The British newspaper The Guardian, in an article about the work ethic in European countries, noted a report that dispels the notion that Greeks are lazy and that they work more hours than even Germans, their frequent critics.
According to the article, nowadays “the biggest enemy of the upper classes is the army of lazy bums, whose lifestyle of indolence and hedonism, financed by crippling taxes on the rich, is sucking the lifeblood out of the economy.”
In the Eurozone, many believe that its current economic crisis was actually caused by the lazy Mediterranean types in Greece and Spain who were spending their time sipping espresso and playing card games, in comparison to the hard-working Germans and Dutch.
The Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) however said that Greeks worked on average 2,032 hours in 2011 – only a shade less than the supposedly workaholic South Koreans (2,090 hours.) Germans worked only 70% as long (1,413 hours), while the Netherlands was officially the “laziest” nation in the world, with only 1,379 hours of work per year.
However, laziness story strikes a significant chord because “in the past three decades of dominance by free-market ideology, many of us have come to believe in the myth of the individual fully in charge of his/her destiny,” the newspaper said.
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