ATHENS – Greeks work more hours than anyone in the 27-member European Union – and even the United States where… Continue reading For Many Greeks, Six-Day 48-Hour Work Week Now Set to Begin
The Greeks are insane for going along with this. Revolutions have started over less. Clearly their politicians no longer have the best interests of the Greek people in mind.
I don’t get something about the article. They are saying that there is a labour shortage so they need to do this but they also say that the employers have all the power.
Usually, a labour shortage means that the employees have the power so you’d have thought that they’d have been able to tell the employers to piss off when they try to increase their hours.
Yeah, that’s certainly one odd aspect. Also, there’s a ton of other methods to handle labour shortages. Like activating underused groups, such as women. Or offering retraining so people can switch to different jobs. And higher pay for sectors with shortages doesn’t hurt either, considering the already very low pay in Greece.
Running your existing workforce ragged is NOT the way to deal with this.
But hey, maybe we’re missing some cultural or political piece of the puzzle as to why they went this route.
The official reason for the introduction of the six-day work week is that there is a shortage of skilled workers on the Greek labor market as the population keeps shrinking and the country losing scores of thousands of workers who fled during the economic and austerity crisis in search of jobs in other countries.
So "The austerity and beatings will continue until morale improves."
Headline in three months: "Less work getting done than in five-day week."
Government and management will blame lazy workers. Workers will blame government, management and burnout. Truth will be closer to the latter, but a few actually lazy employees and some innocent scapegoats will be fired to preserve the bottom line. Burnout will increase.
But at least the bosses got their bonus this month.
I and many thousands of people like me have already been working 6 or 7 day weeks for years now.
I've worked 50 hours this past week (no paid overtime either) and I've done 70 hour weeks this year, but not regularly, so I'm actually one of the lucky ones.
The only difference this makes is legalizing it so boss can't be sued or fined.
Retaliatory tactics are all too common. Your life is made miserable within the workplace (if you don't get fired) and then good luck being hired somewhere else in the same field.
You can be fired after a year without a severance package for no reason.
Where I work now we're short staffed on pretty much every department and yet we won't offer higher wages to attract new hires, cause then you'd need to raise the wages of the tenured people as well.
Instead, you squeeze the everloving shit out of whoever stays for the same money as the last 5 years while inflation is still soaring.
That's interesting. A shorter week is the way things are trending, and seems to mostly offset the loss of total productivity with better productivity-per-time. I wonder if this will actually help anything.
I saw this argument / line of thought in a couple of similar topics already, and I gotta say this really only works if your oblivious enough to believe all/most asylum seekers want to stay in Greece.
They don't really work all those hours. If I'm to guess, there's napping, long lunches etc included. I bet you most countries are more productive in 40 hours.
I don't get it. If the reason for this really is that there are not enogh workers present, then I why won't the employees tell their employers to go fuck themselves? I mean it doesn't sound like there aren't enough job offers on the market.
I thought this said geeks not greeks and then I got confused. That's wild, in North America some companies are pretending to want 4 day work weeks (like my old one that laid me off last year) and then in Greece they've actually gone ahead and implemented 6 day work weeks. Reminds me of China's 966 except this is actually legal apparently.