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.
It starts earlier than that: payroll tax in Spain is 36%.
If you're a micro-company, you can probably get away with paying each employee cash, or via B2B payments.
Once you reach any reasonable scale, you have to formalise those contracts.
This is a problem across the EU, apart from areas like the UK and Scandinavia which don't have payroll taxes (where interestingly tech seems to be flourishing).
If you make the definition of fulltime worker 30 hours a week instead of 40 hours a week, it certainly does make more people fulltime employed, but it also seems like cheating.
In the US underemployment was blamed on laziness, lack of training, etc etc for years but the actual cause is the Fed setting interest rates too high, and when they stopped we got more employment than ever (as of Jan 2020). If you simply make employers compete more to hire people, they will do a good job training them, making them more productive, ignoring minor criminal records and so on.
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.
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.
It's not necessarily less work per person, it's less time per person. That matters in cases where coverage is needed ( medical personnel, police, fire department, secretaries, phone support, hospitality, etc.) but in others where only the output matters ( like software engineering, lawyers, marketing, even factories in some cases etc. ), there have been multiple studies around the subject and they all claim that fewer work hours increase productivity.
While I wholeheartedly agree with you, I think we should be careful with this discourse.
Rather than increases in productivity, increases in production should be emphasized. And yes, you cannot increase labor production without an increase in productivity, everything else equal.
Iirc, increase in production is about 40%. So working Monday to Thursday, you produce the same as someone, working 5 days produces Monday to next week's Tuesday morning.
You're right. It's time spent and not work performed. Original comment edited.
However, in many professions being available for a given number of hours is often a major part of the job, and that means there will be a direct requirement to hire more people in order to cover the reduced working hours.
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.
Everybody needs something to do with their day. And those you really need to be working a full week to produce what we really need will only do that if there is something material for them to exchange for their efforts.
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.
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.
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 about job creation anymore? Politicians will lie about anything, but they don't even dare lie about this - they simply avoid these murky waters altogether.
My theory is they know full-well that the only path to growth and private sector job creation is by taking measures (that moderates like Minister of the Economy Nadia Calviño possibly support) like modifying labor laws and lowering taxes which sound right-wing and therefore sit especially poorly with the communist wing of the government.
The only alternative to that is, as some communists like Iglesias or Garzón are consistently pointing out, to nationalize a bunch of industries (they've talked about examples ranging from banks to media companies) and turn to a centralized economy.
I hope I'm wrong but I clearly do not see how the situation will improve under the current circumstances.
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.
> with very limited decision-making power, being the minority members of a coalition
You seem to follow Spanish politics, so surely you must have seen how moderates like Calviño are often put in extremely rough spots? The communist wing of the government is not nearly as powerless as you claim to be.
We'll see what comes out of labor reform, for example, but I suspect there won't be any measures that are conducive to the creation of good jobs, or any jobs at all.
> 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.
Why is that? We said we needed a new labour law so you can lay off people at no cost, because they said that was the reason the unemployment rate was so high here in Spain. And we did it. And we still have the very same law, nobody is changing it. They also didn't raise taxes very much, in fact not as much as Rajoy did when he took office.
Instead, I think one of the reasons our economy is so vulnerable is because we are so much dependent on tourism and also there seems nobody can innovate and create a business other than a restaurant. But this is hardly our current government's fault.
(Of course, calling this government "communist" is a joke in poor taste, but people from outside Spain may believe this country is the new Soviet Union).
> Of course, calling this government "communist" is a joke in poor taste, but people from outside Spain may believe this country is the new Soviet Union
Many members of the government (eg, Iglesias or Garzón) repeatedly define themselves as communists, though. And they regularly use the term "social-communist" to literally define the government. So maybe they are the ones joking and deep down inside they believe in an innovative market economy, albeit progressive?
> Instead, I think one of the reasons our economy is so vulnerable is because we are so much dependent on tourism and also there seems nobody can innovate and create a business other than a restaurant. But this is hardly our current government's fault.
Because while I agree with the opinion that the government is not at fault for the lack of innovation or productive model in Spain, I seriously doubt a government that is so left-leaning (and in which part is literally communist, and wants the nationalization of many industries) is going to foster an environment for innovation and entrepreneurship...
I don't read any of that drivel, this is a term that Garzón or Iglesias themselves repeatedly use. So I guess I just can't take them for their word on that one, and that they're in fact progressive capitalists who believe in private property and have clear ideas on how to make an innovative market economy out of Spain.
Isn't it true that Garzón and Pablo Iglesias identify themselves as communists?
If the leader of a party identifies himself as a Nazi, it's a nazi party. If the leader identifies as a communist, it's a communist party. That's it. That's the truth.
If a nazi is in power, how would you call the government? The same applies to the communist.
Stop reading Escolar, that guy didn't even finish his degree.
It is a modest trial of a four day work week. You are so far from disaster. This can only be a good thing, if it doesn't work they stop doing it, but probably it will work because people are more productive when they have time to breath.
Spaniards don’t appreciate research, we only nod when solutions sprout out of the blue.
In fact, less work hours will be a complication for many -as they are used to justify the work done by sitting for extra-hours at their desk. It’s sad, but it’s also my daily routine.
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 love how my country hugs the poverty closer and closer each year that passes by.