Seems to me it's the government which needs to stay competitive, not the workers, ie regulation and bureaucracy.
EDIT (to elaborate): IMHO economy (like most things) is all about trade-offs. I know the states and bureaucracy are cumbersome, but they offload risk from individuals into society (which isn't always a bad thing).
I respect your views on deregulation (and share them to some extent), but your phrase is really a cliché and does not address my comment (since deregulation is orthogonal to labor competition).
"I know the states and bureaucracy..."
I wasn't referring to states in general, you were talking about Spain, I was responding about Spain. I'm not a ranting libertarian, I'm aware of a state's role in society. Knee jerk pouncing on a cliché that wasn't here.
we've been told over and over again that we have to stay competitive, which is just an euphemism for working more and earning less
How much of that extra work is unnecessary (in Spain)?
Based on above comments I hope you're voting for Podemos.
* if the government gets its act together*
That won't happen spontaneously.
It doesn't appeal to everyone.
Although Podemos isn't trying to market itself as a left-wing party, it indeed is (and everyone knows it). Its leaders had strong political connections with left-wing movements (some of them were political advisors for Chávez) and promote socialist ideas (some of them good, some bad, in my opinion).
Unfortunately a right-wing Podemos is unlikely to succeed due to the traditional conservatism of the right-wing, and the "indignado" market share is already taken by Podemos.
Some far-right parties grew a bit nothing real but for the moment.
As far as I can tell we're not facing this problem alone, but we're pretty young as a democratic society and most of our politicians inherited their position or remained on it under an amnesty after Franco's dictatorship (hence the usage of "caste").
I think (though it's hard to analyze when you're involved in the situation) we're in the middle of a social and generational change. We've got daily news of corruption cases amongst the mainstream parties and people are really fed up. "Podemos" (literally "We can", a left-wing grassroots party) rose as an alternative to that political caste, and most surveys situate them as a heavy contender (if not winner) for the upcoming elections.
Not long ago you'd hear lots of people claim they were not interested in politics, so they were pretty much puppets in the hands of our politician's interests. Nowadays, thanks to the 15M movement and Podemos, there are political debates on Saturday night prime time. Politics are in vogue.
Perhaps that's the government competition you were talking about?
We'll see what happens.
Crony capitalism, though I would call that an explanation, not an excuse. How else would you explain the tax on renewable energy?
I guess it's also incompetence. The traditional model of parties is fundamentally broken, and professional politicians (i.e. influence peddlers) are a plague in our Establishment.
People need the option to leave a system that doesn't work for them, or that system won't see a need for change. The same competitive forces that are so important to capitalism should apply to nation-states as well.
There doesn't seem to be much of a downside to me.