Unemployment in Spain is terrifyingly high. However, we need to remember that it stood at the numbers that, for us, would mean the end of the world even at the height of Spain’s prosperity. Before the recession, Spain’s economy rarely went much lower than 20%. And nobody seemed to care a whole lot.
The reason for this phenomenon is that firing a worker was so extraordinarily difficult that nobody wanted to hire at all. The best people could hope for were temporary and part-time positions. And the strong welfare state + the permissive credit system supplemented the rest.
I hope I don’t have to tell you how enormously problematic this system of temping and part-timing without a hope for full-scale employment is.
Clarissa's Blog 
The danger in psychologizing the law is that even if one is changed, the other remains the same. They are two separate entities. So, making it easier for companies to sack people might, in the end just make it easier for them to sack people. It may not influence whether any more full time jobs become available in any companies, since nowadays it is easier to take people on as casual labor, as a matter of economic principle. There’s nothing psychological about this. The more flexible the workforce is, and the more dispensable it is, the more easily a company can make a profit and minimise its risks whenever the market fluctuates. It’s just good business practice to hire a casual labor force and let others take care of their health costs, their days off, their training, etc.
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It’s true, there is nothing psychological in this phenomenon. In the US, the 9% unemployment was experienced as the end of the world. In Spain, the 20% unemployment was a matter of course for two decades.
And a business that wants to be successful wants people to stay and work for a long time.
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I’m actually not sure what you are getting at in your first paragraph, apart from presenting statistics. I think in Zimbabwe, eighty to ninety percent unemployment has often been common. But this has to do with political and economic factors and the way those two combine.
I agree that businesses that rely on intellectual or technical expertise would do better to have people employed for a very long time, but they are still moving toward a flexible workforce, as you may have seen with the phenemenon of employing adjuncts in US academia as much as possible.
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First of all, universities are not businesses!!! Nor should they be!!! I really needed to get this out.
Adjunctification in the US has to do with higher ed becoming more massive and attracting more and more people from low-income backgrounds. There is absolutely no justification to hiring 20 tenured expensive profs to teach 2 sections of Spanish 101 in a semester. This is a problem that academia is not managing to resolve. And I have seen no interesting suggestions – or any suggestions, period – that would even try to address the issue. As far as I know, nobody is even talking about it except me.
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Right — the business model is taking over more and more, because there is money to be made from it. It’s part of the movement generally from Feudal society, where studiousness was considered to be inherently moral and righteous as a service to God, to one where making money is the only service to anybody that you owe. Furthermore, since quality does not matter so much as the making of money (which correlates with the erosion of Feudalistic sensibilities), it does not matter if high quality people are not kept on in permanent positions so much.
That is the real paradigm shift we are experiencing.
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This is not a business model. This is as far removed from the business model as possible. Adjunctification is happening at colleges that do not make any money and do not try to make any money.
And no business can hope to make money if it doesn’t produce a high-quality product.
I don’t understand this need to demonize businesses. Some of my best friends are business owners. 🙂 And they do everything they can to find, retain and promote talented workers. Why on Earth would anybody want to get rid of a productive, motivated worker and waste money and effort in training newcomers only to get rid of them as soon as they learn and go through the entire process again?
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You seem to be addressing me as if I were some kind of ideological enemy who would set about “demonizing” anything. But I’m not even in America and do not subscribe to American tribal identities, so a lot of your rhetorical power is wasted on me. Also it leads to you not addressing my actual points. All I am saying is that the religious paradigm is losing its hold — a very general historical movement from religion to atheism is taking place. The consequences are that the monastic modes are being devalued as a matter of course and that business models are filling the vacuum they are leaving (not a practical vacuum per se, but in our minds and hearts).
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“the religious paradigm is losing its hold — …The consequences are that the monastic modes are being devalued … business models are filling the vacuum …. ( … in our minds and hearts)”
An excellent point. To put in something closer to Clarissaspeak: Nation states, as ideological constructs built around social cohesion, can afford to set up and maintain pseudo-monastic non-revenue generating sectors of society like universities (which is why there’s a high correlation between nation-stateness and higher educational excellence).
The coming market state of atomized individuals won’t (and in fact can’t) do this and universities will commodify into for-profit institutions. Adjunctivization is part of the collapse of the nation state model since universities have to monotize operations.
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Nation-state is still trying to crowd-please by offering massive, cheap education, that’s true. However, no model under the sun – be it nation-state, market state, feudal state, etc. – can afford to maintain an army of individuals who are paid $90,000 for doing nothing but teaching 2-3 sections of Spanish 101.
I perceive a strange reluctance to discuss this fact. Adjunctification is the strangest of phenomena. Everybody wants to talk about it but nobody wants to name the actual cause.
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Comparing unemployment figures is pointless unless you control for how they’re calculated.
The US (and UK AFAICT) calculates the unemployment rate to make it look as low as possible (so, for example, people who’ve given up looking for work aren’t included).
Poland, on the other hand, traditionally calculates it so that it looks much higher. Basically only full time employment that pays into the social insurance system is counted. I’ve known lots of people working (at legal occupations often doing pretty well) but who would be counted as unemployed for various technical reasons.
How is the Spanish rate calculated. Something tells me that it’s probably closer to the Polish model.
Also, don’t climate and traditional working schedules contribute to this? I think a traditional model in Spain was to have two part time jobs. You go to your morning job, then go home for dinner and a nap and then you go to your afternoon/evening job. It’s what I remember from Valencia (a few decades ago). I assume it doesn’t happen everywhere now but Malaga, for example, gets very, very dead in the early afternoon (with stores closing) and then picks up again later.
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“firing a worker was so extraordinarily difficult that nobody wanted to hire at all”
This is one of the universal rules I’ve figured out over the years.
More restrictions on employment = less employment.
It seems like a simple point, but I never hear it in debates about unemployment in Europe.
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Maybe nobody wants to discuss this because the reaction of unexplainable outrage is the result of such discussions. There is a very real and very well-known mechanism in place in Spain that makes it very hard to fire. Now there are attempts to changed that system but it has been in place for decades. The phenomenon is very well-documented and even the uber-progressives in Spain have recognized it.
Businesses need to be able to fire bad workers to function properly. And bad workers exist, as impossible as this realization is for some people.
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I’m also noticing that the word “business” provokes an intensely and viscerally negative reaction on some people. I’ve seen it in the post where I wrote that my sister wants to create more workplaces at her company. This reaction is just as unhealthy as the way some people erupt the moment they hear the word government.
The absolute majority of businesses are ran by good, hard-working people who go without a salary any number of months to make the payroll. Most of the goods and services we enjoy are the result of these people’s hard work. If I’m incapable of starting and running a business it doesn’t mean I should hate everybody who is capable.
The rant isn’t addressed at Cliff. The app only allows me to best comments this way.
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“Why on Earth would anybody want to get rid of a productive, motivated worker and waste money and effort in training newcomers only to get rid of them as soon as they learn and go through the entire process again?” And yet this is what one of the major Canadian banks tried to do. They brought in workers from the Temporary Foreign Workers Program to replace some information technology workers that they were firing. And made the workers that they were firing train their replacements. The TFWP lets employers bring in workers from other countries (there are agencies who will supply the workers) and pay these workers less than they would Canadian workers. After four years, the workers have to leave but they can be replaced by a new batch. I imagine that this works well for skilled technology workers, who don’t need much training to learn what is required in their new workplace. There was such outrage, and so many instances of other abuses, that the government finally agreed to change the program. But the employers LOVED the program.
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Canadian banks can hardly be called a business, in my opinion. They are a corrupt. government-sponsored monopoly. The way they function is a shame for a developed society. I have had so many nasty experiences with Canadian banks that I still shake in impotent rage whenever I think of them. At the time when I was the most desperately poor I have ever been, they stole my very last money, recognized their mistake, and still refused to give back the money. As a result, I got into so much trouble and debt that it took years to crawl out of that hole.
I HATE THEM.
OK, rant over.
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“Why on Earth would anybody want to get rid of a productive, motivated worker”
The biggest fault of capitalism is a tendency to select for short term thinking. Save 10,000 this year? Yeah!!! Don’t save 10,000 this year but double it in three years? Ehhhh….
I completely agree that capitalism is the best, most workable system going, but it does have its flaws, and that’s one of them.
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“Save 10,000 this year? Yeah!!! Don’t save 10,000 this year but double it in three years? Ehhhh….”
– These are the businesses that go broke within 3 years. The successful ones work differently. Which is precisely why they are successful.
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Or governmentally-sponsored monopolies.
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