EUROSTAT released its latest Labour cost survey (LCS), showing a wide open difference not only among the 27 member states but also among the 17 members of the euro zone. The surveys that are conducted every four years investigates costs for wages and salaries, plus non-wage costs such as employers’ social contributions and cover enterprises with more than 10 employees.
In 2011, the highest hourly labour costs were estimated for Belgium (€39.3), Sweden (€39.1), Denmark (€38.6), France (€34.2), Luxembourg (€33.7), the Netherlands (€31.1) and Germany (€30.1).
The lowest hourly labour costs were estimated for Bulgaria (€3.5), Romania (€4.2 in 20103), Lithuania (€5.5) and Latvia (€5.9).
Despite the fact that Greece is being on the target of the whole of EU concerning the low labour costs in the name of much-disputed “competitiveness” as one of the options that would take the country out of the debt crisis, the EUROSTAT has no data available for 2011!
2008 2009 2010 2011
Greece 16.5 EUR 17.6 EUR 17.5 EUR ——
By 17.7 euro per hour x 8 hours per day x 25 days per month = 3,500 EURO gross salary per month. I hardly know anyone making this money among my friends and relatives, independantly of age and skills.
Full EUROSTAT Report HERE
I dont know how it is calculated exactly in greece, but in my country (austria) aproximately half of the whole working-costs is what the employee gets netto. “gross” we call what the worker actually gets plus what he pays for tax and insurance. the employer also hat to pay tax and insurance and pays altogether about 1,5 times more than the “gross”. so if 17,7 is the whole costs for the company, the worker would get half of it = 8,85, “gross” would be 11,8/hour.
still, the people I know in greece dont even get that, they work for 3 or 4 euros/hour, seven days a week, are only insured for 5 days if at all, and if they are ill the time they are absent is substracted from their wages…
so it is. Menawhile there are lots of part-timers – no time to search for the link right now.
Not quite, the man-month is certainly not 25 days. Essentially, in order to compute it yoy need to add all man-hours in a year and divide by 12*8 (or 7.5) so you exclude holidays, weekends and paid leave. Usually this means 17.5 days but it depends. You also need to consider the 2 month bonuses spread out over the year. Then the 3500 is not that far off.
thanks for the additional info. But still you think it is valid for Greece nowadays?
Maybee not, they haven’t published results for 2011, these figures are for 2010 (2 years ago). Shame they didn’t care to implement the LACOST survey (at least in time) in 2011. As if it is not that important for the people or the policy makers to know what is going on.
what is the LACOST survey? do you have any link?
here is a link from the Greel Statistical Institute. http://www.statistics.gr/portal/page/portal/ESYE/BUCKET/A0103/Other/A0103_SJO49_MT_4Y_00_2004_00_2004_01_F_GR.pdf
But I was wrong, the published data are not based on the LAbour COst survey which is due in 2012. These are annual data, their description from Eurostat is here
http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/cache/ITY_SDDS/en/lcan_esms.htm
thanks again, Michalis.