In news that surprises no one who lives in Mumbai, Bloomberg Quint reported over the weekend that Mumbaikars work the longest hours in the world.
On average, a Mumbai employee works 3,315 hours per year, a study by UBS finds. They also take shorter vacations, at around 10 days on average. The study looked at 77 other cities, but Mumbai had by far the longest working hours, with New Delhi, Hanoi, Mexico City, and Bogota ranking well behind it.
People work the least amount of hours per year in Lagos, at only 609.4 hours. And in Rome, people work less than half the hours of a Mumbaikar, at an average of 1581.4 hours per year.
Unfortunately, the hard work doesn’t seem to be paying off. The study also looked at how long employees in each city would have to work in order to afford an iPhone X. At 917.8 hours, Mumbai ranked second only to Cairo, where people had to work the most amount of time to be able to pay for an iPhone.
Maybe it isn’t time to start fretting about having no disposable income, however. Apparently, the study used Big Macs as an index in previous years, but UBS changed it to iPhones because that’s what “millennials wanted to buy.” The index might not be a particularly accurate indication of the purchasing power of an average Mumbaikar: Import duties make iPhones and other Apple products disproportionately expensive in India, as compared to cheaper, often locally-manufactured Androids.
Of course, having disposable income is one thing, and finding enough time to spend it is another. 60-hour work weeks don’t exactly leave much time to head to the mall. And the study found Mumbaikars to be working the longest hours, but it likely didn’t include time spent working from home or commuting; in this city, commutes can be just as much work as your actual job.
The study also hasn’t indicated what these insanely long work hours are doing to people’s mental health — probably not good things. At the very least, remember that workplace anxiety might be helping you perform better. And before you quit your job and attempt to move to Italy in search of the mythical unicorn that is a 30-hour work week, start by making sure you get a good night’s sleep. If you even have time to sleep, that is.
