europe

An average German employee, for example, works more than 20 percent fewer hours than their American counterparts.

Not that the USA isn't very much terrible but I'm assuming this guy picked up the ever popular "hours per job" metric instead of "hours per person" metric.

Schröders neoliberization effort introduced the mini job, where you could opt out or "opt out" out of social securities, costing you and your benefactorial employer way less money. THe purposed idea was that a mother of 5 could use her spare 5 hours a week to contribute some househould income, what actually happened of course is that 5 full time employees with all the admittedly "strong" social services benefits (compared to the USA) got replaced by 20 mini job employees who have none of those.

This drags down the "hours worked per job" average down a whole fucking bunch, since any given job is going to be like 20 hours a month max. It's just that people mostly have 2 - 5 of those, so more like a 100 hour workweek. Or they just do undeclared work a lot, which means more necessary money in their pocket, it also means 0 pensions since it's not in the system.