Average number of weekly hours worked in the U.S. and USSR 1970-1988

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, average work weeks in the U.S. were consistently longer than those in the Soviet Union. In 1970, non-agricultural workers in the U.S. worked 3.4 hours per week longer than their Soviet counterparts, and this gap increased to 4.2 hours in 1988. The gap was even wider in agriculture, where work weeks in the U.S. were 5.2 hours longer in 1970, and 3.8 hours longer in 1988.

Additionally, this data is for wage and salary workers in the U.S. only, as very few in the Soviet Union could have been considered self-employed given the socialist economic system. The gap between work weeks increases significantly when Soviet figures are compared with self-employed workers in the U.S., where average work weeks in 1970 for those in agriculture were 51 hours, and for those in non-agricultural work they were 45 hours, although both dropped to 47.5 and 41 respectively by 1988.