Almost one third of employees in Slovakia work either regularly or occasionally on Sundays, which is among the highest proportions in the EU, a Wood & Company analysis based on Eurostat data for 2019 has shown. Similarly high numbers of employees reporting to work on Sunday can be seen only in the Netherlands, Malta, Denmark and Croatia.
Slovak employees work regularly on Sundays in 16.3 percent of cases, while another 14.6 percent do so every now and then. "This high percentage is related to the economy's orientation. The strong focus on industry and on several other areas which, so to say, don't distinguish between individual days of the week, increase the number of Sunday workers," explained Wood & Company analyst Eva Sadovska.
Even though this number seems high, it's actually decreased somewhat over the course of the last 15 years. The number peaked in 2006, when 36 percent of employees worked on what is traditionally a day of rest. In terms of absolute numbers, the number of Sunday workers in Slovakia stands at approximately 786,000. According to data provided by the Slovak Statistics Office, retail businesses employed roughly 168,000 people last year, with many of those affected by Sunday work. "We estimate, drawing on our results from Eurostat data, that 650,000 to 700,000 Slovaks employed in businesses other than retail usually or occasionally work on Sundays. This applies mainly to industry, restaurants, hotels, transport, agriculture and even culture. Of course it also concerns medical staff, firefighters and police officers," explained Sadovska.
Slovakia's proportion of Sunday workers is by far the highest among the Visegrad Four countries (V4: Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary). Poles and Czechs work on Sundays in approximately 25 percent of cases, with the figure being even lower when it comes to Slovakia's southern neighbour - 23.1 percent. The lowest percentage within the EU is found in Germany, where 19.3 percent of employees work on the day of rest.
