Spain to launch modest trial of four-day working week
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
A couple of years ago my girlfriend came from Spain to live with me in Germany and got a job. After the first day she came home at 10:00 pm (work ended at 6:00 pm). I was worried that they were making her work to hard the first day, but when she came home she told me she just stayed late doing nothing for the new boss seeing her put in the effort... That really really reminded me why I left Spain to work in Germany. I just do not get that kind of attitude, when I confronted her about it she told me that this behavior was expected in all the places she worked at. Leaving early (or even on time), even if you are effective and have done you work is frowned upon by both coworkers and managers. Paradoxically people might even consider you lazy.
So I am really expectant to see how this experiment turns out and if it achieves a change in mentality or if it is just a way to spend tax money and make some “friends of friends” rich as politicians like to do in Spain by subsidizing companies that once the state money runs out go back to normal.
I'm keeping on eye on the experiment because of that, maybe this is a better way to increase productivity in cultures like these.
The worst part of working in Spain is the work is usually from 9 to 14 and from 15 to 18 or variations of that, instead of 8 hours straight.
In the steel industry there are three working times, 6.00 - 14.00, 14.00 - 22.00, 22.00 - 6.00 much better than working from 9.00 to 14.00 and from 15.00 to 18.00.
The only way to have a decent job in Spain is by working for a foreign company (as a remote worker or FTE if they have a spanish office) from which you can get a decent salary and work conditions or creating your own company if you’re successful. Otherwise, working for spanish companies in Spain is most of the times a death sentence and may as well make you hate your job forever.
> Here work seems to always be some tedious chore that keeps you away from social life
This is just one manifestation of what's more generally a very poor work culture, in what amounts to a giant, self-reinforcing negative feedback loop. Management often lacks professionalism, salaries are poor, and employees are demotivated and must therefore look to anything but work for fulfillment.
To be clear, I don't believe this is inherently Spanish, due to our genes, the climate, or our love for fiesta: similar phenomena could be observed locally in the US or Northern Europe. The problem in Spain is how widespread these attitudes are, in a macro context where good opportunities have been scarce for decades, probably due to the lack of a vision for a national productive model and any effective policies in this regard.
Personally I believe any permanent solution will need to come simultaneously in a top-down and bottom-up fashion, with both effective state policies and a change in attitudes from individuals. The catalyst would likely need to be a multi-partisan, national and universal social pact rallying institutions (politics, education, unions, businesses, etc.) around a well-defined vision. Anyone who follows Spanish politics knows that unfortunately at present that possibility is extremely remote.
It is a sad state of affairs that people are looking for "fulfillment" in work at all. Why are we still forced to work 40 hours a week or more to barely survive?
But yes, I whole-heartedly believe that people should derive some meaning out of work, as they devote ~40 of their waking hours to that activity, and it can be a cornerstone of a person's identity. And meaning can take many forms: that you're doing something for yourself, for your family, for your community or your nation, that you intrinsically enjoy the task at hand, or a combination thereof.
This is a common characteristic of thriving nations I've observed in my travels and readings, and conversely, I think that nations that do not have this trait are bound to decline or even crash.
Note how I also do not entirely blame Spaniards for a problem that is clearly systemic; on the other hand, I do believe that we as individual citizens should remain strong in the face of adversity, and not succumb to providential fatalism, as this will also inevitably lead to national misery.
It is more or less the same here in Italy. Jobs are so scarce that one has to be grateful for anything better than straight unemployment thus enabling a whole ecosystem of low pay, asshole bosses and coworkers, and toxic work attitude all around.
This really nails it. I'm originally from Portugal (now living and working in the UK). Staying late and maintaining presence was a really big thing in Portugal. You really are looked down on when you leave early, it's a really terrible work culture, it genuinely felt like people would either overwork themselves or just generally do nothing with that extra time.
I tell my friends this story all the time: When I first arrived to the UK and started working, I asked my company about having my work email on my phone, my manager just had a completely blank face - "why do you need your work email on your phone?". I have been happily employed with this company for nearly 8 years now, never once feeling the need to stay late or go beyond the contracted hours. If I put in overtime, it's because I want to (most of the time because I actually enjoy the work). Oh, and I am paid for overtime. Completely unheard of in Portugal.
I know a lot of these things might be company culture specific, but there is definitely a level within geography - The lesser opportunities available, the more is expected out of you. As if having the opportunity to work should be seen as some sort of blessing.
The UK has notoriously low productivity compared to Europe and the US, and longer average work hours than the rest of Europe.
These are larger aggregate studies. I wonder why both your experiences of the UK seem so at odds with the observed studies? Is it just the field you're in?
Some examples:
https://www.tuc.org.uk/news/british-workers-putting-longest-...
https://www.businessleader.co.uk/uk-employees-work-the-longe...
EDIT: Downvoted for actual studies vs anecdotes. Fabulous. Not only that, these studies have been coming out for years.
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/D...
This has been my woe, and the same can be said about many of my friends and uni acquaintances. I suspect other fields might not have it this badly.
I have found a completely different culture here in the UK, there is so much demand for tech workers, combined with a much better approach towards companies investing in tech - it feels like the worker has that much power, if I'm not happy I can just go get a job somewhere else, probably within a week of quitting. It's a very different dynamic when compared to Portugal: Jobs are scarce and the pay isn't great. Tech is non-innovation driven, you're not there to think about the future, just to fix present issues that are very specific to some random company.
I don't miss Portugal at all when it comes to work.
Have you worked for a business in a town, rather than one of the big cities? Or even a lot of the cities.
It's the same everywhere. Most of our businesses are terrible at using tech, view IT as a cost that's to be cut wherever possible and are completely inept.
I helped my last girlfriend automate her excel spreadsheet based job. It basically got rid of weeks or even months of work she was going to have to do manually moving numbers from some CSVs into spreadsheets. The company had something like 10 people doing the same job.
It took me about 2 hours to write that macro. This was a major garden centre chain in the UK, with hundreds of stores, completely clueless about how much money they were wasting on pointless staff busy work.
When I was there I lived in London, but occasionally travelled to an office in Peterborough. I therefore saw two worlds, one where opportunity abounds and another which was, in all honesty, pretty grim. I loved the people there to bits but their degree of dejection was very much comparable to what you see in Spain, if not worse in some regards (as many lacked, in my observation, the strong familial ties that support Spanish society).
I will say however that despite this very poor outlook for some regions in the UK, even in the worst of cases many British people seem to hold on to a certain optimistic national outlook and to an entrepreneurial or "trading spirit" that is much more rare in Spain. The culture, laws and economic structures seem to still support this, for example the conditions for sole traders are infinitely better in the UK than they are in Spain.
But otherwise yes, I know from both personal experience and from studies I've read through the years that the situation is far from utopian.
You should be very wary of productivity statistics coming from Europe.
I have worked most of the past decade in France. Like most highly educated employee in France, my contract is in days and not in hours. Officialy and legally, I have no set hours but for accounting purpose I have always officialy worked 37.5 hours a week. In reality, I have never worked less than 42.5 hours and weeks above 45 hours are both common and expected.
This is the norm not the exception.
Most of the numbers I can find for Europe is from surveys of employees, not gathered from data on labour contracts.
E.g. pretty much all of the EU numbers draws on the European Union Labour Force Survey (EU-LFS)
Then you are looking at it extremely poorly without obnoxious quotes.
Most of the official stastics on productivity like the one published by Eurostat are derived from the total amount of hours worked which is estimated based on contracts.
Here is Eurostat's EU-LFS data browser for "hours worked per week of full time employment":
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/tps00071/defa...
You can find the actual questionnaires used for carrying out these surveys here:
https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
You'll note they include asking for the same information (estimates of hours worked) several different ways (with and without overtime, and asking separately for the overtime) and that they include instructions to the interviewer for confirming that the result is internally consistent.
EU-LFS is the main source of data on those aspects for the EU. Measuring overall productivity then comes from matching economic indicators up against hours worked.
https://www.employment-studies.co.uk/system/files/resources/...
See page 14 of the executive study:
- However, simple international comparisons can be misleading. In particular, the UK position (mid-range) is distorted by the fact that, compared with most other EU states, the UK employs a high proportion of part-time women workers (working fewer than 30 hours a week).
- Amongst full-time employees, the UK shows high levels of long hours working (over 48 hours a week), especially amongst men where the UK has the highest level of long hours working in the EU. Just over one-fifth (22 per cent) of UK men working full-time work long hours compared with an average of one tenth (11 per cent) across the other EU member states.
- Full-time male managers work the longest hours in the UK and across the EU member states as a whole. However, (on average) UK managers do not work longer hours than their EU counterparts
I suspect at least part of the issue is due to climate. I wonder if there is a similar trend in the US?
There are quite a few counterexamples of thriving economies with warm climates: California, Miami, Texas, Singapore off the top of my mind. Historically, the Greeks and Romans achieved splendor in the classical era in Southern Europe. In the modern era, the Ottomans and some Italic kingdoms did as well. Spain and Portugal most certainly did as well, but maybe these are all too similar to oil-rich countries nowadays in that they held quasi-monopolies over valuable resources of their time, so I'm not sure they would qualify as much as the others.
Conversely, there are quite a few examples of really bad economies in cold climates.
There may be some correlation between climate and the odds of success of a nation or region, but I believe the counter-examples prove there is no definite causation. It's too easy to fall into the fatalistic idea of "we're fucked because it's warm and cozy here" but I will refuse to accept that until I see unequivocal scientific evidence to back it up.
Does anyone who's lived there for a while have any insight on why tasks that I could accomplish in the US in 12 weeks take like 5 years in Spain?
Why is every form and document and signature and approval process seemingly arbitrary? Why is the person you need for the next step always on vacation?
Is there some kind of a system where 5 people are drawing a salary for a job that 1 person could do, so they all mutually agree to do it as slowly as possible?
I just don't get it.
As a Dutchman, who is by no means a fan of the country, can only tremble in horror whenever paperwork abroad had/has to be done. There may be a difference between Spain and the US, it's insignificant between the NL and the rest.
Well, I hear good things about Scandinavian countries too. I haven't had the opportunity yet to work/live there, hope to get around to it though!
We are always swamped in huge piles of bureaucracy, it's difficult not to be caught in some evaluation or other that requires you to spend months devoting countless hours to mindless paperwork (for the last one, I literally submitted a more than 1800-page PDF. I'm not exaggerating, I just checked). There are so many evaluations (6-year research evaluations from the Spanish government, research complement evaluations from the regional government, evaluations of research centers, evaluations of the PhD program, 5-year Docentia teaching evaluations, accreditations for the countless positions in the scale, with the subsequent evaluation for the position itself...) that we are subject to several a year, each with their own CV format and their own forms incompatible with the rest and asking for different things. And then there is the day-to-day bureaucracy where buying a computer can mean filling 10-15 different forms.
Paperwork takes most of our time and being able to do some "real work" feels like a reward that one has to earn. Still the real work is rewarding, but I wish it were like in other countries (say northern Europe, the US...) where real work can be most of the time. (And why didn't I migrate? Because of attachment to my place and my loved ones, like many people here. If work were my main driver in life I'd have been out of here long ago).
As for the experiment, I hope it achieves success but I wouldn't hold my breath. Under the current political climate, I'm afraid even if it's an undisputable success, the moment a right-wing government is voted to office they will tear it down because it's "communism", "handouts", "will turn us into Venezuela" or something like that. It's difficult to achieve anything with the current political polarization (and the main party that was between both blocs, currently in danger of extinction).
This seems to be true of academia almost anywhere I have heard people talk about life in academia.
The only place where I would leave late was when I was working as a research assistant at my university, because my boss was super nice, the environment was friendly, my job was really interesting, and I was happy.
I never forget I was on a plane next to a German fellow he asked me if I liked to work, I said "yes because I like to build stuff, but if I worked as cashier earning minimum wage I would not probably like it", he said "Why so? Even if making a small wage you are useful and you see people and greet them ..." that simply made me think and it broke a little bit of the negative feedback, and I really think that I was brainwashed to hate any job. By the way we are not all like that but most are.
Fun fact: 50% of employed people here in The Netherlands are working parttime in some form.
But another reason is that because of the corona, our company didn't do as good as expected and they didn't give anyone any raises, so working a few hours extra is a nice increase in wage as well.
Mind you, otoh I could make a lot more if I were to work elsewhere.
Keynes' 15 hr work week prediction, for example, is a fascinating rabbit to travel down. The typical economics professors' "why it failed" explanations (at least circa 2005) are tellingly evasive. They preserve all Keynes' premises^ with a "what "happened" scenario that threads a tiny needle.
IMO, regardless of which rabbit hole you follow, it turns out that workweek is a very culturally defined thing. It isn't very reactive to economic forces at all. People get rich. Societies get rich. Women join the workforce. Efficiency rises by N000%. Workweeks remain similar.
Where quantity of work does change, it tends to be outside the workweek paradigm. Retirement became a big thing. Children don't work. Young adults do a lot of college. Women join the workforce, or don't. IE, we might work fewer years. Fewer people might work. Shortening workweeks rarely happens.
IMO, empirically, workweeks seem to be mostly a social institution... not an "economic" one. IE, economic explanations have very little predictive power because "out-of-theory" stuff is more important.
^[1]advancements in efficiency, [2] substitution effects, [3] income effects.
While you have a point that other factors like retirement age (and in recent years, a growing fear of an aging population) has certainly been part of the reason why it hasn't dropped as fast as some expected, in countries with a strong labour movement it certainly has dropped significantly, and even in countries with a weak labour movement it is still lower than it used to be.
The prediction was widely head, and relied on two non controversial ideas: income effect and substitution effect. Higher hourly wages make working more worthwhile, so people work more; Higher overall wages allow people to trade work less opt for leisure. It also relied on efficiency and gdp growth predictions which did really come true.
The orthodox reasoning for why the prediction failed is basically: We invented all this awesome new stuff. People prefer to work more, and buy more of this new stuff rather than work less. I don't believe this holds up, but it's what I was taught at uni.
Anyway... my point is that looking at the history of employment, it doesn't seem like these "economic" (in the literal sense) explanations have any predictive power. Actual changes in working patterns seem to be governed by "outside factors." Women joined the workforce. Children exited the workforce. People go to uni more. Retirement became statistically more common. Laws change. Norms change. Culture changes. Those things do affect how much we work. Economic factors like efficiency don't.
Norway is a small-sih country, and often an outlier, so IDK if it makes a good example. That said, I imagine that these changes in working hours were caused by rule changes: labour laws, union demands or somesuch. They aren't economic.
My point is that the model of the economy and the model of a worker used by Keynes to make the prediction, and by most commenters on the topic since are clearly bad models.At the margin, it doesn't even make sense to most workers. We (most of us) don't choose our work hours. We don't work 8% less because 92% of the money is enough. That marginal choice doesn't even exist. We work a job, and job hours are defined by convention.
Efficiency, GDP growth and such, over the last 91 years, haven't affected the number of hour we work. Work hasn't been static. It's just governed by other things.
If you met Keynes in 1930, you would be right to say "No. How rich we get, how technologically advanced or how productive our industries are will have no effect on how much we work...." You would have been correct. Keynes, and every economist from austrians to marxists would have been wrong.
Even today, after the prediction has long-failed empirically, economists have a hard time facing this.
I don't think you can suggest that economic factors like efficiency has not affected this - increased efficiency has been an enabler that allowed these reductions in working hours to happen without according income reductions. Without efficiency improvements, demanding these kind of reductions would not have been viable.
> Norway is a small-sih country, and often an outlier, so IDK if it makes a good example.
There is not a single country in Europe that hasn't seem a similar pattern of reductions. I used Norway as an example because I was familiar with the reductions, but this is not isolated by any means.
I don't think it's a question of pace. 20% over 90 years instead of 70% over 40 years isn't "pace." Also, Keynes predicted that people would choose fewer hours. I assume that what you are describing about Norway is an advancement of worker rights. That's not really the Keynes prediction.
It is a question, to some extent, of definitions. Does average workweek increase because more women joined the workforce? Decrease because children left the workforce? Does college count as "work? Does unemployment factor in? Should we consider Norway's average workweek shorter than Spain's because of unemployment rates? etc. There are lots of definitional issues. I'm interested in this, honestly.
The definition I'm interested is a the common sense one. What does "full time," generally, mean? Is there a normative choice, at scale, for a 15 hr workweek that is normative. The answer to this is no.
>> increased efficiency has been an enabler that allowed these reductions in working hours to happen
This why looking at old predictions is interesting. It's easy to narrate things that have already happened in ways that don't challenge our views.
Maybe there is a direct relationship between efficiency and working hours. It's just 50X weaker than Keynes (and current microeconomic theory still) predicts. That's it's an uninteresting theory. The difference between true and false is unimportant.
>> There is not a single country in Europe that hasn't seem a similar pattern of reductions
IDK... European countries are pretty different from eachother. Here in ireland, I think average workweek has increased just based on labour force participation. Historically, unemployment has been high here. In our generation it is very low. Female participation also went from very low to very high here. We also went from mostly self employed to mostly employed in that period.
Ireland was never very industrial, so the "standard" or union normative working conditions are not as specifically defined as it is in Germany, for example.
And there it is. (The proposal is the government pays a fraction of this for a few years before sticking the companies with this.)
It's basically just a minimum wage law but written the other way.
This always sticks the bill with the only person actually paying to begin with, the business owner. If society thinks people should be paid more perhaps it should mandate paying more for the company's products to compensate for making them pay their employees more per hour.
But this is not an economical law. It's absolutely possible to sacrifice ever increases in growth for more worker time.
So a shop owner that wants to stay open sees a 20% reduction in attendance by their employees. This is going to cost some people real money.
Strongly disagree, productivity increase is everywhere, surgery recovery times have been drastically decreased in the past decades, and recovery protocols accelerated across the board.
Just because doctors have a limit throughput of how many patients per day they can see, it doesn't mean that hospitals and clinics aren't increasing their productivity as a whole. If you are seing less of the same patients per week then your productivity has increased, as simple as that.
The key point GP is highlight is that productivity has basically decoupled from salaries since the 1970's, i.e. we are all collectively producing more value whilst collectively getting payed less in proportion to the value generated.
Several companies does this (disclaimer: My employer is an investor in one of them).
This thread is about Spain (which certainly has a lot of economic problems along with the rest of the EU), but wasn't that research mainly about the US?
My impression is some but not all of the cause is because "productivity" numbers are very confused because of how much exponentially more efficient computers have gotten. If you measure in 1970s computers, someone building a PC in 2020 has a million times more productivity.
These are often things we'd all rather they be doing, in fact. Which is why McDonald's is still popular in Australia when the national minimum wage is ~20USD/hour and they have automated ordering stations.
This is so because when salaries in productive industries start to rise every other sector also has to raise wages to attract any worker at all, which in turn raises prices. It's also why coffee is more expensive in Silicon Valley than in Podunk Idaho. It's not because baristas in California are more productive, it's because the region is richer and you can't buy your freshly brewed latte from China or India.
The problem here is the effect on productivity. While there are some jobs where decreasing 20% of working hours while keeping productivity constant may be perfectly feasible, there are lots of jobs in Spain's precarious service-oriented economy where this is not possible.
For example, take all jobs depending on tourism: how is a waiter going to produce the same in four days of work than in five?
The same applies for Spain's public sector. Many public workers already have very good working conditions, but more importantly, the same effect described above also applies to them: it is not clear whether their working hours can be compressed without a significant loss of productivity.
To be clear I'm not against the idea, as there may be some merit to it if applied reasonably and on a tactical level, as part of much greater economic reforms. But I fear this is not what will happen; rather, populist politicians will take it and run with it because it sounds good, without any regards for its real implications, and without addressing the much harder and endemic problems of the Spanish economy such as the eye-watering unemployment levels and the lack of opportunities for our youth.
By not being tired on the fifth, not taking wrong orders and not dropping glasses. Same as a software engineer would.
I see your point tho, and it is very valid. I am just playing angels advocate here.
But, iirc, earliest research on the topic was conducted in a hospital, which is a services business, same as a restaurant. Increases in production (I said production and not productivity) were found. Research is not solid.
This is not an actual problem that needs a solution.
If you make labour 'reassuringly expensive', then the only way to maintain output is to invest in capital deepening.
Which is the only place productivity comes from.
Capitalists need to start doing some capitalism.
What kinds of capital deepening can one do for our tourism-oriented and increasingly public-sector-dependent service economy?
We can, of course, move all those operations to the Job Guarantee if that is your view of capitalism.
Personally I'm more optimistic about improved methods and machinery.
They don't have to justify anything, they're profitable. Out compete them, with your 80% workers, if you think it's a better way.
> Personally I'm more optimistic about improved methods and machinery.
The companies are optimistic about machinery too, as it'll help them achieve the elusive 0% worker. It feels like you're trying to devalue humans out of any possibility of employment, not help them.
Once there is a guaranteed alternative job available - to balance the power discrepancy - then competition can be turned up to 11. At which point these operations 'profit' will be seen as what it is - under bidding labour in a system that is systemically short of work.
Workers need that 'no deal' option adding. And businesses need the "what about the jobs, can I have a bailout" option removing. Then competition will be 100% fair - and effective. Driving forward the capital improvements we need to have a better standard of living.
Hell yeah. Welfare for business is bad.
> Workers need that 'no deal' option adding.
Well, yes. But to some degree you're supposed to build that for yourself. Without that requirement you have no incentive to save and work smart.
I don't think bosses should have the power (ie, society should disrupt it, you're right) to keep people on the edge of poverty so that they have leverage, but I also don't think people should have much say over their boss other than to refuse the job. Either unbalances the market.
If you pay people more, then you can. Basic Henry Ford.
It also only worked because he had a huge first-mover advantage and wasn't facing price-pressure from competition. His grand plan could have bankrupted him in a week if the market hadn't been right for it.
When you drive additional volume you get cheaper output due to economies of scale effects.
There isn't a fixed amount of stuff, any more than there is a fixed amount of money to make that stuff.
Sales depend upon people having the money to buy things. Wages are the major component of profit. And quantity expanding firms will always outcompete and destroy price expanding firms.
You just said the business owner is the "only person paying" and then contradicted yourself by saying "people" pay more. Everyone pays for things because the economy is a cycle.
Intervening in the economy (eg with minimum wages and just giving people money) can improve the health of the economy by increasing money velocity; economists don't think it's strictly bad to do this anymore*. It can lead to inflation but that's fine, most developed economies don't have enough of it.
* https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-15-minimum-wage-is-pre...
Those same educated voices also tend to support UBI and other ... less than fully considered social engineering ideas. When it comes to government mandates I'm cautious, especially because you can't usefully go back. Even if they're a PhD they're in a field where you cannot test your ideas.
If you want to pay a worker more, actually do that. Walk up to a barrista and offer them a monthly cheque to make up the difference between their wage and your proposed minimum. Your vote that Starbucks must pay more usually isn't accompanied with a certain minimum purchase guarantee that they can use to actually fund this.
> You just said the business owner is the "only person paying" and then contradicted yourself by saying "people" pay more. Everyone pays for things because the economy is a cycle.
Not usefully in that sense. I'm the only one paying my rent. You're not doing anything towards it. Even if you shop at my employer and indirectly pay my salary, you aren't putting money towards my rent. I'm the one who makes the food/fun/shelter tradeoff. If there's a slack month or unexpected expenses, I suffer.
If you actually paid the store an extra 15% line-item specifically to use to pay their employees then I would accept that.
I love how my country hugs the poverty closer and closer each year that passes by.
It's been long since we were the leaders of employment creation in the eurozone, back when Rajoy was in power.
In fact, less work hours will be a complication for many -as they are used to justify the work done by sitting for extra-hours at their desk. It’s sad, but it’s also my daily routine.
Maybe they're downvoting you because they are also Spanish, they know who Rajoy is and what he did, and what effects a pandemic produces on your economy regardless of the party in the government.
I certainly do not miss Rajoy, but I whole-heartedly believe that a social-communist government is possibly the worst alternative to get us out of this hole.
We need jobs, a lot of them, not only in the public sector, and I think that our current government is tremendously ill-equipped for this task.
Has anyone noticed how members of the government rarely, if ever, talk about job creation anymore? Politicians will lie about anything, but they don't even dare lie about this - they simply avoid these murky waters altogether.
My theory is they know full-well that the only path to growth and private sector job creation is by taking measures (that moderates like Minister of the Economy Nadia Calviño possibly support) like modifying labor laws and lowering taxes which sound right-wing and therefore sit especially poorly with the communist wing of the government.
The only alternative to that is, as some communists like Iglesias or Garzón are consistently pointing out, to nationalize a bunch of industries (they've talked about examples ranging from banks to media companies) and turn to a centralized economy.
I hope I'm wrong but I clearly do not see how the situation will improve under the current circumstances.
Sure, some individual members of the government (with very limited decision-making power, being the minority members of a coalition) declare themselves so. In an already very diluted way. And they do some political posturing with nationalizations (which aren't even a communist thing. If nationalizing a few strategic industries is communism, then what was Spain in the 80s with lots of nationalized industry? The USSR?). But it's not really going to happen. They know it, we know it.
Macron has also set forth the idea of nationalizing some industries to face the COVID crisis, and I actually think it's more likely to happen in France (with its notoriously non-communist government) than in Spain.
You seem to follow Spanish politics, so surely you must have seen how moderates like Calviño are often put in extremely rough spots? The communist wing of the government is not nearly as powerless as you claim to be.
We'll see what comes out of labor reform, for example, but I suspect there won't be any measures that are conducive to the creation of good jobs, or any jobs at all.
And boy, do we know how everything went back when we had that law.
Why is that? We said we needed a new labour law so you can lay off people at no cost, because they said that was the reason the unemployment rate was so high here in Spain. And we did it. And we still have the very same law, nobody is changing it. They also didn't raise taxes very much, in fact not as much as Rajoy did when he took office.
Instead, I think one of the reasons our economy is so vulnerable is because we are so much dependent on tourism and also there seems nobody can innovate and create a business other than a restaurant. But this is hardly our current government's fault.
(Of course, calling this government "communist" is a joke in poor taste, but people from outside Spain may believe this country is the new Soviet Union).
Many members of the government (eg, Iglesias or Garzón) repeatedly define themselves as communists, though. And they regularly use the term "social-communist" to literally define the government. So maybe they are the ones joking and deep down inside they believe in an innovative market economy, albeit progressive?
> Instead, I think one of the reasons our economy is so vulnerable is because we are so much dependent on tourism and also there seems nobody can innovate and create a business other than a restaurant. But this is hardly our current government's fault.
Because while I agree with the opinion that the government is not at fault for the lack of innovation or productive model in Spain, I seriously doubt a government that is so left-leaning (and in which part is literally communist, and wants the nationalization of many industries) is going to foster an environment for innovation and entrepreneurship...
And by the way, I very much agree with you.
Plus, I certainly hope Ayuso wins the elections.
I'm Spanish, so to be expected!
Dude, stop reading La Razón and listening to Marhuenda/Inda/Losantos, the "social-communist" bullshit is beyond ridiculous.
If the leader of a party identifies himself as a Nazi, it's a nazi party. If the leader identifies as a communist, it's a communist party. That's it. That's the truth.
If a nazi is in power, how would you call the government? The same applies to the communist.
Stop reading Escolar, that guy didn't even finish his degree.
You should get better opposition. Do you have a functioning Pirate party already? It seems dormant. Maybe try to revive it?
I'm not sure it's viable in today's financial climate, but I guess we're about to find out.
Iirc, increase in production is about 40%. So working Monday to Thursday, you produce the same as someone, working 5 days produces Monday to next week's Tuesday morning.
Research is not solid, but promising.
However, in many professions being available for a given number of hours is often a major part of the job, and that means there will be a direct requirement to hire more people in order to cover the reduced working hours.
We need more high quality jobs, not paying more for the low quality jobs we already have.
In the US underemployment was blamed on laziness, lack of training, etc etc for years but the actual cause is the Fed setting interest rates too high, and when they stopped we got more employment than ever (as of Jan 2020). If you simply make employers compete more to hire people, they will do a good job training them, making them more productive, ignoring minor criminal records and so on.
I will give you one concrete example: companies in Spain with more than 50 workers must carry out salary audits to avoid gender discrimination [1]. These and other perverse incentives keep many companies from growing, which in turn hurt the economy and reduces demand for workers, driving wages down.
[1] https://spainsnews.com/companies-with-more-than-50-workers-m...
If you're a micro-company, you can probably get away with paying each employee cash, or via B2B payments.
Once you reach any reasonable scale, you have to formalise those contracts.
This is a problem across the EU, apart from areas like the UK and Scandinavia which don't have payroll taxes (where interestingly tech seems to be flourishing).
Everybody needs something to do with their day. And those you really need to be working a full week to produce what we really need will only do that if there is something material for them to exchange for their efforts.
We really don't want farmers on three day weeks.
- No minimum wage laws. - Reduce or remove taxes paid by companies. - Reduce or remove forced social contributions by companies on behalf of the workers. - Remove bureaucracy and taxes to start companies. - Facilitate capital investment by foreign firms.
It's simple but not easy, because people vote for policies that sound good but are actually either ineffective or directly give the opposite result.
There is this thing called stress, burnout... That decreases production. Less work usually means less stress.
Research is not as solid as I would like, but promising.
It absolutely blows my mind that 99% of office roles are still 5 days / week, Monday to Friday - why is there basically no variation on this model?
It annoys me so much that I've just launched https://www.fourdayweek.io/ (shameless plug)
I think a real 4 day working week would be closer to 28 hours or less: it should mean employers get somebody else for the fifth day or three three days left in the week: closer to jobshare, no overtime, people work less but the work is shared around.
Fridays are now "flexible". This means that you should check slack/email for fires, get your house in order for the next week, and, if there's something urgent you're working on (actually urgent, we haven't just reclassified all work as urgent) then you should probably be progressing it. Otherwise, enjoy the rest of the day.
It's brilliant.
Many people already work 4 and 3 and 2 and 1 day weeks. Many of these people's schedules would not be affected by these laws. The only point of these laws is to see what what happen if you enforced them systemically en masse. If you don't do that, you are exactly where you started which is a few people having this privilege but not everyone.
And most of the potential rewards as well as potential consequences are only going to expose themself when the policy is enacted en masse. Like of course the few people you give the privilege to are going to happy. I don't really think that was up for debate. The question is is what effects will it have on the broader economy and running a trial with .05% of the population tells you nothing about that.
Or those same jobs will just pay a lower salary.
It could be good or bad.
The good part is, less buying. Less shopping. Smaller homes. Lower needs. etc.
The bad part, all of that part of the economy that was depending those incomes is going to have to transition to something else.
Maybe it could lead to more people moving to lower cost countries... OR... more people living like how people live in Bangkok, Beijing or Bali.
Either way, the end the middle class as we know it in America is quickly coming to an end.
Simultaneously, there are fewer jobs due to automation.
Wages will continue to decline with an oversupply of labor.
Also, this isn't even happening. It's mostly an artifact because productivity of e.g. computer manufacturing looks super efficient if you measure each 2020 computer as containing a million 1970s computers.
> Wages will continue to decline with an oversupply of labor.
This is called the "lump of labor" fallacy. Increasing the number of people increases both supply and demand, and therefore improves the economy, and therefore may raise wages.
(Economists don't simply use supply and demand for the labor market anyway, they consider things like monopsony and search models.)
The current bubble will drain money from producers to the value-empty mortgage sector for decades.
Detroit, Baltimore, Camden would like a word with you and your theory that housing never goes down.
> outside of a total bubble deflation.
Detroit is rare, and Detroit's bubble popped hard at the same time as real-estate in general.
There are A LOT of places in the US where real estate has not been a panacea of wealth accumulation.
Anyway, this can be solved by waiting for them to die, and in the meantime building more houses with more efficient land use.
As for new builds, much of that money is held by the large rental companies and needs them to transfer out of the rental space, which they won't do until the market looks sane. Maybe not as long as waiting for people to die, but still painful.
What a trap we built by trying to make our residences an investment.
Just an example: In Berlin you will pay around 850.000EUR for a newly-built single family home of around 160qm on a 600qm plot. With realistic interest rates of around 1.5 to 1.8% it will take you around 4.8% per year to pay this off in the (roughly) 25 to 30 years you have left of working years if you are a mid-thirties professional. This (conveniently) gives you a factor of 0.004 per month to pay for this house. That's a whopping 3400EUR per month.
Now normally you should not pay more than 33% of your net income for living. That means, such a house is affordable, even with the relatively low interest rates, for families with a net income of 10kEUR per month. How many mid-thirty families have that kind of income?
So what drives these prices is actually inherited wealth. Inherit real estate and you can cut that price easily in half. 1700EUR a month is much more reasonable and that does not even account for the even better interest rates you will see. Notably you just transfer your inherited wealth, you do not lose it.
This is so true for Germany/Most of Western Europe. Buying property is a pipe dream at this point, even for white collar professionals, if you have no help from the bank of mom and dad.
Building has just not kept up with demand (can't build and dilute the value of established NIMBY property owners) and wages have not kept up with the rising property prices.
And rent freezing for the established ones further increases the cost for those new to the market. So good luck building wealth for a mortgage when you'll be paying over half of your net income for big city rent.
I feel like unless something changes, we're looking at some massive revolts in the next decades if things continue along this path of squeezing the middle and lower classes to further transfer their wealth to the rich, all carefully enabled by the ruling politicians.
That's why so many desperate young ones are gambling their savings on GME and other memes, since they realized that unless you're born into wealth, the game is rigged against you building wealth no matter how hard you work. So then, why bother working hard as that just makes the rich even richer but not you.
I’ll only support reduced work weeks (because it’ll inevitably be used to reduce wages eventually) if our housing problem is fixed.
Doing 8 hrs of work done in 5 is not possible for a dental nurse, waiter or an air traffic controller. Those jobs literally need asses in seats for N hours. The hour reduction game is almost 0-sum. Do less work. Hire more employees. Pay less. Charge more.
This is a lot of jobs.
For a software developer, hr executive, or user happiness advocate... reduced working hours is not necessarily 0-sum. What we think of, when we think of reduced work hours depends on which of these is our anchor.
Working 72 hr/week while making $200k/yr is only $53/hour.
To get to $80/hour would require a salary of $300k. $100/hr is $375k. Oh, and taxes because not an owner of capitalist assets.
There's no way a FAANG could hold onto staff requiring 72h/w without paying huge bonuses.
Businessmen in Spain sees the worker as another machine in the factory and a lot of them work actively to fired the workers that try to unionize. I talk from experience having worked in 2 some what small (50 to 150 workers), family-owned companies, where in one, the union representative was the son of the owner and in the other there wasn't any union because 2 years before I entered, the person who tried to create a union office in the company was fired and reported to the police with false pretences.
You have exceptions of course but the vast majority are very very conservative with ideas between right wing or extreme right wing.
My opinion is that the wealth, like in any place, is very very bad balanced. Studies are viewed as useless, because they won't give you a good job or because there are some part of society that sees them as something not cool. We don't have a solid STEM-based industry like for example Germany or France. Also, We are highly dependant from tourism, being tourism the largest sector in our GDP (in some regions is the 25% )and we don't re-invesment that wealth in R&D, which is arround 1,25%.
Plus political instability from various populism movements is the perfect mix for a country stuck in time. Without any project of future.
I do not believe that business owners are trying to maximize the efficacy of their resources. If it were so, this kind of proposals would be accepted by the business community, given research on the topic. I believe this proposal is a tremendous opportunity.
I believe business want to control people. As such, one less day is less control. In exchange for Business controlling your life you get different degrees of financial security. Feudalism.
This attitude is reinforced by tradition and misconception. And both employees and employers are at fault. Gee, I am at fault! I haven't worked a 40 hour week in my entire working life. On my defense I would say that I have sent juniors and interns home... But still.
I have also said that research on the topic is not solid, but of this proposal were to be properly implemented could help solve that issue.
Politicians doing a proper policy implementation is a different can of worms. I was hoping that some progressive business would actually start doing 4 hour weeks, rather than a top down approach.
I agree with you. I didn't know how to label it but feudalism sounds right. And I think that employees are greater at fault that employers. We must know when to say enough is enough.
In the second company, I had a couple of interns and I saw that the first week they where doing like 1 or 2 hours every day more than they should by contract (4 hours/day contract). I invited them both to a coffee outside the company and talk about them about doing more hours for free.
I still have contact with one of them and before this thing of Covid exploded, we talked and said that he had with his intern the same conversation I had with him about free hours.
I think that we need a strong class / work mentality, something lost in recent years, and that it comes from education.
I would be honored.
Other thing most people don't understand is that unpaid overtime is actually tax fraud. I have never seen paid overtime in Spain. I read someone in HN saying she got paid overtime tho.