Kerja paling lama...hectic giler..

If you thought you worked long hours, consider 39-year-old Lee from South Korea. A civil servant at the ministry of agriculture and fisheries, Lee gets up at 5:30 a.m. every day, gets dressed and makes a two-hour commute into Seoul to start work at 8:30 a.m. After sitting at a computer for most of the day, Lee typically gets out the door at 9 p.m., or even later. By the time he gets home, it's just a matter of jumping in the shower and collapsing into bed, before starting the whole routine all over again, about four hours later. This happens six days a week, and throughout almost all of the year, as Lee gets just three days of vacation.

That's right. Three days.

And, did we mention Lee has a wife and three teenage kids? "I get to see them for 10 or 15 minutes a week, and then just on the weekend," he says of his children before adding that, on weekends, he usually gets interrupted to go to the office.

Lee, who sometimes has to sleep at the ministry of agriculture and fisheries by lying on top of his desk, might seem like a workaholic that needs to get his priorities straight. But his schedule is completely normal in South Korea, where the average employee works 2,357 hours per year--that’s six-and-a-half hours for every single day of their life. According to a 2008 ranking by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, South Koreans work the longest hours per year, on average, out of every other OECD member.

"It’s the culture," says Lee. "We always watch what the senior boss thinks of our behavior. So it’s very difficult to finish at a fixed time." Leaving at the official time of 6 p.m. could mean not getting a promotion or raise. What would happen if Lee took a month's vacation? "My desk would surely be gone when I got back."
South Korea's hard-working citizenry is not alone. Greece comes second in the OECD's rankings with 2,052 hours worked on average each year, and just behind is a trio of Eastern European nations: Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. The U.S. is also above the OECD average of 32 nations, coming at No. 9, with 1,797 hours worked on average each year.

One nation that is famed for a short working week is France, whose 35-hour week is currently in a state of flux. But even the French aren't the OECD's most leisurely workers: Bottom of the list are the tall and amiable Dutch, who work an average 1,391 hours per year, preceded by Norway and Germany.

Culture, as Lee says, is a big factor in the different working hours of nations, but types of employment and legal vacation time are also important. In some countries like the United Kingdom, which comes in at No. 20 on the list, the length of the working week is relatively long, says Pascal Marianna, an OECD expert in employment analysis and policy. But vacations are legally longer in the U.K., at 20 days, than in, say, the U.S., where employees get 10 days of vacation each year. The French get five weeks of vacation a year.