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Spain to launch modest trial of four-day working week

theguardian.com

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Re: Spain to launch modest trial of four-day working week

#101

Post by fidelramos »

mschuster91 wrote: post #47
arcturus17 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm Spanish and I've lived in Germany, the UK, and in short stints in the US, and some of what you say resonates with me. In particular: > 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, salar…

> and employees are demotivated and must therefore look to anything but work for fulfillment 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?

We don't need to work 40 hours a week to "barely survive", these 40 hours give people a standard of living that was unthinkable centuries ago. If you accept the lower standards of living of the past you can work much fewer hours. On the other hand if you want modern housing, electricity, water, gas, Internet, a modern house, a car, a smartphone, a computer, fridge, freezer, washing machine, dishwasher, etc., then of course you need to work to afford them.

Re: Spain to launch modest trial of four-day working week

#102

Post by fidelramos »

daptaq wrote: post #7
ladyanita22 wrote: post #4

Oh, beautiful Spain, playing experiments with an unemployment rate of 16.13%... I love how my country hugs the poverty closer and closer each year that passes by.

Aren't fewer workdays better for employment, because more people can be employed? I'm guessing it's more complicated, but is there some clear tendency?

Part of the complication if the enormous taxes and bureaucracy involved in companies hiring workers, it's a real pain for start-ups and smaller companies.

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...

Re: Spain to launch modest trial of four-day working week

#103

Post by fidelramos »

tomcooks wrote: post #8
ladyanita22 wrote: post #4

Oh, beautiful Spain, playing experiments with an unemployment rate of 16.13%... I love how my country hugs the poverty closer and closer each year that passes by.

How else would you solve the unemployment problem? By giving more hours of work to those who already have a job?

Simple, remove or reduce all barriers to employment:

- 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.

Re: Spain to launch modest trial of four-day working week

#104

Post by yiyus »

teataster wrote: post #58
arcturus17 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some economists in Spain say that starting from this premise, and trying to apply it universally for the economy may have disastrous results. 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 e…

> how is a waiter going to produce the same in four days of work than in five? 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 pro…

> By not being tired on the fifth, not taking wrong orders and not dropping glasses

This is not an actual problem that needs a solution.

Re: Spain to launch modest trial of four-day working week

#105

Post by yiyus »

sofixa wrote: post #6
ladyanita22 wrote: post #4

Oh, beautiful Spain, playing experiments with an unemployment rate of 16.13%... I love how my country hugs the poverty closer and closer each year that passes by.

Well, with a reduced work week, some jobs ( mostly service jobs that need to provide full coverage) would require more workers to cover the whole week, so i really don't see the issue here with regards to unemployment.

We are talking about Spain, where most people work in service jobs for very small companies that are already struggling to stay alive. If a bar needs, let's say, four bartenders now, they are not going to contract a fifth one with the increment of costs that implies (with no increase, at all, in their income). They probably cannot even afford it. What they will do is to keep the same four bartenders and pay a part of their salary in black money, increasing the submerged economy, and in the long term being detrimental for the economy and, therefore, employment.

We need more high quality jobs, not paying more for the low quality jobs we already have.

Re: Spain to launch modest trial of four-day working week

#106

Post by yiyus »

mordae wrote: post #73
ladyanita22 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course you will downvote me, but as an inhabitant of such country, the truth is, this is the result of the socialist and incompetent government that is in power due to the even more incompetent opposition. It's been long since we were the leaders of employment creation in the eurozone, back when Rajoy was in power.

Check out Czechia. We have a communist party that supports a cabinet lead by a billionaire capitalist who literally sacrificed thousands of lives for better election results. You should get better opposition. Do you have a functioning Pirate party already? It seems dormant. Maybe try to revive it?

I think the reason the Pirate party never got momentum in Spain is because they cannot compite in pirateness with the traditional parties.

Re: Spain to launch modest trial of four-day working week

#107

Post by dalbasal »

vidarh wrote: post #92
dalbasal wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you may be misunderestimating the original prediction.^ He predicted those drastic reduction in working hours within a generation or two, writing in 1930... It was supposed to happen by 1980. 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 t…

I'm fully aware of the original prediction. The point is that while it was overoptimistic about the pace of reduction, working hours have declined, and have done so substantially. 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 effic…

I see.

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.

Re: Spain to launch modest trial of four-day working week

#108

Post by sbacic »

arcturus17 wrote: post #42
n_cusan wrote: post #14

Growing up in Spain, I am currently living back here after living over 14 years in Germany and spending most of my working life there. I am half Spanish and half German and have a good perspective on both mentalities in general. In my opinion the problem in Spain is definitely the mindset towards work and the way it is perceived. Here work seems to always be some tedious chore that keeps you away from social live. I…

I'm Spanish and I've lived in Germany, the UK, and in short stints in the US, and some of what you say resonates with me. In particular: > 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, salar…

I don't think this issue is specific to Spain - judging by the rest of the comments and my own personal experience (Croatia) this problem seems endemic to much of southern Europe.

I suspect at least part of the issue is due to climate. I wonder if there is a similar trend in the US?

Re: Spain to launch modest trial of four-day working week

#109

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

arcturus17 wrote: post #91
severino wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course you will downvote me... 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.

> 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 abo…

Come on, the government is not "communist" in any practical sense of the word, anymore than the right is "fascist" as people in the left usually call it. Those words work well to inflame the masses and polarize political campaigns but not for serious political analysis.

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.

Re: Spain to launch modest trial of four-day working week

#110

Post by arcturus17 »

sbacic wrote: post #108
arcturus17 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm Spanish and I've lived in Germany, the UK, and in short stints in the US, and some of what you say resonates with me. In particular: > 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, salar…

I don't think this issue is specific to Spain - judging by the rest of the comments and my own personal experience (Croatia) this problem seems endemic to much of southern Europe. I suspect at least part of the issue is due to climate. I wonder if there is a similar trend in the US?

I've thought about this and discussed it a few times with friends, but every conclusion I've ever reached seems quite unscientific, so I've never held on to any of it.

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.

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