37.9 Hours a Week, Precisely Tracked, vs. However Long It Takes

🇱🇻 Latvia · 🇮🇩 Indonesia

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Latvia's statistics office can tell you, to a tenth of an hour, that the average worker clocked 37.9 hours a week in 2025 — more than Estonia, less than Lithuania, and notably with almost no gap between how long men and women work, the smallest such gap anywhere in the EU. Indonesia's numbers are messier and more alarming depending on which slice of the workforce you're looking at: 81% of workers are in the informal sector with minimal enforcement, gig drivers routinely log 12-15 hours a day for pay below the local living-cost average, and a cultural belief that "working longer equals loyal" quietly drives unpaid overtime in exactly the sectors with the least protection. Except that's only half the Indonesian story — in the formal, contract-based sector, one long-time employer insists unpaid overtime is "uncommon" and staff leave on schedule, even at startups.

Do's & Don'ts

🇱🇻 Latvia

🇮🇩 Indonesia

Latvia: Precisely Measured, Moderately Long

Latvia's working-hours picture is unusually well-documented, thanks to Eurostat's EU-wide tracking: 37.9 hours a week on average in 2025, comfortably above the EU average of 35.9 and placing Latvia "among the countries with longer working weeks" on the continent. Within the Baltic cluster specifically, Latvia sits in the middle — shorter than Lithuania's 38.4 hours, longer than Estonia's. What stands out more than the raw number is the internal consistency: Latvian women worked 38.9 hours and men 39.3, a gap of under an hour, described by Eurostat's own data as the smallest gender difference in working hours anywhere in the EU. The starker internal gap runs along employment type instead — salaried employees work roughly 4.5 hours more per week than the self-employed, among the largest such divides in the bloc, suggesting Latvia's labor market rewards (or requires) considerably more structured hours inside formal employment than outside it.

What the data doesn't fully capture is daily texture, and here the record thins out — forum accounts of actual Latvian office life are sparse, with most expat-facing discussion centered on job availability and wage levels (one Riga-based commenter noted average city wages around €400 a month, observing residents "seem to be able to live well on that") rather than hour-by-hour workplace culture. The honest read for a prospective mover: Latvia's overtime and hours regulation is EU-standard and well-enforced on paper, but the qualitative, ground-level account of what a typical workday actually feels like is thinner in available sources than the hard statistics suggest it should be.

Indonesia: Two Entirely Different Countries, Depending on Your Contract

Indonesia's overtime story splits cleanly along a line that most outside coverage collapses into one narrative. On one side: 81% of the workforce sits in the informal sector, where enforcement is minimal and just 2% of workers are unionized. Gig-economy drivers for platforms like Gojek and Grab routinely work 12-15 hours a day for roughly IDR 3 million a month against a living-cost average closer to IDR 4 million — a gap that has produced documented cases of burnout and worse. Journalists earning under IDR 4.9 million a month report working 8+ hour days with no overtime pay at all. Underneath all of it sits a specific cultural belief one researcher identified directly: that "working longer = loyal," a norm that pressures workers toward unpaid extra hours even where it actively works against their own interests.

On the other side of that line sits formal, contract-based employment — the kind a relocating professional would typically enter — where the picture looks genuinely different. One employer who has run an Indonesia-based team of 150+ staff for a decade describes unpaid overtime as actively "uncommon," with employees maintaining firm boundaries around contracted hours even at fast-moving startups, a pattern he contrasts explicitly against Japanese overtime expectations he's had to actively manage against in the same offshore-development relationships. The friction in that formal-sector environment isn't hours at all — it's "jam karet" ("rubber time," a normalized cultural tolerance for schedule slippage) and a communication style that avoids direct refusal, meaning a "yes" doesn't always mean a firm commitment. Indonesia's Hofstede profile — a striking Power Distance of 78 against an Individualism score of just 14 — captures the hierarchy-and-collectivism combination underneath both halves of this story: deference to authority that, depending on your sector, either protects your boundaries through formal structure or leaves you with none at all.

The Reckoning

The genuinely useful contrast here isn't Latvia-versus-Indonesia as single national averages — it's that Latvia's overtime culture is legible and evenly distributed (everyone, roughly, works the same EU-regulated hours, tracked to a tenth of an hour), while Indonesia's overtime culture depends entirely on which half of a deeply bifurcated labor market you land in. A software engineer on a formal Jakarta contract may work genuinely reasonable, boundaried hours; a food-delivery rider two kilometers away may be working double that for less pay and no legal protection at all. "Indonesia's work-life balance" isn't one answer — it's a question that only means something once you specify which Indonesia you're asking about.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Medium ("Long Hours, Low Pay: The Harsh Reality of Indonesian Workers") — The author's most pointed observation wasn't a statistic but a diagnosis: a cultural belief that "working longer = loyal" drives much of the unpaid overtime documented across gig and informal work, compounding an economic reality where workers "accept overtime just to meet basic living costs" rather than out of genuine choice.

Timedoor.net (10-year Japan-Indonesia business owner account) — Running a 150-plus-person Indonesian team for a decade, the author's clearest piece of advice for foreign managers was about tolerance, not control: build buffer time into every schedule for "jam karet" (rubber time), and never correct anyone publicly — "public criticism damages morale," while the same feedback delivered privately works fine.

Timedoor.net (same account, second observation) — A specific cultural misread the author flagged repeatedly: Indonesian colleagues tend to avoid direct refusal, often saying "yes" even when they can't actually deliver — a pattern he described actively coaching around daily, rather than a one-time adjustment.

Expat.com Latvia forum — The single most concrete local-economy data point volunteered in an otherwise thin discussion: average wages "even in city" run around €400 a month, with the commenter's own observation that residents nonetheless "seem to be able to live well on that as all have new phones and good cars" — an outsider's read on cost-of-living that says as much about local financing norms as about wages themselves.

Conclusion

If you're weighing these two on work-life balance alone: Latvia gives you a predictable, EU-tracked, moderately long working week with genuinely equitable hours across gender — solid, if unspectacular, ground to plan a life around. Indonesia gives you no single answer at all; the honest move is to ask very specifically what sector and contract type you'd be entering before assuming either the boundaried, 150-staff-strong formal-sector experience or the 12-hour gig-economy reality is the one you'll get. The version I'd tell a friend: in Latvia, trust the average; in Indonesia, ignore the average and ask which Indonesia you're actually being offered.