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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

#71

Post by wizardofdos »

lnsru wrote: post #48
FullMetalBitch wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of assholes bosses in Spain, in my experience I have been very honest from the beginning I had sick people I have to take care of and sometimes I have to leave early or I can't just go to work I was always willing to work remote that day when the job allowed it. 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.

Well, we have in Germany in a German company mandatory 42 minutes long lunch break. So 8 hours straight isn’t feasible. I would really love to ditch 42 minutes long break and have real 15 minutes meal break with punchcard sign out/sign in. Now we just have one hour long breaks taking a walk and eating afterwards.

Can't have that in Germany as labour laws require a 30 minutes break if working more than 6 hours and an extra 15 minutes if working more than 9 hours (including the 30 minutes break. So the best your company could do would be 30 minutes instead of 42.

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

#72

Post by joaodlf »

mattmanser wrote: post #69
joaodlf wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem in Spain is how prevalent these attitudes are, in a macro context where good opportunities have been scarce for decades 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…

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 else and are at the complete mercy of the client (who demands the world since they have an expensive contract with the outsourcing company).

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.

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

#73

Post by mordae »

ladyanita22 wrote: post #5
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.

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?

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

#74

Post by vidarh »

dalbasal wrote: post #63

"The Workweek" is, surprisingly, a really deep topic. 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 wor…

When my grandparents entered the workforce in Norway, the working week was typically 54 hours. When my parents entered the workforce it was limited to no more than 45 hours, and a couple of years later it was down to 42.5 hours. By the time I was born it was 40 hours. Before I entered the workforce, it was down to 37.5 hours for most employees (it is legally limited to 40 hours, but 37.5 has been the norm since 1986).

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.

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

#75

Post by vidarh »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #68
choeger wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not everywhere. There are many professions that do not take part in the growth of productivity. Medical Doctors for instance (even though some radiologists try hard to) are limited by interactions with their patients. The same holds for employees at points of sales, they only take part indirectly by selling more higher-priced goods. So a shop owner that wants to stay open sees a 20% reduction in attendance by their e…

> Medical Doctors for instance (even though some radiologists try hard to) are limited by interactions with their patients 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 hos…

As a concrete example of doctors practices increasing their productivity: Video consultation preceded with automated triage to push more people to consultations with nurses, pharmacists etc. instead of going via a doctor first. The triage itself reduces the number of doctors consultations by removing a step in the process whenever the triage is successful.

Several companies does this (disclaimer: My employer is an investor in one of them).

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

#76

Post by FullMetalBitch »

lnsru wrote: post #48
FullMetalBitch wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plenty of assholes bosses in Spain, in my experience I have been very honest from the beginning I had sick people I have to take care of and sometimes I have to leave early or I can't just go to work I was always willing to work remote that day when the job allowed it. 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.

Well, we have in Germany in a German company mandatory 42 minutes long lunch break. So 8 hours straight isn’t feasible. I would really love to ditch 42 minutes long break and have real 15 minutes meal break with punchcard sign out/sign in. Now we just have one hour long breaks taking a walk and eating afterwards.

No one should work 8 hours straight but something like 7.00-15.00. Spain also has a mandatory break after 6 hours of work (15 mins and up) and it counts as working time.

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.

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

#77

Post by arcturus17 »

mattmanser wrote: post #69
joaodlf wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem in Spain is how prevalent these attitudes are, in a macro context where good opportunities have been scarce for decades 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…

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…

To clarify, I said I lived in the UK just to lay out my bio, but didn't want to imply that everything is dandy there.

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.

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

#78

Post by astrange »

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?

Well, you don't want to design work to be anti-fulfilling, do you? I suppose it's OK if it's neutral.

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

#79

Post by astrange »

Rule35 wrote: post #21

> “The only red lines are that we want to see a true reduction of working hours and no loss of salary or jobs.” 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…

> 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.

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...

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

#80

Post by astrange »

choeger wrote: post #33
tsimionescu wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is that wages have never kept up with productivity increase. Companies are extracting more and more productivity out of their employees, which translates to ever increasing profits. But this is not an economical law. It's absolutely possible to sacrifice ever increases in growth for more worker time.

Not everywhere. There are many professions that do not take part in the growth of productivity. Medical Doctors for instance (even though some radiologists try hard to) are limited by interactions with their patients. The same holds for employees at points of sales, they only take part indirectly by selling more higher-priced goods. So a shop owner that wants to stay open sees a 20% reduction in attendance by their e…

Employees manning cash registers often also have other tasks they can do instead of operating the register for you - for instance fast food workers also make the food, and clothes workers stand there looking fashionable and tell you how good you look.

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.

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