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 do not know many people who truly enjoy their job.
A couple of years ago my girlfriend came from Spain to live with me in Germany and got a job. After the first day she came home at 10:00 pm (work ended at 6:00 pm). I was worried that they were making her work to hard the first day, but when she came home she told me she just stayed late doing nothing for the new boss seeing her put in the effort... That really really reminded me why I left Spain to work in Germany. I just do not get that kind of attitude, when I confronted her about it she told me that this behavior was expected in all the places she worked at. Leaving early (or even on time), even if you are effective and have done you work is frowned upon by both coworkers and managers. Paradoxically people might even consider you lazy.
So I am really expectant to see how this experiment turns out and if it achieves a change in mentality or if it is just a way to spend tax money and make some “friends of friends” rich as politicians like to do in Spain by subsidizing companies that once the state money runs out go back to normal.
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, salaries are poor, and employees are demotivated and must therefore look to anything but work for fulfillment.
To be clear, I don't believe this is inherently Spanish, due to our genes, the climate, or our love for fiesta: similar phenomena could be observed locally in the US or Northern Europe. The problem in Spain is how widespread these attitudes are, in a macro context where good opportunities have been scarce for decades, probably due to the lack of a vision for a national productive model and any effective policies in this regard.
Personally I believe any permanent solution will need to come simultaneously in a top-down and bottom-up fashion, with both effective state policies and a change in attitudes from individuals. The catalyst would likely need to be a multi-partisan, national and universal social pact rallying institutions (politics, education, unions, businesses, etc.) around a well-defined vision. Anyone who follows Spanish politics knows that unfortunately at present that possibility is extremely remote.
> 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 either overwork themselves or just generally do nothing with that extra time.
I tell my friends this story all the time: When I first arrived to the UK and started working, I asked my company about having my work email on my phone, my manager just had a completely blank face - "why do you need your work email on your phone?". I have been happily employed with this company for nearly 8 years now, never once feeling the need to stay late or go beyond the contracted hours. If I put in overtime, it's because I want to (most of the time because I actually enjoy the work). Oh, and I am paid for overtime. Completely unheard of in Portugal.
I know a lot of these things might be company culture specific, but there is definitely a level within geography - The lesser opportunities available, the more is expected out of you. As if having the opportunity to work should be seen as some sort of blessing.
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?
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.
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.
> The UK has notoriously low productivity compared to Europe and the US, and longer average work hours than the rest of Europe.
You should be very wary of productivity statistics coming from Europe.
I have worked most of the past decade in France. Like most highly educated employee in France, my contract is in days and not in hours. Officialy and legally, I have no set hours but for accounting purpose I have always officialy worked 37.5 hours a week. In reality, I have never worked less than 42.5 hours and weeks above 45 hours are both common and expected.
> Most of the numbers I can find for Europe is from surveys of employees, not gathered from data on labour contracts.
Then you are looking at it extremely poorly without obnoxious quotes.
Most of the official stastics on productivity like the one published by Eurostat are derived from the total amount of hours worked which is estimated based on contracts.
EU-LFS, which I referenced, is published by Eurostat, is a core part of the official Eurostat data, and is survey-based, not derived from estimates of contracts.
Here is Eurostat's EU-LFS data browser for "hours worked per week of full time employment":
You'll note they include asking for the same information (estimates of hours worked) several different ways (with and without overtime, and asking separately for the overtime) and that they include instructions to the interviewer for confirming that the result is internally consistent.
EU-LFS is the main source of data on those aspects for the EU. Measuring overall productivity then comes from matching economic indicators up against hours worked.
- However, simple international comparisons can be misleading. In particular, the UK position (mid-range) is distorted by the fact that, compared with most other EU states, the UK employs a high proportion of part-time women workers (working fewer than 30 hours a week).
- Amongst full-time employees, the UK shows high levels of long hours working (over 48 hours a week), especially amongst men where the UK has the highest level of long hours working in the EU. Just over one-fifth (22 per cent) of UK men working full-time work long hours compared with an average of one tenth (11 per cent) across the other EU member states.
- Full-time male managers work the longest hours in the UK and across the EU member states as a whole. However, (on average) UK managers do not work longer hours than their EU counterparts
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.
I'm part Spanish, grew up mostly in the US, but often have to engage with Spain in order to do paperwork.
Does anyone who's lived there for a while have any insight on why tasks that I could accomplish in the US in 12 weeks take like 5 years in Spain?
Why is every form and document and signature and approval process seemingly arbitrary? Why is the person you need for the next step always on vacation?
Is there some kind of a system where 5 people are drawing a salary for a job that 1 person could do, so they all mutually agree to do it as slowly as possible?
If you hold the US as a paragon of administrative velocity, you haven't completed your tour of countries my friend.
As a Dutchman, who is by no means a fan of the country, can only tremble in horror whenever paperwork abroad had/has to be done. There may be a difference between Spain and the US, it's insignificant between the NL and the rest.
Well, I hear good things about Scandinavian countries too. I haven't had the opportunity yet to work/live there, hope to get around to it though!
> To be clear, I don't believe this is inherently Spanish, due to our genes, the climate, or our love for fiesta: similar phenomena could be observed locally in the US or Northern Europe.
It is more or less the same here in Italy. Jobs are so scarce that one has to be grateful for anything better than straight unemployment thus enabling a whole ecosystem of low pay, asshole bosses and coworkers, and toxic work attitude all around.
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.
i used to work at an IBM office in the southwest. at the time we were considered lazy and laid back compared to the old school IBM offices back on the east coast
> 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?
Note how I never said that work should be your main source of fulfillment.
But yes, I whole-heartedly believe that people should derive some meaning out of work, as they devote ~40 of their waking hours to that activity, and it can be a cornerstone of a person's identity. And meaning can take many forms: that you're doing something for yourself, for your family, for your community or your nation, that you intrinsically enjoy the task at hand, or a combination thereof.
This is a common characteristic of thriving nations I've observed in my travels and readings, and conversely, I think that nations that do not have this trait are bound to decline or even crash.
Note how I also do not entirely blame Spaniards for a problem that is clearly systemic; on the other hand, I do believe that we as individual citizens should remain strong in the face of adversity, and not succumb to providential fatalism, as this will also inevitably lead to national misery.
People should make living wages, without forced overwork, burnout, and other sorts of abuse. But if I get fulfillment out of my work, could I please? It's not for everyone, but for me it's everything.
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.
I’m yet another spaniard abroad for close to a decade and couldn’t agree more, it’s like night and day.
The only way to have a decent job in Spain is by working for a foreign company (as a remote worker or FTE if they have a spanish office) from which you can get a decent salary and work conditions or creating your own company if you’re successful. Otherwise, working for spanish companies in Spain is most of the times a death sentence and may as well make you hate your job forever.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 exaggerating, I just checked). There are so many evaluations (6-year research evaluations from the Spanish government, research complement evaluations from the regional government, evaluations of research centers, evaluations of the PhD program, 5-year Docentia teaching evaluations, accreditations for the countless positions in the scale, with the subsequent evaluation for the position itself...) that we are subject to several a year, each with their own CV format and their own forms incompatible with the rest and asking for different things. And then there is the day-to-day bureaucracy where buying a computer can mean filling 10-15 different forms.
Paperwork takes most of our time and being able to do some "real work" feels like a reward that one has to earn. Still the real work is rewarding, but I wish it were like in other countries (say northern Europe, the US...) where real work can be most of the time. (And why didn't I migrate? Because of attachment to my place and my loved ones, like many people here. If work were my main driver in life I'd have been out of here long ago).
As for the experiment, I hope it achieves success but I wouldn't hold my breath. Under the current political climate, I'm afraid even if it's an undisputable success, the moment a right-wing government is voted to office they will tear it down because it's "communism", "handouts", "will turn us into Venezuela" or something like that. It's difficult to achieve anything with the current political polarization (and the main party that was between both blocs, currently in danger of extinction).
To me, that attitude sounds like a good thing. It sounds like the Spanish, or at least the Spanish that you’ve come across, haven’t been sucked in by the unforgiving ideals of capitalism. It pleases me that they’d find ways to enjoy their life that don’t involve economic efficiency
A couple of years ago my girlfriend came from Spain to live with me in Germany and got a job. After the first day she came home at 10:00 pm (work ended at 6:00 pm). I was worried that they were making her work to hard the first day, but when she came home she told me she just stayed late doing nothing for the new boss seeing her put in the effort... That really really reminded me why I left Spain to work in Germany. I just do not get that kind of attitude, when I confronted her about it she told me that this behavior was expected in all the places she worked at. Leaving early (or even on time), even if you are effective and have done you work is frowned upon by both coworkers and managers. Paradoxically people might even consider you lazy.
So I am really expectant to see how this experiment turns out and if it achieves a change in mentality or if it is just a way to spend tax money and make some “friends of friends” rich as politicians like to do in Spain by subsidizing companies that once the state money runs out go back to normal.