Spaniards are less productive, constantly tired: Spain is in the wrong time zone
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
This extra-long workday has given us some fun Spanish cultural quirks, like the 9 p.m. dinner hour and the two-hour lunch break.
I know that folks in the US, Germany and some other countries eat at or around 6pm but I also know that folks in most of Latin America, India, Thailand, etc. eat at 8-9pm or so. So why is this considered a 'cultural quirk' ? A little culturally insensitive I must say.
I can only speak for Mexico, but the reason for this is that dinner is not the most important/bigger meal of the day, lunch is.
Mexico: medium breakfast, big lunch, small dinner.
USA: small breakfast, medium lunch, big dinner.
Over here people will just have a sandwich or two for dinner, that's why it doesn't matter if it happens at 8 or 9 p.m.
Originally, dinner referred to the first meal of a two-meal day, a heavy meal occurring about noon.
[...]
In Europe the fashionable hour for dinner began to be incrementally postponed during the 18th century, to two and three in the afternoon, until at the time of the First French Empire an English traveler to Paris remarked upon the "abominable habit of dining as late as seven in the evening".
India also has hot meals during lunchtime (nice story at http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2882-the-incredible-delivery-...)
I think it made sense to have a hot meal during lunchtime in places where the sun may set early at night because cooking in the relative dark would be more dangerous than cooking during daylight (swaying around a burning stick inside a wooden house to search for ingredients, spare wood, etc, is not a good idea)
English-speaking cultures use the word "dinner" for the main meal of the day whenever it happens. Cultures that eat breakfast, dinner, and supper have a large midday meal and a small evening meal. Cultures that eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner are the other way around. It just so happens that the English-speaking cultures that make more movies and TV shows (namely London and the coasts) are breakfast-lunch-dinner cultures, so people assume this is normal everywhere.
(note, this comment is meant illustratively)
I miss it and sincerely cherish that country and all the great people in it.
Otherwise, for office work, lunch breaks are short. European style.
Problem is, most people now don't live 5 minutes walk from their place of work, so there isn't time to get home and sleep before returning to the office. But there is nothing else to do. Everyone else is on the same break. You can't run your errands for the day because everywhere else is shut as well.
As a student living 5 minutes from my classes, I found the dual sleep (usually about 4am til 8am and 1pm til 3pm) with the main meal in the middle of the day to be fantastic, but for modern working conditions and commuters it is a serious problem.
With an unemployment rate of a staggering 50% for those under 25, and with 68% of them leaving Spain to find work, and 12% overall unemployment for everyone else: that sounds like a lot of people that don't even have a job.
That's not a good thing, perhaps the attitude of work to live, as said previously, is more of a coping mechanism. Otherwise, maybe this is at the core of their unemployment problems? The more I read about their labor laws, it just sounds bad in Spain. And the youth unemployment problem sounds like a disaster in the making.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008–13_Spanish_financial_crisi...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008–13_Spanish_financial_crisi...
If it's a new thing, it's a coping mechanism. (I'm pretty sure it's not)
On paper the UK has the worst economic exposure in the OECD and produces very little indeed.
We are little more than a service economy for banking at this point, and UK banking has the lion's share of our total debt, dwarfing what is owed by the public sector. Luckily we are considered the stable place, so people continue to put their money here, but I suspect that is more of a confidence trick than anything else.
And exactly what attitude to work have Spaniards?
The reasons of Spanish underdevelopment during the past centuries are several and have been studied thoroughly and have nothing to do with "being lazy" as you seem to suggest.
I detest how every news that involves Spain is linked to the current crisis. Just 5 years ago Spain was a model of economic growth and progress and we lived at the same Time Zone.
Hahahahaah, I live in Spain and that is bullshit.
If there's any kind of special Spanish fatigue, I can't believe it has anything to do with their timezone -- it's the entire cultural thing of sleeping/relaxing at siesta, and staying up late. Spaniards don't work late because of anything to do with the natural setting of the sun, it's the fact that they take a three-hour "lunch"!
Yet somehow the article neglects to mention this at all...
A few years back, when I lived in Madrid, I noticed that this city has an insane grind. To me it looked as if the culture there started off with a "begin work early, have siesta, end work late" setup, but at some point along the way they lost the siesta part.
Many Spaniards work really hard all day, all week, then (at least the young ones) party just as hard all weekend. Repeat ad infinitum.
Don't know about the time zone though. That seems dubious.
If you actually read the article you'd know that the complaint is that they work too much and that it's because their timezone is out of sync with daylight. Which is what distinguishes their situation from ours here with DST -- we're actually better sync'd with daylight because of it.
I'm Spanish, from Barcelona and I don't know anybody that sleeps or relaxes at "siesta" time. Well, I don't know about siesta time.
> it's the fact that they take a three-hour "lunch"!
Also, I don't know anybody that takes a three hour lunch
The siesta is alive and kicking in Mexico as well -- a friend of mine who's a well-to-do lawyer in Mexico City, his whole firm takes off 3 hours an afternoon as well, and he explained it's a pretty normal thing to do -- particularly so you can have lunch with your family. Of course, doubling your daily commute has its own problems...
I am an American who lives his life an hour off for the majority of the year, and I will tell you that it pretty much harms everything, from my point of view. But I just sit here and take it.
You see, that's the thing about the apathy this institutionalized circadian chaos and lack of sunlight induces. It immerses you into a hell you can't be bothered to alleviate yourself from. And when you grow up in public schools which heap layer, upon layer of pointlessness atop your life, this is just one more thing, and at some point you just stop caring and capitulate to the stupidity of TV dinners, 2 liter bottles of soda, and mindless sitcoms that you hate but can't stop watching.
It's a sort of perpetual, depressive cabin fever, where there are never any trees or animals or sky. You're ferried back and forth to your stations in life by automobiles, buses, or underground trains, wondering what happened to the timeless but fleeting enthusiasm of summer, and you stare out the window all day, but you'll never feel enough sunlight and wind on your face at the same time during the winter. In my gut there has always been an undeniable sensation that there's something wrong with that. These compulsory, artificial extremes.
I envy you and your life which is so insulated from this annual exercise in negation.
DST is in the summer. And now, in the US, much of the spring and fall as well, since it got moved to November and March. Winter time is "natural" time, where wall time corresponds more closely to solar time.
"Everyone in Spain feels jetlagged all the time, even if they haven't been traveling"
I live in the north of Europe now and when I can I take siesta, just I don't do it longer than 25 min. and never too late(around 14:00).
This is clearly just an example of the Spanish parliament looking for a scapegoat for the woeful state of the Spanish economy.
Spain should be in 0 (and France, Moroco, Argelia, etc...) just as UK.
Portucal could chose, since it just in the middle, currently is 0.
Canary Islands should go to -1.
http://www.travel.com.hk/region/time_95.jpg
Anyway, I think it will be a good marketing movement for Spain, as I've explained, so we get rid of a little bit of the lazy country fame.
France largely overlaps Spain in terms of [latitude] longitude, is in the same time zone, shares some of the traditions cited in the article (long lunch break, midddle-of-the-morning and middle-of-the-afternoon coffee breaks, dinner at 8pm), and has one of the highest productivities in the world, in line with the US, Japan or the UK (above if you count it per hour worked).
So maybe they should look for an explanation somewhere else
Edit : fixed latitude instead of longitude
What about the higher productivity of Scandinavians? They shift back and forth on "time-zones" due to the constant change of amount of light because of the very hash winter. Sometimes with as few as 3 hours of light, not sun, but still maintain the same level of productivity.
Currently, Spanish primetime stretches until after midnight <- Well what about making less time for primetime? Or less siestas?
Pd: yes, we take siesta because we have longs timebreaks.
The solution most would expect to succeed is a legal one: I know of a dev shop that could easily switch to a 9-5 schedule, as many banks and civil servants have already, but it has to keep a split timetable just because management wants it so.
Wait, how does extending lunch by an extra hour push closing time by 3-4 hours?
I don't know, that's a good question.
What are you talking about?
EDIT: On the chance that my ambiguous grammar has got you tied... in the right order, I would be a bit slow for an hour or two in the afternoon, after having three or six cervezas.
What? We have summer time (DST) and regular time - just like most other European countries. If you're talking about Scandinavia's location relative to its time zone, most of Scandinavia is within its "natural" time zone [1].
And your "very hard winter" and "as few as 3 hours of light" comments mostly apply to the very Northern (and sparsely populated) parts of Norway and Sweden. The Danish climate is more like the UK's.
The distance from the northernmost part of Scandinavia to the southernmost part is like the distance from Minnesota to Texas, so obviously the climate varies a lot.
1) http://www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/images/world_t...
If that was true that Spaniards are less productive and constantly tired (which is not, as many of HNers have pointed out) it is not because of the time zone. It's simply because of the toxic work culture that exists in most places, more oriented towards "appearance" of working hard, and that means long hours more than plain simple productivity.
Again, don't get the wrong picture. Most companies in Spain do not have siesta, do not stop three hours for lunch, though 45 min-1 hour is usually the norm and I find it better than having lunch at the desk US-style. The problem is that working from 9 AM to 7 PM is the . If you don't do that, even if you're a top performer, you'd be suggested to "improve yourself", simply because people are envious of your sane working hours. So they say, envy is Spain's national sin.
http://www.gaisma.com/en/location/a-coruna.html
http://www.gaisma.com/en/location/nis.html
The Central European time zone could probably use a bit of fragmentation.
A more extreme example is China, which has been "unified" under one single time zone since 1949, despite the fact that the country's over 3000 miles wide. That makes for a four hour difference in sunrises between east and west. Of course, this is a bit problematic for the west:
http://www.wisegeek.org/why-does-china-have-only-one-time-zo...
With regards to time spent at home, the Spanish seem to spend a far greater portion of their normal lives socialising. I really don't see how more time spent at home could be listed as a positive thing. In the UK it makes me think of long cold winters when no one wants to leave the house because it's so miserable outside.
9-14 morning work
14-15 lunch
15-18 evening work
18-20 (aprox) partners-only work
Dunno in construction or other sectors, in consultancy we work more hours and I've never seen anybody taking siesta on labor days. Some people make siesta when 2 of the following 3 things are true: Summer + Old people + Sunday.
I think, however, that changing the time zone will improve our reputation. Currently we're at sync with sun time, but from the point of view of a tourist it means that we have lunch, get out of work, have dinner and go to bed at least 1 hour later than on 'normal countries', and this contributes to the fame of 'lazy country'.
Once we change the hour, after a period of adaptation, we will do everything pretty much the same but S&P will come an say... hey! look at Spain, now they deserve credit because they go to bed earlier, we should lend them money!.
Finally, we currently go into work at 9 as everyone else, but for us the sun is at 8. Nobody realizes because we have more sun hours (in winter).
No, moving the clock an hour up or down is not going to have a huge effect into a country in the long term. That's magical thinking.
Pd: If you see the stats is not really a problem. The differences aren't so big.
Seriously, the Spaniards I worked with were up until 2am regularly - and the country eats dinner at 10pm at the earliest - yet get up for a 9am workday. Is there any doubt why they are tired?
Here in prosperous Denmark, the official workweek is 37 hours, not 40, and the limit is taken seriously. When we do joint projects with Southern Europeans, they seem to regularly be working weekends and evenings, and get paid less than us for it.
I misremembered Belgium, though; it was the Netherlands that's the lowest in the OECD. Here is the list: http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=ANHRS
Also taking into account GDP divided by population, that implies Greeks get less done per hour than Belgians. To call Southern Europeans ‘lazy’ would be a bit much, but I do think the numbers support that they have a different work ethic from Northern Europeans.
I live in the Netherlands, where people work 30 hours a week on average. Yet, the Netherlands is one of the most productive countries in the world, if GDP (PPP) is to be believed[1]. (Then again, on that chart, Greece is placed only one spot lower, so that may not be the best source.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_...
Greece's problem is indeed productivity, not lack of hard work. There are a lot of hard-working mom-and-pop shops which put in many hours, but cannot anymore compete in a globalized economy, when their international competitors are streamlined corporations. Here in Denmark we work fewer hours, but rather than work them in a DIY import/export business like is common in Greece, in Denmark those hours are put into a giant globalized logistics business like Maersk. The end result is more productivity, not because the individual Maersk employee is more hardworking while the Greek import/export guy is lazy (the opposite is likely true), but simply because 10,000 mom-and-pop businesses put together cannot compete with a well-oiled machine like Maersk.
http://capitalsocialenespanol.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/st...
http://capitalsocialenespanol.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/gr...
Students who graduated in 2010 in the fields of mathematics, science and technology:
The Netherlands: 15,000, on a population of 17 million. At that time, the country had 985 thousand people between the ages of 20 and 24. The percentage of 2010 graduates in STEM fields is 1.5% of that group.
Spain: 25,000, on a population of 47 million. At that time, the country had 3,34 million people between the ages of 20 and 24. The percentage of 2010 graduates in STEM fields is 0.75% of that group.
So, relatively, twice as many Dutchmen graduate in STEM fields than Spaniards and it’s certainly not a new trend. I think it’s safe to say that, relatively, the Netherlands has at least twice as many people who graduated in STEM fields.
Of course, my mention of engineers were just an example. The Netherlands is tiny, Spain is 11 times larger in area. That’s one of the reasons why the Netherlands has a far smaller group of agricultural workers. However, despite it being cramped, the Netherlands has more than half of the GDP Spain has.
http://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/factbook-2013-en/10/01/06...
Personally I think the current economic difficulties are mostly structural, rather than to do with individual attainment or character of the populous. You can have wealthy agricultural societies and you can have poor industrial ones.
http://rwer.wordpress.com/2011/10/24/southern-european-worke...
http://rwer.wordpress.com/2012/11/29/jobs-and-productivity-i...
If we ignore the numbers and just look at the situation a little more generally then, Spain has gone through a massive construction boom that was typified by speculative overbuilding, which is part of the current problem now that too much has been built and the real estate prices have collapsed.
Building far too much is not often associated with lazyness on the part of the workforce.