Spain to launch modest trial of four-day working week • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by anm89 » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 2:40 AM UTC

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #54

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 have one of the most exciting jobs one can have, being an academic, and still in Spain the system does as much as it can to make it a tedious toil. 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 e…

> We are always swamped in huge piles of bureaucracy

This seems to be true of academia almost anywhere I have heard people talk about life in academia.

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

#122

Post by anm89 » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 2:43 AM UTC

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?

Yes, if you lower the bar for the definition of employment more people will fit the category. This doesn't fundamentally improve or worsen any problem. You are just redefining a term. The underlying reality hasn't changed.

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

#123

Post by anm89 » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 2:48 AM UTC

Rule35 wrote: post #114

refurb wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real estate rarely goes down, outside of a total bubble deflation. Detroit, Baltimore, Camden would like a word with you and your theory that housing never goes down.

> rarely > outside of a total bubble deflation. Detroit is rare, and Detroit's bubble popped hard at the same time as real-estate in general.

My city Pittsburgh would also like to have a word with you. It's doing well now after a 40 year downturn. Long enough to ruin many peoples lives permanently where they couldn't outlast the cycle.

There are A LOT of places in the US where real estate has not been a panacea of wealth accumulation.

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

#124

Post by pezezin » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 3:05 AM UTC

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 myself, I worked there for 10 years, and I never understood that mindset. Every place where I worked I would leave as soon as my working day ended. I'm now working in Japan, a country famous for inventing the word "karoshi" (death from overwork), I'm I do the same.

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.

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

#125

Post by pezezin » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 3:46 AM UTC

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…

> I certainly do not miss Rajoy, but I whole-heartedly believe that a social-communist government...

Dude, stop reading La Razón and listening to Marhuenda/Inda/Losantos, the "social-communist" bullshit is beyond ridiculous.

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

#126

Post by doublejay1999 » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 7:46 AM UTC

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…

Imagine a culture that does not fetishize work!

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

#127

Post by __saykou » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 9:14 AM UTC

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…

From next door Portugal its the same thing exactly, negative feedback loop. Here we work to live, and in other northern countries they live to work.

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.

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

#128

Post by neilwilson » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 11:33 AM UTC

arcturus17 wrote: post #64

neilwilson wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The problem here is the effect on productivity." 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.

I'm not sure your comment addresses anything I've said, except nitpicking a single sentence and taking it out on a tangent. What kinds of capital deepening can one do for our tourism-oriented and increasingly public-sector-dependent service economy?

If that's your view, then that means that capitalist oriented structures running those operations cannot justify their profit share. Since capital depending - doing more with less - is the only reason they are allowed to take a profit in the first place.

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.

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

#129

Post by neilwilson » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 11:34 AM UTC

Rule35 wrote: post #115

neilwilson wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" 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." If you pay people more, then you can. Basic Henry Ford.

If people pay you more, then you can. Ford's money came from products and they have to be priced to cover his higher salaries. That helped his workforce but made cars more expensive for everyone else. 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.

"Ford's money came from products and they have to be priced to cover his higher salaries."

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.

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

#130

Post by mattmanser » Tue, Mar 16, 2021, 2:28 PM UTC

joaodlf wrote: post #72

mattmanser wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony of this and the parent comment is the UK regularly come up as a country that the exact same problem happens in. 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: h…

Tech, more than likely, contributes towards personal experience. I can safely say this about Portugal: this is a country where companies do not want to invest in a tech department. There is a culture of outsourcing all tech related work. This has caused the birth of manyyy "outsourcing tech companies" - the sort of companies that hire tech talent just to shift them over to "projects", where you go to work for someone…

And the same thing happens here in the UK.

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.