Gallery: Top 10 hardest working American cities
Economic output and industry have always been synonymous with American cities—a new ranking from WalletHub categorizes the nation’s top hardest-working cities based on metrics like employment rate, average hours worked, and share of workers with multiple jobs.
On average, Americans work 25% more hours than those in Europe, according to a brief about the findings from WalletHub. The brief notes the average American worker logs 1,791 hours per year—184 more than Japan, 294 more than the U.K. and 441 more than Germany.
A big reason for this is a lack of robust American labor laws, according to Judy Ancel, a retired labor educator at the University of Missouri-Kansas City who was interviewed for the article.
“Here in the U.S., the vast majority of workers are at-will employees with no power to win improvements from their employers,” Ancel said. “We have some of the worst labor laws in the developed world … That, in turn has translated into a lack of protective legislation such that workers in most states have no rights to sick leave even or any kind of paid family leave.”
Among notable findings from the ranking, Irving, Tx. is documented as having the lowest percentage of non-working adults at about 11%—three times lower than Detroit, where 40% of adults don’t work.
Elsewhere, New York City holds the longest average commute time at 41 minutes, and Baltimore, Md. residents contribute the most annual volunteer hours at 45 minutes per person.
To tally the results, researchers weighted “direct work factors” including average workweek hours, employment rate, vacation time used, and percentage of people who work into a top score of 80. “Indirect work factors” like the average commute time, annual volunteer hours, and average leisure time spent per day were weighted into the remaining 20 points, for a total score of 100.
For more information and to view the top 20 hardest-working cities, visit WalletHub’s website. The top 10 ranked American cities can be viewed in the gallery above.
