A representative opinion poll conducted in June 2008 was designed to find out how many hours per week Lithuanians would agree to work for a certain salary. The results demonstrate that people would agree to work overtime to earn a desirable amount of earnings, while they would work only about 30 hours per week for the currently paid average monthly earnings.
Question: if you were paid 1,000, 2,000, 3,000, 5,000, 7,000 or 10,000 litas per month “in hands” (after tax), how many hours per week, on average, would you consent to work? (1,000 litas equals 291 euro). (Answers are presented in percent).
The Lithuanian Labour Code sets a regular working week of 40 hours, which clearly doesn’t satisfy those people who are willing to earn larger wages and salaries. According to the survey, Lithuanians would agree to work 40 hours per week for a salary, amounting to 3,360 litas per month, but they would work longer hours if the salary was raised. To receive average net monthly earnings, as reported by Statistics Lithuania (1,650.6 litas in the 1st quarter of 2008), people would agree to work scarcely more than 30 hours per week. This shows that workers are not willing to work overtime for small, unsatisfying salaries. If people are paid low wages, they wish to work short hours – the smaller the earnings, the meagre the probability they would consent to work extra hours.
LFMI’s Senior Policy Analyst Giedrius Kadziauskas says that the results of this poll indicate that Lithuanians know how much they wish to earn and would work overtime to receive this amount of money. The survey also revealed a wide gap between desirable earnings and the real wages and salaries paid.
“Workers earn on average twice less for working in two jobs compared to the amount they indicated they would agree to work for. This discrepancy is rather conspicuous, but it can be explained: while expressing their views about how many hours they would agree to work for certain wages, people tend to reflect their expectations or desires, rather than the real situation in the market. People’s opinion reflects the price of the labour force supply, while the ultimate price in the market occurs only after evaluating the demand for labour from the company side,” – G. Kadziauskas commented the results of the survey.
He also highlighted that the perception of the payment for overtime work elicited from the survey is an illustration that people don’t need to be shielded from overwork as they themselves are able to measure how much an extra hour of their work is worth. Overtime work is only the matter of remuneration: all respondents, including low-income earners, would agree to work overtime, if they were paid properly,” – said G. Kadziauskas.
This representative sociological survey was conducted on June 5-16, 2008 using face-to-face interviews. It is an Omnibus poll. 1,043 permanent Lithuanian inhabitants aged 15 to 74 were interviewed. Statistical error does not exceed 3 percent.
