Working time account (yearly)

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Purpose and history
The purpose of establishing the Working Time Account (WTA) is to compile time series on hours. Furthermore, it is also intended to compile data on earnings and employment for the national accounts statistics, adopting the definitions of work, earnings and employment as applied in the national accounts. At the moment, the statistics include data on sex, industry, public/private and socio-economic status (self-employed, assisting spouse or employee).

The system for the Working Time Account is the result of a 3-year project established in Statistics Denmark in 1995 with grants by The European Social Fund. The purpose of the project was to improve the current statistical description of the Danish labour market. The background to the WTA is that there has been a considerable expansion in the number of statistics covering the labour market and the fact that the figures from different statistics are not immediately comparable. The project work has been centred on developing statistical systems integrating already existing labour market statistics. In December 1998 the project ended with the publication of a report: "Integrated Labour Market Statistics - the Labour Market Account and the Working Time Account 1995-97" ("Integreret arbejdsmarkedsstatistik - Arbejdsmarkedsregnskab og Arbejdstidsregnskab 1995-97") in which 2 new statistical systems were presented. In 1999, the WTA were presented by Statistics Denmark with the inclusion of annual as well as quarterly statistics.

The time serie 1995-2008* were published on October 1.st in News from Statistics Denmark 435.
Annual data as from 1995 onwards are available in the Statbank at ATR1, ATR2 and ATR11.

A description of the special conditions in relation to publishing data on September 2009, and a more thorough description of the method behind the Working Time Account, can be seen in the document attached to section 6 in this declaration of content.

Description of Contents
Consistent time series on employment, jobs, hours worked and compensation of employees. The data basis is made up of a number of primary statistical data, which are adapted and adjusted to achieve agreement between the concepts and definitions used.

Statistical Concepts
Concerning self-employed, assisting spouses and employees respectively, there is an accounting, definitional relations between hours worked, jobs, compensation of employees and number of employed:

The average number of employed consist of the average number of persons above the age of 14 who every day during the year have been paid either as self- employed, assisting spouse or as employee. Persons who are temporarily absent due to leave, but who are connected to a workplace in the form of having a job to return to, are counted as being employed.

1. Employment = number of primary jobs + persons on leave + persons on maternity

The average numbers of jobs are calculated as the sum of primary and secondary jobs. Similarly as to employment the average number of jobs is calculated for every day of the year. Employees who are temporarely absent from the labour market are not included in the estimation of jobs. There is the following relationship between the number of jobs and the number of employees:

2. Number of jobs = number of primary jobs + number of secondary jobs

The number of hours of worked is defined as hours paid by employers, including paid overtime and excluding paid hours of absence. Paid meal breaks are regarded as hours of availability and are included in hours worked. Paid hours of overtime are defined as the number of paid hours that are worked in excess of normal paid hours (i.e. contractual hours) and include extra hours of work for part-time employed without additional overtime pay. It is not possible to obtain detailed data on unpaid overtime hours and undeclared work. Unpaid overtime hours and undeclared work are therefore excluded from the calculation of hours of work performed in the WTA. Unpaid hours have explicitly been excluded, when quarterly statistics from the Labour Force Survey are used in estimating the provisional data on hours for the period, following the most recent structural statistics.

Hours worked include hours paid by employers, which have been carries out by persons aged over 14, including the hours in jobs that are not part of either the persons main employment or the persons largest secondary job.

3. Actual hours worked = average actual hours worked per job × number of jobs

The number of jobs refers to the total number of active jobs over a year (This concept differs from the published annual average number of jobs in the WTA).

Compensation of employees is calculated in accordance with the definitions in the National Accounts (SNA). Compensation of employees includes total wages and salaries in cash or in kind which the employer pays to an employee for work performed in an accounting period. Compensation of employees also includes employers' actual or calculated social contributions including contribution to pensions.

The compensation of the self-employed and assisting spouses is not included in the WTA. Furthermore, the hourly concept for the self-employed and assisting spouses differs from the hourly concept used for employees, as only hours in the primary job and most important secondary job are included for the self-employed and assisting spouses, and it is also impossible to distinguish between paid, unpaid and undeclared hours of work for these groups. The other variables are calculated in full accordance with the relational accounting equations that have been set up for employees.

An essential feature of these simple relational equations is that they can be used to link the various sources for different variables in the statistics. In this way, hours of worked performed are, e.g. extracted from the Statistics of Earnings, whereas the number of jobs are extracted from the Establishment-related Employment Statistics (ERE statistics). These identities open up to, in addition to quality checks by comparing primary sources, the fact that the relational accounting equations lead to new variables supplementing the present statistical resources

  Read more about the statistics on 'The Annual Working Time Account' in our Declarations of contents

Releases

Last updated:	1 October 2009
Scheduled releases:	16 September 2010 for the period 2009

Contact

Michele Naur
Telephone:	+ 45 39 17 34 14
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