I lived in Spain for about a year. Blame it on the time zone, but inherently the culture is "work to live" not "live to work".
I miss it and sincerely cherish that country and all the great people in it.
I miss it and sincerely cherish that country and all the great people in it.
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.
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.
And exactly what attitude to work have Spaniards?
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.