Do immigrants work longer hours than natives in Europe?

Abstract

The difference between the working hours of natives and immigrants has begun to attract a great deal of attention in U.S. migration research, but this phenomenon has yet to be studied in a European context. In this article, we examine this difference in working hours for 13 European countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Greece, Spain, Finland, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden and the U.K.) for the period 1995–2013. Contrary to popular belief, we find that immigrants usually work fewer hours than natives in most of the countries studied. In addition, we observe that native workers in Western and Southern Europe have, over time, tended to increase their number of hours worked compared to immigrants. However, the opposite is true is for Northern Europe, where natives’ working hours have generally decreased compared to immigrants, even following the global economic crisis in 2008.