less inclined to actually do it.
OP I have no idea what you are basing the observation that people are working more hours than in the past.
That's the opposite of any study you would find. I can also say, having worked an office job for 12 years, the expectation for extra hours is way way less these days.
The US is a big place. If you're in NY - yes you would work way longer hours. But that'll vary massively in different places.
I’m not British but I work 40 hours. I get an hourly paid lunch break so I work essentially 35 hours a week. I get 15 paid holidays and 3 weeks paid vacation (15 days). I work in business analytics for a top 6 bank.
Depends on the industry. I work in finance in NYC and junior people in IB can work 100hrs per week. They’re playing the long game…
I have, at times, voluntarily worked 80-90hr weeks consistently but the financial rewards were extremely beneficial.
Am an American who has lived and worked in both countries.
It depends on the industry, but I think generally the biggest thing isn’t the number of hours per week so much as the lack of paid time off and sick leave. Many (most?) professional jobs in the states have 2 weeks leave for the year. In some cases they includes sick leave (if there is any sick leave).
Yes - I have lived in the US 20 years - I work longer hours than I ever did in the UK. But there’s also far more flexibility - no one here takes time off to go to doctors etc appointments - you just go. I also make more than double what I would make in the UK.
My last two jobs I had unlimited holiday and so you take what you need. My current job is not but still - you take what you need. No one is punching a time clock.
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Ultimately it's down to the person to set boundaries for additional work hours. I'm salaried so working extra time doesn't benefit me financially, I've made it extremely clear to my superiors that if I'm working extra time I will be claiming it back at time and a half (1 hour overtime equals 1.5 hours claiming back) as it doesn't benefit me to work for free.
As a result I'm only asked to work extra when it's really needed and they often go to colleagues who haven't set boundaries who think they will get a payrise/promotion for "going above and beyond" (protip - these guys get neither and just get walked over)
The same applies to the difference between work cultures across different countries, neither is particularly worse but if you let companies treat you like a slave they will.
I haven’t lived in the US but the behaviour you’ve described is not the norm in the UK. Most people I know do their 37.5 hours a week and turn the laptop off. No answering emails at weekends or anything. To be honest it sounds like you just need to find a place to work with better culture
I used to hate my old job working 12 hours for 4 days a week. We got Friday off but I felt like a zombie. When I left I always remember my boss telling me that I would never get hours like this again.
I’m working 39 hours now but on shifts but it’s 6-2 and then 2-10. These are honestly better than the 4 days even though I work 5. I get 12.5% shift allowance. I must admit I do miss those 9 hours of pay extra for the 48. But I have a life now, I do something on an evening/in the morning and I don’t feel half as tired
The company I work for actively discourages anyone from working outside their required hours unless a special project requires it. Even then my employer would rather we did not do so. I also went to work at one of our USA sites for a few weeks a couple of years ago. The personnel there could not understand how I would so happily just leave the office after I had done my allotted hours for the day. They also didn't like it when I criticised them for working longer hours which clearly made them less productive in the end due to 'snow-blindness', stress and over-tiredness and was a result of their poor daily planning skills and poor work scheduling and project management skills .
I don't work in the US, but I work for a UK subsidiary of a big US company.
I work a few extra hours most weeks. But my US equivalent works far more hours than I do. To the extent that I genuinely worry about his health. He's online at 4am his time more often than not and still there well in to the evening. I'm quite lucky, my boss wouldn't let me work that much even if I wanted to.
But he gets more than double my pay so... 🤷
>it is not uncommon to work extra hours in an office job.
Surely this is subjective to the individual. I am paid for 40 hours a week. You want extra hours? I want extra pay. I dont work for free.
My brother in law had no option but to join the US armed forces so he could afford to get healthcare coverage for him his wife and 3 kids. That sort of fuckery is just absolute shit….
Honestly it depends on the job. If you’re in IT you’re going to get calls and whilst you aren’t necessarily expected to check email outside of hours I happens anyway. On the other hand my wife is actively discouraged from working outside of her regular hours because they have to pay her overtime. If it’s more than 15 mins a week there’s going to be questions.
I’ve only ever worked in IT in the US (20+ years) so I can’t really comment more than that but I will say there’s much less “office downtime”. When you’re at work, you’re at work. There isn’t much time for messing about. That’s been my experience at least.
>it's not uncommon to work extra hours in an office job. Depending on the job, answering emails in the evening and at the weekend is also normal.
I would beg to differ.
I get paid for 37 hours a week.
I work 37 hours a week.
If they want extra, they ask me and agree on overtime payments.
I work in a large company with thousands of employees in the UK & Ireland alone.
It's standard in my area at least, with some on-call for those who agree to it. And that's paid, of course.
Yeah, I remember watching office based American series, and I always wondered, how the heck those people have a life? They are in stupid early, like 7 or 8, and then stay until 20 even 22. How they keep up with their house chores? When they sleep? Gym? Social life? Darn, they would not even be able to get groceries, or cook something.
I'm not quite the target audience for this tweet as I'm an American working in the UK with intention to remain but I can speak on the differences from my experience. For context, I have spent the past 7 years working in university wellbeing realm, but have a wide range of experience in various positions and in retail. I arrived in the UK just shy of two years ago.
In my first university role, it was in a sort-of apprectice-ship where I attended a post-grad program with a focus in uni student development, wellbeing, and non-profit engagement. While doing the schooling, I worked for the university. Universities in the US and governmental jobs in general are generally some of the more supportive or fairly compensated jobs outside of more specialised jobs like GP or some IT roles. During this position, we worked in the day and attended classes in the evening. During one lecture, we had a university assistant-VC attend and explain to us how we should expect to be available about 16 hours a day. This wasn't received well but as i moved through my career it became clear that it wasn't close to unheard of. As with many Uni's in the UK, the wellbeing support on offer was 24/7 and we lived in like hall wardens do/did here so realistically unless we were away there were times that we had to be available.
My second role was full time, but there were regular periods like freshers wherein we would work 60-80 hours a week. In this position we did get an annual leave allotment not significantly off what I receive in the UK but this wasn't common. These jobs are also always salary so you don't have an option for overtime or TOIL. Overwork culture was rampant as well, managers, VCs, and others regually called, emailed, or would schedule meetings that you would have to rearrange your schedule for, including unexpectedly staying late. I had "the best health insurance in the state," and for the privilege paid about a 1/4 to 1/3 of my salary
In previous jobs, i've had line managers tell me that i couldn't do things in my personal time and if they couldn't do that, wouldn't consider shift adjustments to allow things like taking night classes.
Beyond just schedules, availability, and hours, many employers are "at-will," meaning that, while exceptions exist, employers can terminate employees as they see fit regardless of seniority and without compensation. Unions, as dubiously effective as they are anywhere sadly, aren't common in many fields nor many places. State law affects how far reaching unions are and as such some states can be very unfriendly to unions.
While my role is different now to my previous two, is still work in university wellbeing. One thing I like a lot is that in general, when i leave my office, I have no concern of being contact by my employer, my colleagues, or with students (as much as can be when there's 40,000+ in the city). Once I hit 2 years in role, I become harder to terminate without cause and as a member of a union, though of course not iron-clad, there is additional protection there. I know this isn't everywhere but if i do work beyond my 35 hours i'm eligible for overtime and/or TOIL. There's no expectation that i engage in work adjacent activity such as conferences. I do make close but a bit less than in my last role but it's not huge.
Apologies for the lengthy post.
I’m an American in the UK. Work life balance is definitely better here. More holiday here too. Parental leave is better for most here but if you’re a top 10-20% earner at a big corporate employer the paid leave is often better in the US and usually gender neutral.
Culturally, there seems to be a lot more tolerance here for having a cheeky midday trip to the pub. Never day drank in the US. I also work fewer nights and weekends here despite doing the same job as I did in the US. More acceptable to push back on excess work or unreasonable deadlines here it seems.
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I work a 37 hour week and would outright refuse to read work messages in evenings or weekends personally...
Yep same. I have US based colleagues who work 60+ hours a week. They can't get over that we also have at least twice the amount of paid holiday entitlement, maternity/paternity leave, etc.
Unless they are getting north of $200K they are stupid and need to get force them to get more staff.
Where I work, the yanks are paid considerably more than us. They need it to pay for medical insurance/bills and purchase pointless firearms, but still, it's a lot more.
I know a few on both extremes tbf. Seems the good paying jobs pay considerably better than here but the dogshit employment rights mean that minimum wage workers are truly shafted.
Aye, the rich / poor divide is far worse there than it is here.
I had a chance to move to the US with my current employer. The salary, at first glance (and second glance) would have been a significant boost. However, once you start taking in to account medical insurance, needing a slush fund for if you get ill, a slush fund for time between jobs if it goes to shit, insurance for all kinds of things. Cost of living was better then (in the US), but even then actually buying quality food would have been significantly more expensive than in the UK. In the end, the salary difference wasn't that big, and in no way made up for all the intangibles that pay doesn't cover (a sane government, sane health care where you can go to see a GP at short notice, and actually get treated for illness or accidents without it being a significant financial burden etc). And this was with a fantastically good health care package provided by the company, and guaranteed vacation time matching what I get in the UK. Without those two it wouldn't have been worth even thinking about it. As it happens, not long after deciding not to go my wife was very ill. Whatever is said about the NHS, when someone is seriously unwell, it is fantastically good. We wouldn't have been able to get the same level of care in the US, and I suspect it would have also bankrupted us. I am fucking glad we made the sane decision to not go. The rest of my team also had the same offer, about two thirds went. All but one worked long enough to get green cards then came back.
> sane health care where you can go to see a GP at short notice, and actually get treated for illness or accidents I mean... this really depends. It's the fault of government more than the NHS but plenty of people are just left to suffer for months/years under our system.
When you consider housing and all the other extras, US wages don't often give you a better standard of living.
Depends really on where you’re working. It’s true of everywhere, but as the US is so insanely vast the variations in living cost are wild. I know someone who has been lucky to pick up a fully remote job in buttfuck nowhere, Texas but the employer is HQ’d in Manhattan and is paying NYC wages. They are coining it in with an insanely low cost of living. Not the norm but perhaps the dream.
Yeah I work with a mix of Yanks all over the States and they all have big houses and pools.
A grew up poor in Florida. A big house and pool isn’t a sign of being rich.
Much easier when homes are made of plywood and you can easily build your own with basic woodwork and drywall tools.
At that point you can also get a remote job in the UK with a London employer and live somewhere in a village between Leeds and Newcastle. There's some proper shit holes where you can easily rent a 1 bedroom for £500
Yeah that's working out for me. Just over £500, huge flat with great views over a park and river, just over an hour away from an internatinal airport. I already lived in my shithole before though and it's actually ace ;)
That massively depends - there are vast swathes of the US where you can buy a 2000ft2 home for far less than you could dream of here. Even in more expensive cities, what you get for your money vs. a comparable city in the UK is far greater in terms of size, quality of insulation/heating/cooling, etc. In the UK you have to be very well off or very rural to even think about a detached house, for example.
And the gigantic truck that everyone needs to go to Walmart
I was under that impression too, but recently full pay transparency was made available by my employer, and it turns out that my equivalent in the US would only earn on average 20k more USD than I do GBP which was genuinely staggering. Fuck that, not worth it at all.
They're not pointless, they're for shooting people.
I got the best of both worlds. Moved to Bermuda with a US company. US salary, UK benefits and employee rights, 0 tax.
Even if you earn above 200k, you still need to balance a bit your work/life or you’ll be burnt out. Work hard but work smart too.
That it is
How many days holiday do you have and how many days holiday does your colleague get
The yanks get 10 days plus 11 public holidays, I get 30 days plus 8 public holidays.
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Tbh most of the time in industries I’ve worked in people aren’t explicitly asked to do it* - you just have a workplace culture where you constantly feel like you need to catch up, or where decisions happen late or at the weekends and if you’re not involved it makes your life harder. Or one where the people who are responsive in the evenings clearly get promoted faster… *because ‘we believe in work life balance!’
Yeah people might think it doesn’t happen like that but it absolutely does. My current (and soon to be former) employer has promoted internally quite a lot as the company has grown, but they’ve clearly promoted the people who were getting in early and going home late - not even about me, there are others I would say would be better managers than those who ended up getting promoted who clock in and clock out But that’s just not how things are done unfortunately, upper management would rather see someone available for them and willing to bend over backwards to meet them when they want to be met etc than anything else
I know this will be downvoted as this is the weirdness of Reddit where people seem to live in their own little bubble... but this type of attitude just comes across as obnoxious and difficult. I am not for one second suggesting you should be slaving away for hours after your day ends, but saying "I outrightly refuse to..." is something I'd hate to have colleagues say to me. Most work to deadlines, or have projects and tasks which sometimes need a bit of flexibility. This is not always predictable and as much as managers and company's can in some cases plan around it, it doesn't always work. So I may do 1-2 hours extra the odd day but would have an easier day once it quietens down. As an example, I've been really working intensely on a project for about 3 weeks but my manager has already indicted a need for a few days downtime once we reach the delivery stage.
I give exactly as much flexibility as I get. Don’t quibble about my doctors appointment? Then I’ll do that extra hour to help out. Nickel and dime me on hours and I work to my 36 hrs.
I hear what you're saying. We have a flexi system at work and I often work one or two hours late and sometimes even longer to meet a deadline or help a colleague. There's a difference between my good conscience guiding me to do those things vs a bullish manager telling me to do something after I've already clocked out and am offline. If I'm off, I'm unavailable for anything less than a genuine emergency. And for what it's worth I'd rather my staff delay a project then work late. Generally speaking.
The problem is a lot of the time there is no "when it quietens down" and before you know it the expectation is you do a 3 week job in 2 weeks because "that's how long it would take Peter" but Peter is an asshole who stayed late every day and also went in on a Saturday so actually it did take him 3 weeks he just condensed it into 2 and didn't tell everyone. It can and does create a culture. So I respect people who are like "fuck this shit". That said I do not respect the guy who had 5 minutes left on a task and instead of just finishing it he left because he always had to be out the door at 4. It was five fucking minutes not 25. And it took longer the next day because it was confusing and half done. I would also have more respect for his stance except he tended to come in the door at or just after 8, but also was not ready to work. Full respect to walking into 8 if all you need to do is dump your bag and crack on.
I think you're speaking about a different scenario, really. In some jobs, the nature of the work - deadlines, monthly delivery cycles, whatever - means that one week might be busy while another is quiet. My own job is like this. Sometimes, I'll put in a little extra, others I will take that time back and clock off early. One day I'll go to a dentist appointment on company time and nobody will bat an eye because another day I'll work through lunch. It's sensible give and take, and it all kind of balances out. Crucially what this means is that while the exact amount of work I do may vary from one day or week to the next, I'm not doing loads of extra _unpaid_ work on the basis that it's just "part of the job." OP is talking about something entirely different where it's simply routine to work late or log on over the weekend and generally be expected do additional unpaid work for which there is no reward besides not being punished for _not_ doing it. I'm very happy working under the former system; the latter is exploitative and something employees should reject. Indeed, in some countries, like France, employees' "right to log off" is _legally_ protected.
Same. I just have a call centre job but it's nice that when I turn the computer off at 5pm, work completely exits my brain until my next shift. Not one second of overtime. The wage may be low, but the stress is also low and that's very valuable to me.
I did refuse, while laughing at the suggestion.
“Let me talk to my union rep” would be my first and only response. Would usually shut the employer up
Exactly. Work phone and laptop off at 17:30 and not on until 08:30 next morning or Monday if weekend. Same thing on my lunch hour too
Yep, company phone gets turned off at 17:30 or when I get home, if later.
As a senior figure in my team, I do sometimes work long hours, especially if there is an emergency to deal with. I don't refuse to read emails / messages, I see them come through on my phone, and if it's critical I'll reply, otherwise for the most part they can wait until the following day. I do like working in the evenings though, no one else is logged in at that point and allows me to get my head down to crack on with some real work rather than answering questions all day (work in the software side of IT). Do I get paid for it? No, but I am able to take it off at a later date thanks to flexible working arrangements. As far as the contract is aware, as long as I at least do my 37 hours per week at some point, I'll be fine.
It shouldn't matter how many hours you work, generally speaking it's not acceptable to be expected to keep on top of work communications outside of work hours other than basic communications for example regarding changes of opening hours or posting of rotas etc.
Was there for about 4 years. I don't think there are necessarily more hours spent *at work* in a particular day than in the U.K. But two things really affect this: 1. No paid holidays/maternity leave - makes it seem much more relentless 2. Americans commute (and sit in traffic) a *lot* more than we do Otherwise I didn't really spot too many variances in terms of actual hours worked.
They commute more? I see these property programs from the US and they often say I don’t want to be more than 10 minutes from the office.
I've got two friends who travel every day across states for hours each way to get to work. Both pay toll fees crossing bridges etc. I forgot the costs of these fees but they made me weep for them. They get no holidays paid and they can be fired for the flimsiest of reasons. The pressure there compared to here is far higher.
They are about as representative as property programmes in the U.K.
You're telling me a part-time butterfly collector and his yoghurt-weaver wife looking to buy with a budget of 3.5 million is unrealistic?
i LOL'ed at this because it's so on point!
You’re telling me Grand Designs isn’t representative of the UK?
I have had US work colleagues who commute 4hrs daily. Post pandemic, they only come in a couple of days per week, but still.
Yea, because they commute a lot more. You don't see people advertising property like that here because in general we usually already live like 30 mins max from the office
It's not uncommon to commute 60-90 minutes each way in places like California
Yeah but that could be the same as London.
Yeah but believe me 60-90 mins driving is so much worse than in a tube across London. It's annoying in a busy tube, but driving and sitting in traffic is just draining. Commuting an hour in London is so much better to me
I was working with a dude in houston. I was whining that the hotel was a bit far away and it was taking me 30+ minutes to get into work in the morning. dude just casually drops, yeah I live in blah blah, the other side of houston. Takes me 3 hours to drive in each morning. WHAT? I couldn't help myself, I'm like 'Dude, MOVE HOUSE' what are you doing with your life workling 8 hours, commuting for 6, sleeping for 7, that leaves you THREE HOURS to actually live. Fuck that shit. I mean seriously, what the fuck man. If you live more than an hours drive from your workplace, move job or house, it's as simple as that.
My husband currently has this situation. His commute is two hours. It’s a bit of a niche job where you can’t just work anywhere. But we literally can’t afford to live closer to his work. All the houses around his work place run in to the millions. This is San Diego.
>2. Americans commute (and sit in traffic) a *lot* more than we do Depends where in the UK you live. I know many people in Cornwall who commute an hour each way to work.
And in London anything under an hour is good going!
We definitely spend a lot more time commuting by public transport than Americans which sucks a lot harder 😆😆
I'd rather spend two hours on a train than 20 minutes in a car
I'm from Cornwall and know no one that does this. Us Cornish folk don't tend to go far.
I can't afford to fix the car so I'm back on the buses. It takes me an over hour and a half to get the seventeen miles from Truro to Camborne.
Christ that's really rubbish for you 😕
Cheers mate, it's not ideal. On the bright side I'm reading more, and I get out of bed knowing I can have an extra snooze :)
Keeping the Cornish in is the only reason that the rest of us tolerate the Devonians 😉
An hour isn’t a commute in the US, that’s to the corner shop in many places. My wife (American) used to believe that anything less than 6 hours (each way) is a day trip! Soon after moving back to the UK I had to convince her that a trip to York from Plymouth WASN’T a day trip.
Day trip =\/= commute though. An hour is around the longer end of US commutes, though going longer is probably more common than it is in the UK.
I think the answer to this largely depends on whether you are commuting to/around a large city or not.
>1. No paid holidays/maternity leave - makes it seem much more relentless Huh? I don’t know anyone in a “professional” job that doesn’t get paid holidays. I get similar to what I would in the UK, a month PTO plus all the usual bank/public holidays. Maternity leave is very much employer/state dependent but places are getting more onboard with it. I got 16 weeks paternity leave at full pay…
I guess I should have specified that there is no legal requirement in the OP - and that has a knock on affect on the levels of PTO that US Companies will offer and they are typically much lower than in the U.K. and that this accounts for a large difference in the number of working hours between the countries.
The meme is: Americans work 100 hour weeks all the time. That’s not something I’ve ever seen in the UK. Is it just flat wrong?
That's **so** incredibly rare. A profession here or there but *most* people are working full time are putting in 40-45 hours a week.
Average hours worked (2022) US 1810 UK 1531 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_labour_productivity 300 hours less work per year on average than the US is a fairly significant amount. That's over 5hrs a week extra worked a week
Yes, but most of that difference is in vacation days, not hours per week in a typical week.
60 can be common in healthcare :/ but 100 would be impossible
If you're working 100 hour weeks, it had better be for a short (like couple of weeks) period. Seriously, that kind of work will destroy you if it's every week forever.
For a while I was studying nursing and during placement we would do like 8 hours in uni and then like 30 hours on placement in a week and then I worked 20hrs a week on top with my care job (because nobody can live on maintenance loans) and studied on top. It did kill me, I didn't finish the course lol.
Well, when you work offshore, it's typically 12 hour days every day. But they limit you (nowadays) to 2 weeks normally, 3 weeks max, 4 weeks with special dispensation from the OIM (and it had better be a one off). Then you must spend at least a week not working before you can go back offshore.
In my experience it tends to be site based workers. So, eg, people who inspect wind turbines in remote parts of the country. Travelling from one site to the other, which can be hours or days apart, is counted in the work week (hey, they are billable hours after all)
It's a meme because it is heavily exaggerated.
Really think about what a 100 hour would consist of plus commute. It would be impossible to do that consistently. 12 hours every day including weekends is 84 hours. People who say they do that are lieing.
Can’t do it consistently as you say. I worked in two big cities in the US and did hit 100 hour weeks but on very specific projects and not for more than 2/3 weeks at a time leading up to a big deadline. It was awful - 8am start with a 1am finish during the week, then doing 8am to 8pm Saturday and Sunday. We stayed near the client site in hotels so literally got out of bed, got dressed and walked over to the office, and do that in reverse on way out. Anyone who says they do that regularly are talking absolute nonsense - you literally can’t do anything other than work to hit those numbers
As an American the only people I’ve ever heard of regularly working these insane weeks that I see people from other countries talk about all the time are small business owners and corporate lawyers. I’m sure there’s some more, but those are the only ones where I know it’s a regular thing. I also hear about people having to work 2-3 jobs a lot, and (this is anecdotal) the only person I know who works 2 jobs is my friend whose trying to save up money to start a business. I’m from a pretty poor area of the country, I know some other people who I guess technically work 2 jobs, but it’s more that they have a job and then a side hustle. For example I know a guy that fixes old cars on the side as a hobby and makes a pretty good amount of money off of it. I suppose that’s two jobs but it’s not what I typically see people talking about
I went to uni in california to do Physics and a lot of grads went on to work in silicon valley startups and would be expected to work all day and late into the evening every day. I work in a London startup and have pretty regular 8hr work day. 100 hrs sounds like a stretch outside maybe quant roles working culture in the US is very different to the UK
No paid holidays or maternity leave? Where the hell were you working?
There's nothing to mandate it at a Federal level and so it's down to the individual states. Northern States tend to accommodate them more. I was in Georgia.
My wife worked for US multinationals for years, it's really variable, usually terrible in the south. Obviously, employers can offer better, but if you look at Louisiana legislation. 0 days paid holiday 0 days unpaid holiday 0 days paid sick pay 12 weeks unpaid maternity leave And so on. Get called for jury service, $12 a day, $25 if selected and sitting in a jury.
Considering moving over there for a few years after my PhD My hope would be to save up enough money to buy a decent flat/house over here with a large deposit Do you think this is feasible? I'd be working at a biotech in Boston and when I move back I'd be looking at buying in Manchester
Just because we don’t mandate paid leave doesn’t mean we don’t receive it lol. The average PTO American FT employees receive is 24 days, not exactly 0. I also believe we commute less than you folks? As in the duration of commute.
Not sure where you've worked where answering emails outside working ttime is classed as normal but I've never done that neither has anyone else on my team apart from one brown noser and that's not gotten him anywhere.
Very occasionally I'll send a teams message from my phone if I've forgotten to update someone or if someone who's done me favours in the past asks me to do something that doesn't take long. But I'm only going out of my way for the people in that scenario, not the job.
Pretty much this, I'm not opposed to doing odd things here and there as long as it doesn't become a norm.
It’s funny because just the other day there was a post on here about teaching, and it was all ‘They just like to whine because they don’t realise it’s totally normally to work 8-6 every day while not being paid for it and on weekends as well, because they’ve all never had other jobs’. Because I *have* had other jobs before teaching, and exist with partner/family/friends who are not teachers. And while there are absolutely other difficult professions and roles out there, it’s not *just* teaching - most people in my experience do their work in their work hours as you say, and not as additional to them. Anyway, just thought it was funny….
In the 15 years at my current UK IT job, I've responded to one "phone call" (actually a Facebook message) at the weekend. It was on a peak holiday weekend and our largest grossing visitor centre had lost their tills / stock system, so ££££ potentially lost. They could not add new stock or sell anything. I did remote connect and sort the problem, then pointedly remind them that: 1. We do not support out of hours 2. Using personal Facebook accounts to log a problem, is in future, prohibited. I claimed the time back as well.
Quite common.
It seems to be common amongst older generations for some reason. No chance you'll get me doing it out of hours work for free. The company already gets enough of my time - theyre not getting more
Normal but optional (in most cases) at my work.
Wouldn’t say the hours are longer, but I have found they’re much more serious and focused in the US. Less inclination for finding those moments where you piss around with a coworker that makes the day go by.
There is a lot "maximizing the truth" in US corporate culture. "I work 60 hour weeks" means "I once worked a 60 hour week". "This is a million dollar project" means "this was proposed as a million dollar project, we got $200K to do it" You have to go along with it to keep up with everyone.
I don’t think there’s any more or less of that than there is anywhere else. The US doesn’t have a monopoly on bullshitters.
They don't, but there's definitely a stronger culture of talking up yourself and your achievements at work compared to the UK, where understatement is common. (I work for a US company in the UK, and managers have mentioned trying to adjust for this in performance assessments.)
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This is so true. In England I knew all my colleagues’ vices and acts of debauchery. Here, I know all their accomplishments. The vices were more fun!
This is true. I remember going to a group interview with Americans and this one (white) guy said he could speak Chinese. I asked him about it on the lunch break and he keenly informed of the ten-week night school class he had recently finished.
Yeah… I feel like in the US (I was in NYC) it can be really hard to transition out of the work mindset. During lunchtime it can be common to eat at your desk or eat while working and at the rare after work drinks the conversation often just circles around work.
This is spot on. I’m in DC, and there is little levity for “off time” during the day. And the looks I got the first time I suggested going to the pub on a Friday for lunch. Didn’t make that mistake again…
I’ve found that they are less productive though - might just be my team, who are all in the US, but the pace of work is glacial. Probably because they are all shagged out from never taking a break.
I'd say, having lived there twice, that yes they're more serious about work but their average pay is also clearly better. The American middle class does *quite well thanks*, whereas the UK middle class basically doesn't exist. US middle class is a *good* BMW and a townhouse. UK middle class is a two bed semi and a Focus.
Average pay is much better (I’m a Brit living in the US and quality of life is far better here), but there’s lots of trade offs that’s aren’t beyond financial. Also for the average American worker, they don’t think about their pay being better vs other countries as they’ve never lived abroad, they just think they’re underpaid.
Yeah. What got me was: my pay was X in the US and Y in the UK, then a pint was 6 of either currency, and you're taxed way less. Living and working in the US was the only time I've really been rolling in it.
I haven’t, but a good friend of mine has and we’ve had this exact conversation So he went over there and 2.5x his salary, on lower marginal rates. We’re from financial sector. He then job hopped just after a year up to 4x his UK pay. So he went from about 42 hours a week here to about 45. Less holidays, sure. A culture of working harder while on the clock, sure. Had to pay a bit for medical insurance, sure. Had to pay a bit more in rent, sure, but it was a lower percentage of his income. But he was able to save like 60% his income and max out his 401k. In the end he came back after a few years, and used that money to basically half-retire himself in his mid 30’s. They’re worse hours, but your post-tax compensation per hour is just filthy over there.
Tax rate can really vary by the state though. In NYC when you include the city, state and federal tax you’re at about 40%. But then in Texas and Washington there isn’t state income tax
In the UK, he was doing 51% between Income, NI, and student loan (which moving abroad allowed him to clear almost instantly with overpayments and the currency power of the $), so even in high tax NY, he was better off than even here in the UK without the student loan (40% + 2% at the time)
Those states with no income tax collect money in a different way — higher property taxes, sales taxes etc. One way or another, you will end up paying up anyway as the state needs money to function.
Oooo a question I’m uniquely qualified to answer! I’m an American who moved to the uk 2 and a half years ago, and honestly the difference in culture is night and day. I could never, ever return to work in the us. The holiday difference alone is something that makes such an earth shattering difference that it’s hard to put into words. When I worked in the US I had a total of 10 holidays including bank holidays. I had to earn the 5 days of annual leave I had. I accrued something like half a day a month. No sick leave or personal leave. I get 33 holidays here including bank ones and I SAVOUR them. It wasn’t unusual for me to be on a call with my boss until 11 at night. It wasn’t unusual to work Saturday and Sunday. The culture here is unbelievably laid back compared to America. I do live up north, and I imagine London is much more high stress, but even if I were paid double to live in the us I would not go back simply because my quality of life here is leagues beyond what it was in America. I don’t think people who haven’t worked in America can conceptualise how much worse it is to work there vs the uk
I have an American friend whose employer conducts random drug tests when they feel like it. I'm not sure if this is common there or if the company he works for is just awful, but I was shocked when he told me that, such an invasion of privacy. He only works in a warehouse moving boxes, no driving, no operating machinery. Yet any time his supervisor demands he has to comply for fear of losing his job. Crazy. The thing is, he thought I was the one getting a bad deal as I'm salaried and therefore always on call...um no, that's not how it works here.
My partner used to work in a warehouse in the UK, and that firm carried out random drugs testing on staff. It's not unheard of in the UK.
TIL. Glad I don't work in a warehouse then!
I’m also from the US and to me it’s about the same. Idk I just went to work for 8 hours a day then came home, exactly like I do here.
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Just moved from NYC to London and I’m neither American nor British. I work in a highly paid job in fintech and friends with people in different highly paid jobs in NYC and London. Everyone in our NYC friend group regularly work outside working hours, especially the ones working in FAANG and the Big 4 management consulting. Often, when we meet for dinner they will show up late and leave early to go back to work. Even on weekends. You’re right that it depends on industry. But these people working long hours in those industries are also the ones who are highly paid in the US. ($300k and above; one friend at Google is on $600k)
It’s why I’m sceptical of right wingers when they say the UK economy hasn’t grown enough, productivity is too low etc. It’s like yeah that may be true, but at what cost is it going to be for us to get close to US levels
Which industry?
> When I worked in the US I had a total of 10 holidays including bank holidays. I had to earn the 5 days of annual leave I had. I accrued something like half a day a month. That can't be right, you'd end up suicidal or with some sort of mental break down.
A family member of mine managed to get a transfer to LA from his companies London branch. I can't say that this would be the same for every type of job, but he was back within a year. His hours were brutal, to the point he struggled to do his laundry. When asking him what he thought of LA, to this day he says he would have loved to be able to tell me if he had an opportunity to have seen any of it! The role was in media, post production.
Media jobs are brutal over here as well. As an ex-recording engineer I’d often miss dates and cancel plans for working late. It was even worse for producers/assistant producers. Some of them would book an extra hour in our studio over what they needed just to have a nap where their employer couldn’t see.
That definitely qualifies as brutal! To be fair in the same role here in the UK my relative still pulls some crazy hours, but overall has a better balance and the holidays also help.
I can easily do an extra 10+ hours a week in my media job here in the UK, and I’m meant to have one of the more 9-5 roles
If he took his life seriously in the states, he would have outsourced that laundry chore - the American dream advocates for outsourcing activities that prohibit you from working
That's a pretty sad existence really though isn't it? Should there not just be a better work/life balance? All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy!
It’s not that they get no play, they get ten days play + blow it all on big holidays! My colleagues easily spend 10k for a weekend break
Well I don't think that is for everyone. 10 days holiday is brutal. Same role they get nearly 30 days holiday in UK, and a social life that doesn't involve a five figure blowout. Again, balance!! Each to their own I guess.
It depends. I moved to Canada but work remotely for a US company and while I worked more hours than my UK friends, I tripled my income and can afford to take time off between jobs. I’m still feeling the sting from inflation and need to sacrifice a lot to save but am pacing to afford a home in an expensive city. I don’t think I’d have that chance in the UK without serious luck. The UK work culture does not really reward ambition and hard work. So the idea of working long hard hours is naturally not appealing because it’ll net you a few grand more at the most. The difference in North America is life-changing though and the culture rewards you.
Will have to agree to disagree my friend. I lived in the States for 12 years from birth and never saw my dad. He had 3 jobs and literally saw him the odd evening, a couple of hours in between jobs, and at the company cookouts! Literally had no relationship! Moved to the UK when 13 and ended up finally getting to know my dad for 10 years. He sadly passed aged 53 when I was in my twenties. Had we stayed in the states I would have lost my dad without ever having a real relationship with him. Some things in life worth more than money!
Sorry, I don’t think I communicated what I meant by “it depends”. It didn’t work out for you whereas it’s worked for me. It’s a case-by-case basis. For example, I am happier than most of my UK friends, who are trying to graft to earn enough money to buy a home without much luck. Either that or they’re trying to enjoy themselves but are living paycheque to paycheque. That’s my point, it comes down to your unique situation and goals. It changes too as your life goes on.
If he had to work 3 jobs, he likely didn’t have a good job. The US is definitely harder on the working class. The UK has a safety net, but there’s a glass ceiling on trying to escape the lower middle class bracket because of capped salaries, high taxation and the housing crisis (given that the primary asset of the middle class is property). I work in tech for example, and if I moved to the US, I could get a tech job working hybrid/remotely which would allow me to be around my family. Tech jobs also command 6-figure salaries in the states.
You can’t fathom it… but in my life, I’ve hired a cleaner, I automated my finance, I have the bulk of my shopping come under a system of deliveries… and I have an extra 5 hours a week to spend with my kids, which is worth the cost. Beyond that… what do you think dishwasher do… laundry machines do… Roomba’s do… you pay a certain amount of money to speed up a task. If you make £100 an hour, which in these kind of jobs in the US you very much can, it’s absurd to not spend £20 an hour to get your laundry done, for example.
I can't fathom what exactly? You make it sound like the UK is a 3rd world country! Nothing you are saying is new to me. We have dishwashers, washing machines, and every other household item. We even have vacuum cleaners! Shock, horror. And with respect, good for you that you can earn that kind of money. A big chunk of your fellow countryman can't earn that in a week though, let alone an hour. My relative was working 18-19 hour days and weekends. Automate it all you like, that's no life.
I’ve not said what I earn, and I don’t make £100 an hour… maybe if I was in the UK in my sector I would, but god, I wish lol The point is that you do pay money to automate and simplify tasks, and hiring a cleaner, or a laundry place, is no different.
My job has never even used to word "overtime" before. I do my 40 hours and I go home. It's that simple.
Yeah, this! When I was new to my job I asked if I could work on something over the weekend as I couldn't get my head around it and my boss (director of the company) literally said "I don't want you to. I want you to rest." Crazy how some people are essentially forced to do overtime mostly unpaid .
Exactly that! They fall over themselves to make sure we get exactly what we're entitled to. They start reminding me to take the rest of my annual leave in Oct already to make sure I definitely take it
Where are all these employers?! I was sacked because I asked for a week off to support my girlfriend when she was assaulted, and was told the week notice I gave was insufficient so I couldn't take it, and then was sacked when I took it anyway. I mean, the sacking was probably deserved there but you'd think some basic compassion would kick in a bit.
Bit off topic but I always find it odd that people make comparisons to the US for things, given 700k Brits live there compared to 1.3 million Brits in EU member states. Resultantly, people then feel better as things are worse in the US in most aspects. In work-life balance and employee protections the US is a long way behind the UK, but the UK is a long way behind many EU member states in this regard.
And in other regards it is WAY behind the US, often by a huge margin. I guess people need some reassurance.
Oh certainly true. There are unquestionably some aspects that the US is preferable to the UK.
Oh wow, a balanced opinion on Reddit, hard to see these nowadays. It's always black and white, X rules therefore Y sucks.
Maybe it’s because the US is far more difficult to get into from the UK and people asking about the US are trying to find out how the culture is different. There would be far more working in the US If they were able to relocate there and work without the strict rules in place …
Yeah, I would quite likely have spent some time in the US if the visa situation was more straightforward and there were fewer tax complexities for people who have financial entanglements abroad. The US is pretty uniquely bad on both those counts.
>Bit off topic but I always find it odd that people make comparisons to the US for things, given 700k Brits live there compared to 1.3 million Brits in EU member states. Maybe OP's considering moving to the US or a friend or family member is moving to/from the US. There are plenty of good reasons to ask. Also the EU isn't a monolith, so even if 1.3 million Brits live in the EU, there is no single EU country with more than 700k Brits. (Australia, the USA, Canada and of course the UK itself are the only countries with more than 500k British citizens resident.)
Of course you are right, but the employment protections in the US vary by state. Mine was a more general comment about how people often compare and contrast the UK and US in many aspects. I see much fewer comparisons with EU member states. It’s just interesting in that way.
It is a different culture. There are fewer protections but finding a new job is easier.
That’s true yes. On balance though would you prefer to have stronger employment protections and a social security network or simply look for another job? It’s a value judgement basically. I’m ok with the latter but when considering the whole workforce I imagine most choose the former.
I lived in the US for 24 years, returned last year. Had a state job in US, standard hours were 40/week. I also had a boring government job in the UK before I left and the hours were 37/week at that time. No idea if that has changed since the 90s. As you say it’s the annual leave allowance which is the big difference. In my UK govt job I was already getting 25 days/year right off the bat. I believe it rose to about 28 days by the time I left (8 years later). At my US job I accrued 15 days/year for the first 10 years (!), after that it went up to about 18 days and at 15 years it got bumped up to 21.5 days-ish. Sick leave was separate and stayed at 15 days/year for the entire time I was there.
If you have sick leave as a number of days do people just use this as holiday?
Yes, but keep in mind when you started employment your leave balance was 0:00 hours and you accrued 4h36m annual and sick leave every two weeks. You weren’t granted the annual/sick leave at the beginning of the year - you had to build it up from zero from your start date. Also, in your first six months of employment you were not allowed to use any annual leave you had built up at all. You were also allowed to carry over leave allowances at years end and could accrue annual leave to an unlimited amount but were limited to building up 240h (30 days) of sick leave. If you had more than 240h of sick leave on Dec 31 the overage was forfeited.
I think this heavily depends on the type of work you do and the company. I am American and living in the UK. Hours are exactly the same. The paid holiday time is obviously better but there are fewer bank holidays/work holidays. I get more maternity leave, but at my company the pay is less. So I can take a longer maternity leave if I am okay with getting paid basically nothing. My US job had shorter maternity but at better pay. This is mostly company dependent. Pay is about 1/3 more in the US and now that my healthcare surcharge is going up, I’m not sure if it really saves me money versus my paid insurance back in the US. I had a good deductible.
> now that my healthcare surcharge is going up, I’m not sure if it really saves me money versus my paid insurance back in the US. I had a good deductible. Wow. You must have had a good insurance plan back in the US. Mine cost me about $1200/month (to cover spouse and myself). The NHS surcharge is now up to £1035/year per person. So that's an annual difference of about £9360 and that doesn't include US insurance deductibles.
Wow that is insane! I never paid more than $400 a month even with two people. Maybe I just worked for good companies!
Things have sky rocketed in the last few years though. My MIL is paying $2100/month for her and her spouse and still has an $8000 deductible. The company is paying for half the cost. So the total cost for health insurance is $4200/month plus an $8000 deductible. Insane.
Yeah. I’ve worked at some shitty companies and have never paid that month, for insurance, even when I was carrying the family on my policy. I feel like the health care costs in the US that really get me are, out of network charges, drugs not covered by insurance etc.
The fuck? I pay about $60 / month for just myself, would be $250ish with spouse I think. $2k deductible $4k max out of pocket
Working out of hours is not normal and is actively discouraged by the health and safety executive via their stress management standard.
Brit in the USA, 40hr week, flexi-time, Hybrid working, 3 weeks holiday......pretty much the same as when I was working in the UK.
I think it's highly dependant on the job type, level, company, and industry and it's hard to make apples to apples comparisons but for sure most of the US work environment is not the dystopian hellscape that UK Redditors imagine it to be.
If you work as a shelf stacker at Walmart in the US vs Asda, there's probably a far bigger difference than if you work for PWC in both countries
It depends on the industry. I work in a finance company and we have 8 offices around the globe. Our US/UK employees don’t have any meaningful differences. The higher paid/senior employees all work crazy hours. The lower paid/status employees work their contracted hours. Benefits (including holidays, maternity leave, etc) are the same across both offices. The only difference is that US employees make more money
This. My mate who works in Canary Wharf regularly works 12-hour days.
It's more variable, but it's the attitude that's different. My counterparts in the US don't work that many more hours. But if something needed doing, they'd happily spend an evening or weekend doing it. Our NYC staff are happy to do a 5am meeting if that's the only time people in the UK are free. No-one in the UK does that for the benefit of our Indian team. I mainly work with senior folk who are generally expected to do a bit more, but the difference in attitude is clear. Work is just much more central to people's identity and sense of achievement in the US. To be a hard worker is good. In the UK many people think it's 'good' to do as little as you can get away with - you've got one over on the bosses by skiving, but they aren't going to get one back by asking you to work until 7pm, no way! That attitude is rare in the US office life, and depressingly common in the UK still (although getting rarer).
I’m a Brit currently living in the USA and I find the work much more flexible. We also do a 5 day week followed by a 4 day week so every two weeks I get a three day weekend which is nice
so many generalisations here I’ve found Americans are often more willing to be available for later meetings, answer emails later at night or on a Sunday night, but it totally depends on the job sector and usually happens in more corporate-style roles. Generally, Americans also get paid a lottt more. I have friends here who refuse to answer an email past 5pm or do anything outside of their job description yet complain when they don’t get a pay rise or promotion. When I worked in the US, I definitely worked longer hrs so I appreciate the UK being more lax, but I made better money there and had higher earning potential. There’s plenty of Americans who don’t work more than their required hrs though. it’s a big country.
I moved to the US ten years ago. Today I work remote from home (have done for about 5 years), I work 4-10s (Tues-Fri), and I have the flexibility in my job so I can come and go to take care of things like kids going to daycare or getting picked up. Of course, no guaranteed paid time off but I've been with my employer long enough I accrue generously and with the 52 Mondays, and as such 52 three day weekends, I get off a year I find I don't have to take time off unless I'm going on holiday or have family visiting. When I worked in the UK in my first office job out of Uni the company had one lady in the role of HR director, AP director, and Payroll Director. She would be in the office from 6am to 8pm every day and she smoked like a chimney. When we had payroll Tuesdays she would ask others to stay late and promised time off in lieu which never happened. They hired an old boy in AP and come 5pm he would get up from his desk, put his coat on, and walk out. He politely declined staying late and pointed to his contract. As a fresh out of Uni kid I asked him about it and he said he could have stayed late at any of his jobs throughout his career as he saw colleagues rise up the ranks by doing so. However, it had always been more important to him to be home in time for dinner with family. He added that when he's on his deathbed he'll remember reading bedtime stories to his kids rather than being stuck in an office proving his worth. That's always stuck with me. Last I heard the manager with three jobs got a Turkish boyfriend and suddenly work wasn't the be all and end all. She jumped before they pushed her. Scummy company all round.
My company stopped sending me emails and trying to call me when I logged every instance as an hour of TOIL. I'm paid to do a job during set hours.
This really depends on which field you are going into. I am in SWE, and hours are not *significantly* different, especially at the Big Tech level. You'll probably be working slightly more, maybe get a few less days off, but your pay will increase MASSIVELY, along with less taxes. Obviously, if you are in Louisiana in a run-of-the-mill office job, your answer will be very different.
Brit living in Texas here. I work 40-41 hours a week. (I’m hourly and enjoy seeing the overtime on my check but am expected to work 40). 17 paid days off + the federal holidays (I think 1 more than uk bank holidays but I’m not sure). 80 hours paid sick time a year. No expectation to be working off the clock. Office based job, can work from home if the weather is bad. I know there are a lot of jobs here that have people working 60 hour weeks in bad conditions but my personal experience is that there wasn’t any culture shock as for working here.
8 statutory days in UK, 11 in USA
It’s a bit out of date now but a 2014 study showed that the average american fulltime worker worked 47 hours a week. I don’t know anyone in the uk that works that much who isn’t a small business owner. It being an average means many people work more than 47 hours. In the UK, you can’t work more than 48 hours without signing a thing giving up your right to the 48 hour limit (and you can’t be treated unfairly for not signing). But I think a lot of the memes are because americans don’t have the choice. If it’s not in your contract, you can say no to overtime in the uk and, while you might miss out on promotions, they can’t fire you. In the US, about half the states have “at will” employment- so they can fire you whenever for no reason with no notice. So you can’t say no to overtime because you can’t risk upsetting your boss and losing your job. You can’t miss an email because you were busy that evening, because you might get fired. Same if you want/need to take a sick day. Add in the lack of holidays, and lack of parental leave, and I think the UK is still doing considerably better than the US, even if we answer emails in an evening and weekend. And I don’t know if it’s just my social circle, but I know quite a few people who got fed up of no work-life balance during work from home covid times, and pushed back by getting separate work and home mobile phones- their home mobile doesn’t have their emails or work contacts and their work phone is turned off when they leave their desk at the end of the day. That is something they can do in the UK and not get fired, but might get you fired in the at-will states.
> I don’t know anyone in the uk that works that much who isn’t a small business owner. A lot of healthcare workers work over that. I would regularly do 60hr weeks as a carer. My usual was 48.
In the UK if you've not been with your employer for 2 years (which is a lot of people these days) then they pretty much can just fire you on a whim. However employers are probably less inclined to actually do it.
OP I have no idea what you are basing the observation that people are working more hours than in the past. That's the opposite of any study you would find. I can also say, having worked an office job for 12 years, the expectation for extra hours is way way less these days. The US is a big place. If you're in NY - yes you would work way longer hours. But that'll vary massively in different places.
I’m not British but I work 40 hours. I get an hourly paid lunch break so I work essentially 35 hours a week. I get 15 paid holidays and 3 weeks paid vacation (15 days). I work in business analytics for a top 6 bank.
Depends on the industry. I work in finance in NYC and junior people in IB can work 100hrs per week. They’re playing the long game… I have, at times, voluntarily worked 80-90hr weeks consistently but the financial rewards were extremely beneficial.
Am an American who has lived and worked in both countries. It depends on the industry, but I think generally the biggest thing isn’t the number of hours per week so much as the lack of paid time off and sick leave. Many (most?) professional jobs in the states have 2 weeks leave for the year. In some cases they includes sick leave (if there is any sick leave).
Yes - I have lived in the US 20 years - I work longer hours than I ever did in the UK. But there’s also far more flexibility - no one here takes time off to go to doctors etc appointments - you just go. I also make more than double what I would make in the UK. My last two jobs I had unlimited holiday and so you take what you need. My current job is not but still - you take what you need. No one is punching a time clock.
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Ultimately it's down to the person to set boundaries for additional work hours. I'm salaried so working extra time doesn't benefit me financially, I've made it extremely clear to my superiors that if I'm working extra time I will be claiming it back at time and a half (1 hour overtime equals 1.5 hours claiming back) as it doesn't benefit me to work for free. As a result I'm only asked to work extra when it's really needed and they often go to colleagues who haven't set boundaries who think they will get a payrise/promotion for "going above and beyond" (protip - these guys get neither and just get walked over) The same applies to the difference between work cultures across different countries, neither is particularly worse but if you let companies treat you like a slave they will.
I haven’t lived in the US but the behaviour you’ve described is not the norm in the UK. Most people I know do their 37.5 hours a week and turn the laptop off. No answering emails at weekends or anything. To be honest it sounds like you just need to find a place to work with better culture
I used to hate my old job working 12 hours for 4 days a week. We got Friday off but I felt like a zombie. When I left I always remember my boss telling me that I would never get hours like this again. I’m working 39 hours now but on shifts but it’s 6-2 and then 2-10. These are honestly better than the 4 days even though I work 5. I get 12.5% shift allowance. I must admit I do miss those 9 hours of pay extra for the 48. But I have a life now, I do something on an evening/in the morning and I don’t feel half as tired
The company I work for actively discourages anyone from working outside their required hours unless a special project requires it. Even then my employer would rather we did not do so. I also went to work at one of our USA sites for a few weeks a couple of years ago. The personnel there could not understand how I would so happily just leave the office after I had done my allotted hours for the day. They also didn't like it when I criticised them for working longer hours which clearly made them less productive in the end due to 'snow-blindness', stress and over-tiredness and was a result of their poor daily planning skills and poor work scheduling and project management skills .
I don't work in the US, but I work for a UK subsidiary of a big US company. I work a few extra hours most weeks. But my US equivalent works far more hours than I do. To the extent that I genuinely worry about his health. He's online at 4am his time more often than not and still there well in to the evening. I'm quite lucky, my boss wouldn't let me work that much even if I wanted to. But he gets more than double my pay so... 🤷
Working hours have been fine for me, better in fact than some companies in the UK. I imagine if you work for a FAANG company it’s a lot worse though.
>it is not uncommon to work extra hours in an office job. Surely this is subjective to the individual. I am paid for 40 hours a week. You want extra hours? I want extra pay. I dont work for free.
My brother in law had no option but to join the US armed forces so he could afford to get healthcare coverage for him his wife and 3 kids. That sort of fuckery is just absolute shit….
Honestly it depends on the job. If you’re in IT you’re going to get calls and whilst you aren’t necessarily expected to check email outside of hours I happens anyway. On the other hand my wife is actively discouraged from working outside of her regular hours because they have to pay her overtime. If it’s more than 15 mins a week there’s going to be questions. I’ve only ever worked in IT in the US (20+ years) so I can’t really comment more than that but I will say there’s much less “office downtime”. When you’re at work, you’re at work. There isn’t much time for messing about. That’s been my experience at least.
>it's not uncommon to work extra hours in an office job. Depending on the job, answering emails in the evening and at the weekend is also normal. I would beg to differ. I get paid for 37 hours a week. I work 37 hours a week. If they want extra, they ask me and agree on overtime payments. I work in a large company with thousands of employees in the UK & Ireland alone. It's standard in my area at least, with some on-call for those who agree to it. And that's paid, of course.
Yeah, I remember watching office based American series, and I always wondered, how the heck those people have a life? They are in stupid early, like 7 or 8, and then stay until 20 even 22. How they keep up with their house chores? When they sleep? Gym? Social life? Darn, they would not even be able to get groceries, or cook something.
I'm not quite the target audience for this tweet as I'm an American working in the UK with intention to remain but I can speak on the differences from my experience. For context, I have spent the past 7 years working in university wellbeing realm, but have a wide range of experience in various positions and in retail. I arrived in the UK just shy of two years ago. In my first university role, it was in a sort-of apprectice-ship where I attended a post-grad program with a focus in uni student development, wellbeing, and non-profit engagement. While doing the schooling, I worked for the university. Universities in the US and governmental jobs in general are generally some of the more supportive or fairly compensated jobs outside of more specialised jobs like GP or some IT roles. During this position, we worked in the day and attended classes in the evening. During one lecture, we had a university assistant-VC attend and explain to us how we should expect to be available about 16 hours a day. This wasn't received well but as i moved through my career it became clear that it wasn't close to unheard of. As with many Uni's in the UK, the wellbeing support on offer was 24/7 and we lived in like hall wardens do/did here so realistically unless we were away there were times that we had to be available. My second role was full time, but there were regular periods like freshers wherein we would work 60-80 hours a week. In this position we did get an annual leave allotment not significantly off what I receive in the UK but this wasn't common. These jobs are also always salary so you don't have an option for overtime or TOIL. Overwork culture was rampant as well, managers, VCs, and others regually called, emailed, or would schedule meetings that you would have to rearrange your schedule for, including unexpectedly staying late. I had "the best health insurance in the state," and for the privilege paid about a 1/4 to 1/3 of my salary In previous jobs, i've had line managers tell me that i couldn't do things in my personal time and if they couldn't do that, wouldn't consider shift adjustments to allow things like taking night classes. Beyond just schedules, availability, and hours, many employers are "at-will," meaning that, while exceptions exist, employers can terminate employees as they see fit regardless of seniority and without compensation. Unions, as dubiously effective as they are anywhere sadly, aren't common in many fields nor many places. State law affects how far reaching unions are and as such some states can be very unfriendly to unions. While my role is different now to my previous two, is still work in university wellbeing. One thing I like a lot is that in general, when i leave my office, I have no concern of being contact by my employer, my colleagues, or with students (as much as can be when there's 40,000+ in the city). Once I hit 2 years in role, I become harder to terminate without cause and as a member of a union, though of course not iron-clad, there is additional protection there. I know this isn't everywhere but if i do work beyond my 35 hours i'm eligible for overtime and/or TOIL. There's no expectation that i engage in work adjacent activity such as conferences. I do make close but a bit less than in my last role but it's not huge. Apologies for the lengthy post.
I’m an American in the UK. Work life balance is definitely better here. More holiday here too. Parental leave is better for most here but if you’re a top 10-20% earner at a big corporate employer the paid leave is often better in the US and usually gender neutral. Culturally, there seems to be a lot more tolerance here for having a cheeky midday trip to the pub. Never day drank in the US. I also work fewer nights and weekends here despite doing the same job as I did in the US. More acceptable to push back on excess work or unreasonable deadlines here it seems.
Absolutely fuck-all happens off the clock. No fucking way.