Why so many Dutch people work part time
economist.com
economist.com
First off there are two ways to spin this: 1) women are less emancipated in NL because they participate less in the workplace or 2) women are more emancipated because they are able to choose to participate less in the workplace.
I first thought #1 was true, but I'm seeing a lot of new fathers taking advantage of Dutch part-time rules by taking a day a week off to participate in child care. So maybe instead of the measure of emancipation being women's values aligning with traditionally 'male' ones, maybe it's that male values are aligning with traditionally 'female' ones.
Subjectively I can also ay that the Dutch workplaces I've had the pleasure to experience are both more healthy and more 'efficient', and my previous experience has been exclusively in hard-working silicon valley. Plans are important, meetings are avoided unless necessary (and have agendas!), and there is a focus on getting stuff done so that people can leave at six and be with their families. Overtime is a sign that something has gone terribly wrong, and nobody bothers you while you're on your vacation. This culture allows part-time work to be an option... that is, a 32/36/40-hour contract is actually meaningful.
At my previous jobs in the US I wouldn't even think about reducing my hours... a 32 vs 40 hour contract is pointless if you're expected to work 50-60 hours a week, better to take as much money as you can.
Are you saying meetings in SV don't have agendas? Gasp
> Overtime is a sign that something has gone terribly wrong
Why are there environments which don't think that the "overtime is a sign that something has gone terribly wrong?" How come that workers don't try to stand to their rights? Specifically:
> you're expected to work 50-60 hours a week
How come, if you sign the contract for e.g. 40 hours? The only thing workers are selling are their work hours, why do they accept to waste 25-50% of that?
At least Scott Adams gets it:
Combine this with another American trait, optimism, and you end up with over-ambitions projects that genuinely underestimate the effort and underestimate the resources, meetings that last twice as long because the first half was spent eating bagels and talking about something unrelated (oops!), and problems where everyone sincerely believes "we'll be able to solve later", and you end up with mad-dash, please delay your vacation, oh can you come in on Saturday, overtime. I also forgot to mention that you get bonus points for being the first one at work and that last one to leave, even if you're taking an awful lot of reddit breaks.
To Europeans it seems insane, to Americans it's funny but normal. The inverse also applies, it has taken me a long time to adjust to a detailed level of planning based on FTEs, make project plans that include unforeseen absences, and actually truly worry early on in the project.
And they wonder why I'm looking for another job.
[1] http://www.alternet.org/corporate-accountability-and-workpla...
And if there weren't laws and worker inspections and whatnot in place already, people would go on strike - and that usually has a major effect, like nationally crippled transportation (of any sort) or rapid accumulation of trash.
Which TBF makes me a bit depressed about the Americans. Have all the Walmart employees unionize and go on strike - there's nothing the management can do, not even enforce their 'you cannot unionize' contract thing, if everyone goes against them.
Some people are afraid pushovers TBF. And the employers slowly turned them into that, by making them poor.
On the contrary. Walmart's policy to date has been to simply close the store:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0210-13.htm
They got in trouble for that one, so now they at least pretend to have other excuses:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/union-walmart-shut-5-stores-over...
I don't think you should lump the UK with the US on this one. You can't "just fire someone" in the UK, most employees can't work more than 48hrs/week, paying extra for overtime is standard, 28 days holiday is minimum¹ and taking it is normal, if you're ill you don't need to use a holiday day, etc.
The new-ish government website is a bit of a mess for linking to whole sections, but anyway: https://www.gov.uk/browse/working
¹ That legal minimum includes public holidays.
Many top US tech companies truly have no direct bosses at all now, e.g. some kind of peer reviews system combined with whatever measurable results if available, replacing bosses. I suspect that this totally flat approach is only possible for very top-level best employee-quality companies though, as a single bad behaving person can really screw up the peer-review system.
Side note: In the US there's a strong split between "professional behavior" and "personal behavior". In (most?) of Europe that split in personality seems to be nearly non-existent, or even frowned upon. Each person is expected to have only 1 personality. So don't get confused that there's just 1 behavior culture in the US, there's at least 2 that every professional has.
It really is that simple.
Don't believe it is the companies forcing workers to do it as it is my experience that most, but not all of course, American men would rather be "working" then dealing with child raising.
You know what, that's it. People complain all day long, but in the end it is just a choice. Nobody is being held at gun point and being asked to work long hours. Instead people make financial choices that they must now assume by working under terrible conditions, then they go home to complain about it.
I've been seriously considering getting a really really really nice few-year-old RV (one of the 50' bus ones with expanding sides) as my home in order to opt-out of the housing stupidity and apartment renting game. It'd be nice to be able to own my home after just a few years paying the equivalent of what I currently pay for Bay Area rent. I'd still have to pay e.g. National Parks for staying the night, but I'd much much rather have my money go to them vs the slim land owners and apartment places here.
As for the second point, I would strongly recommend against an RV as your primary home. It is very likely to negatively affect your social life and could get into the way of a lasting romantic relationship. Perhaps (and this is just a guess) you would be better off employing your skills and time to make more instead of attempting to save more.
Note: I am not speaking of extreme cases here. There are definitely situations where some people find themselves in a vicious circle, but I assume that is the minority of cases.
For situation when you'll hear from management that they don't see you as engaged as others I guess your answer would be to just leave, it's that simple.
Thing is not everyone can easily change jobs. And it's not only a matter of (un)sufficient professional skills. (Less money outside of corp. environment or even number of jobs in particular location (and moving is also not on a plate sometimes))
Enjoy your chance not to participate but it's not really that simple
When I was hired, I said "I'm going to make X happen - this will give you Y competitive advantage over competitors Z1, Z2, and will generally do what I can to increase shareholder value". I made no promises about hours worked, and my employer isn't paying attention to that.
I "stand to my rights" when dealing with the police, government and other hostile parties - my employer and I have a collaborative relationship. We create value together and share in the proceeds. If the terms (the vast majority of which cannot be explicitly stated in a contract) no longer are mutually agreeable, we'll separate.
It's mainly semantics, but "shareholder value" sounds a bit narrow for me.
I would say the goal would be to improve the employer's idea/product/business. Or even a step further: society as a whole. Although shareholder value is the consequence in many cases, I personally wouldn't be motivated if I worded the goal of my collaborative relationship like that.
Also, while money is a useful result of this relationship, creating progress/improvement is the awesome part.
And unfortunately those brilliant, but cruel, geniuses have inspired an entire segment of unskilled managers and bosses who now think that by cargo-culting dickheadedness they can rise to the top.
The rest of the country can't wait for the bubble to pop in Silicon Valley so we can stop hero-worshipping assholes...
This idea of a detailed employment contract is something I've only heard about from europeans, and I'd love to see what the contracts look like. Generally employment in the USA is "at-will" and either party can terminate the arrangement at any time for any (or no) reason, without further obligations.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm
(not a high percentage overall though)
If it's really common that:
"an employee can be dismissed by an employer for any reason (that is, without having to establish 'just cause' for termination), and without warning"
then that explains the motivation of the workers to really please the bosses.
Is it really so common and easy to lose the job "just so"?
That very much depends what the market conditions are in your industry. In good times, even bad bosses will try to act professional, and good bosses are often downright humane. In bad times, there's always someone up the org chart to take the blame so the boss doesn't look like a jerk.
But "no reason" firings are comparatively uncommon. That's really more of a legal classification for, "I fired her because I find her tone-of-voice insubordinate."
Employers get away with it due to a mix of fear of being fired, and a bunch of people who act happy to give up their lives for the company.
The difference between less-than-full-time and full-time employment is the issue here. If you're a "full time" employee, depending on your local cultural values, you stay until the job is done, within reason. If you're on less than full time, in, I would wager, the vast majority of cases, the position is very closely regulated time-wise, ensuring the employee works their hours and very little more, if any.
Now two people work instead of one and they are no better off. Who is the second parent working for? The banks. Who pays? The kids.
The financialisation of land is a disaster, we are not more free we are enslaved by debt.
Prices are related to available credit. Wages (and rent) have hardly budged but land prices have rocketed.
Low interest rates allows banks to more efficiently financialise housing (that is to say price housing at the optimal point to extract as much economic rent as possible). You get to spread your repayments over a long time and end up paying lots of lovely interest.
Higher rates (and therefore more wage inflation) quickly erodes the debt whilst putting a ceiling on the asset price bounded by wages at the time you sign the mortgage deeds.
The west has been utterly captured by banks. We've seen politicians walk rates down to zero to allow the asset price bubble to continue to extract value from labour.
This is the issue. It's not off-topic for this - all families are working two jobs for the banks.
ps also dude as you are in Canada (so am I):
Vancouver is nuts. Calgary: timber
I'm not convinced this is as true as a separate issues: many desirable cities and first-tier suburbs have implemented severe land-use controls that force families who want better school districts to pay for housing. This is a point Avent makes in The Gated City (http://www.amazon.com/Gated-City-Kindle-Single-ebook/dp/B005...) and Yglesias makes in The Rent is Too Damn High (http://www.amazon.com/Rent-Too-Damn-High-Matters-ebook/dp/B0...).
I read Progress and Poverty: An Inquiry in the Cause of Industrial Depressions and of Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth but am worried that land-use controls weren't really even on George's radar for obvious reasons; in the 19th C the U.S. was a different place. I don't think the book is bad exactly but much has changed. think the causal issue runs from "land use restriction" -> "higher prices" rather than "dual income" -> "higher prices."
So, people don't pay for housing or land use, they pay for school district.
Perhaps, in the US, there are indirect ways that land use impacts school quality, but it wouldn't have to be that way.
Anybody who's overpaying for good school district is chasing home ownership in the area that's expensive to begin with.
What policies and/or regulations can we make to incentivize a market where house prices reduce over time? Is that the goal? Houses are on average twice as big as they were not too long ago. How much of the increase is due to people wanting bigger homes?
Therefore to have a free market in credit with these constraints it's inevitable that it will be used for speculation. We should have land value tax to win back our right to exist instead of credit fueled full land enclosure. It's an unmitigated disaster - the defining issue of our times.
Credit is near infinite as thanks to fractional reserve banking banks can create as much of it as demand requires. They are not constrained by savings. Most bank lending is against land, it's how money is being printed.
How has the market adapted when we are working 25 times 2 years for the same pile of bricks our parents worked for 15 years for? It's simply the banks taking more of a share of your labour. You get nothing else back.
There is no point in being more productive. It will feed through into land prices as disposable income (briefly) increases and then land prices go up and we are back where we started. This is how banks capture all productivity.
Read http://www.amazon.com/Progress-Poverty-Industrial-Depression...
ps in the UK house sizes are falling, in part because of smaller families / divorces but mostly because of land price ramping
I drove by it recently, and can say that the square footage hasn't changed. Don't take anecdote for data, only illustration, but my scenario was repeated hundreds of thousands of times in South Florida alone. (Some) houses are getting bigger, but that doesn't explain house prices.
As you note land prices per square foot have increased massively.
My parents paid $80,000 for a house in 1988. They haven't sold it, but it's probably worth around $200,000 today, which is an increase very slightly higher than the rate of inflation.
House prices (or, more significantly, house/land/building-permission bundles) where demand exceeds supply (in the US, generally rich coastal areas with tight zoning) are determined by available credit. House prices elsewhere are determined by marginal construction cost.
There are a lot of additional complications, many involving the use of single-family-only zoning and the cost of new construction as an implicit or explicit mechanism of segregation in the fair housing era.
I was a kid in the 1970's and grew up in a middle to upper-middle class neighborhood in, what was at the time, a newly-minted suburb of New York City. I was pretty fortunate, but back then I remember neighbors who didn't have central air conditioning, and whose kids slept two to a bedroom (sometimes, three), and who -- if they took a vacation -- went camping for vacations. Hand-me-downs were no big deal. And not everyone drove a new car. The really well off drove Cadillacs. We got McDonalds or Pizza once a week, to give mom a break.
If you take the equivalent lifestyle today, things are much different. Homes are bigger and better equipped. Cars are nicer -- and just about everyone in the family of driving age has one, of some kind. Vacations are more extravagant. People eat out more. Clothes are stylish.
The middle and upper-middle class don't aspire to the standard of living we had 40 years ago. Many of them would turn their noses up at it. But, truthfully, a number of them could get by on one income, if they lived more modestly.
I had a cousin of mine complain, a few years back, about how it takes two incomes to "survive." Do you want to know her idea of "surviving"? They have a big house with an in-ground pool, and an outdoor Tiki bar. They drive Volvos, and take nice vacations.
For me, that about sums it up.
I feel like there's a healthier (both physically and economically) balance somewhere around 50/50.
Average square footage of a single-family dwelling in 1950 was 983 sq. ft. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5525283 and guess what happened to the square footage once two incomes came into the equation.
For example, I have two children in day care three days a week, and we pay 1200+ euros per month. My friends in Belgium (where I'm from) pay literally 1/10th of that. Those in France and Germany also pay much less than we do, although I don't know by heart exactly how much.
The reason child care is not subsidized (much) is the same as that mentioned in the article though - conservative popular opinion on how parents should be home with their children, and that having children in day care 5 days a week is tantamount to neglect.
You do have to be very careful your income doesn't change while claiming it, but it is quite a big subsidy, right?
(We don't currently claim it and have 1 child in childcare. You're right that it's freaking pricy!)
[1] http://www.belastingdienst.nl/wps/wcm/connect/bldcontentnl/b...
But the UK doesn't have the same rat of part-time working.
But in Holland, its even more worse. The Dutch send them into Day Care after 3 month. Some kids can't even roll around at that time. Then you have a day-care-mommy/kid ratio of 6:1. If you are lucky. Can't see them changing all diapers in time.
And about being bored: Well, if more mommies would be at home, they would eventually socialise more during the day and therefore the kids would have all the social interaction. But at least under the supervision of their own blood. Which loves them and doesn't see them as 'products' for their 'customers'.
My own kids are now all adults, but I remember how heart-breaking it was to leave a two-year-old to a day-care place where she did not want to stay. She'd cry all the way when going there, and stick to hug my legs "please don't go" though she could barely speak. It wasn't good.
Later on, she and younger brother were perfectly happy in another day-care place when they were a bit older.
Also, my daughter was all the time sick in her first day care place. She'd pick every infection there ever was around and we had horrible days with day care, horrible evenings queuing in the health center, and horrible nights without sleep. The daughter just had weak resistance as a 18-month-old, but was much stronger when she was 5 years.
My younger son on the other hand enjoyed day care tremendously from the very start, but he only went there at age of 4.
I would say that
1) there is variance in children, as individuals (some of them are naturally more dependent on their parents)
2) there is variance in day-care places (the first one we had was run by the council, the staff was inexperienced and they compensated for their insecurity by being rude; the other was a private one subsidised by the council, and the staff was really nice -- others have reported things being the other way round with very nice council-run places, so I conclude just that the human factor has a big impact).
3) there is variance in parents
(These experiences from the Finnish system which provides very extensive and affordable public service by North American standards).
There was one place that my daughter was never really happy to go to. It was fine, and she was safe - she was just never happy there. We moved her to a new place and she loved it from the moment she walked in (though she knew some of the other kids from her first nursery).
I think sickness and childcare just go hand in hand. It flowed on to the rest of the family too. I've been sick so many times in the last few years - though I think we're through the worst of it now. Nothing like the happy embrace of a snotty child to make you ill.
When I dropped my 1 yo off at nursery this morning she literally ran with open arms and screeches of joy to one of the careers.
Our daughter was in daycare full time after 4 being 4 months old and she became able to verbally express wants and needs using words at around 12 months. Now at 2 she is using full sentences.
So it's not exactly 1/10th the amount, but still a lot less.
Also, this was limited to a 1 year period more or less. There is a 2 year age difference between the children, and from age 3, the oldest started going to kindergarten instead of daycare, which is quite a bit less expensive.
Minimum wage for an adult is 1500 euro per month working full time, so even if you're a single breadwinner family earning minimum wage, you're already exaggerating. You also fail to mention that the government pays for nearly all of this if you're making minimum wage. Calculate it here:
http://www.belastingdienst.nl/rekenhulpen/toeslagen/
I filled in the numbers for a single parent working full time for minimum wage who sends their two kids for the maximum number of hours per month to an expensive daycare which charges 7 euro an hour. The government subsidizes their daycare for €2894 per month.
A family making €40,000 in taxable income a year still gets a maximum of €2584 per month reimbursed for 2 kids going to that same daycare.
I filled in the numbers for a family making €100,000 in taxable income (about three times the median income) a year, and it looks like they still get about half the costs reimbursed.
It actually looks like the fewer hours you work, the lower the percentage covered by subsidies becomes.
People keep bringing up the cost of daycare as an excuse not to work more, but I don't think it's a very good excuse. I think the actual reason why the number of part time workers is so high, is that people can afford to do it. Outside the Netherlands, if you're not working full time, you're seen as lazy and unambitious. Unless you're doing it for an ambitious reason, such as studying for a degree, you can forget about a promotion or a raise, if your employer allows it at all.
In NL, for some reason, the right to work part time was championed as a women's rights issue. Unless you allowed women to work part time, you were oppressing them. The government also started stimulating part time work to reduce unemployment. Employers were limited in their ability to deny part time employment, to the point that it became very unusual for women to work full time. So unusual, that those working full time are now becoming somewhat socially stigmatized as workaholics or greedy. Some women are also putting pressure on men to start working less to do something about this very unenlightened looking wage gap between full time working men and part time working women.
Basically the "stuff that isn't worth fighting an election over". See also: drugs (we're now falling behind, and even moving backwards), opening hours (most of the country still shuts down on Sundays), or to give a recently newsworthy example: insulting the royal family being illegal.
Mix that with the dominant right-wing urge to "privatise all the things", and subsidised child care gets happily thrown under the bus by various coalition governments, despite what the majority of the population actually wants.
If you have more cildren, you'll pay 2% for the second (max 90 euro), 1% for the third (max 45 euros) and nothing for the fourth.
In London I pay £170 per day to have my two children in childcare. That's for private childcare, but you have little choice if you want to go back to work (because of the hours). There's a little give in the costs of different nurseries but most have a waiting list to get in where we're based (and the lowest I've seen locally is £75/day/child).
We now receive a £120(ish)/month government subsidy for our oldest child. That's something I guess - doesn't do much to help with the £1300 or so we pay per month.
It wasn't really worth it financially for my wife to go back to work, though it does give a much needed break from constantly looking after children (ironically, she's a speech therapist for small children). By the time you account for transport / lunch etc in London we're about breaking even.
It's pretty depressing when you're trying to get a company off the ground and all your money goes into childcare.
Is child care as expensive as he says? Absolutely, it can easily be €600 per kid.
Thing is, if you make €20k, so €1600 household income, you get €520 or so per kid from the government for every €600 or so you spend. So you end up with €80 per month per kid, very doable for a single parent. No parent in the Netherlands makes €800 on full-time work, so we have to assume €1600 household income is for a single parent.
Even if your household income is €80k, i.e. 6-7k monthly income: typical for both parents working solid office jobs in their mid-late 30s, you still get a little over €200 per kid out of €600 expenses per kid, so €400 out of your more than €6k.
There are various caveats, and paying €80 for a single parent is no joke. But it's not nearly as bad as saying a median salary goes wholly to child care of two children, far from it. And it's unlikely to be the sole or even main reason for child care. In fact, I'd make a cautious bet that you'll see significant part-time statistics for people who have no children.
At the end of the day, the costs per working day per kid after subsidy is anywhere from €4 to €20. So the notion that this prevents people from going to work in order to be with their kid so as not to have to pay childcare, is false.
As on the low-end an individual makes like €13 per hour stacking shelves at a supermarket by age 25, working a 9 to 5 in a low-end job easily nets you €80, easy easy easy, at which point you make €1600 a month and pay the €4 a day rate. If you make say €40k and your spouse does, too, then you make more than €160 a day each, and so the notion that you'd rather stay home to save €20 and earn 0 than to pay €20 and earn €160 is unlikely. Even with two kids or three kids, it still pays off in a huge way to go to work.
Now there are some situations in which it could make sense. e.g. a parent who, somehow, has a 9 to 2 contract (5h a day), and picks up the kid from school. That can make a lot of sense in a family where the husband makes €60k and the wife could make €30k full-time, and €20k part-time in a 9 to 2 job. In this case the household income is such that it costs €20 per kid per day and it can make sense to work the $20k parttime job that allows you to pick your kids up from school (€80 income a working day) instead of the €30k parttime job (€120 income per working day), because if you have two kids, then childcare costs €40 per day, the difference in your working hours. And then it's probably more fun and useful to be with your kids than to pay for someone else to, if it's financially all the same. But 9 to 2 working days barely exist, and this is in the context of a cliched family where the man earns €60k and the woman has €30k max earning potential full-time. In more realistic scenarios the financial incentives are definitely such that it pays off for both parents to work full-time.
Germany: 300 EUR+
Seems like highly dependent on geography and underlying real estate prices. The private market for child care is fairly open to anyone who's willing to go through proper training and safety rigor.
But let's say you plan a home-based childcare business, an it's in Bay Area, and the first thing you need to take care of is to buy real estate for it (in $2 million range) and child-proof it.
What you then have to charge for it to cover the mortgage, the property taxes, the insurance, the salaries to the employees quickly results in some unrealistic numbers.
Which is why no child-care provider would choose an expensive place to live as launchpad for their business, and expensive places to live have exorbitantly high childcare costs.
When I applied at ASML they asked me: What if it looks like you will not be able to finish your work within the assigned time, what do you do?
I said: I would just work some more, if it doesn't happen very often, not a problem.
WRONG. Go to your project leader tell him: "I have time for either this or this, where should I put priority." We do not want overworked people.
ASML gave employees about 2 months salary as a bonus some time back, this is on top of a customary 13th month in December.
Maybe the little value that is put in hierarchy (my boss has my respect because he is smart, never just because he is my boss). Displays of hierarchy are very badly appreciated here. We appreciate professors that want to be called by their first name. It balances things more perhaps.
There are a few exceptions in Dutch IT but, unsurprisingly, they are mostly staffed with internationals.
I wish one day we can do away with this sort of 'reverse' sexism, and I think that next year 100% of executive board positions should be held by capable people, regardless of their sex.
So, in theory, 50% of capable people should be women, no?
edit: If your point is that we shouldn't be positively discriminating to artificially reach equidistribution of men and women in the workplace, then I agree, but your line of argumentation is often used to imply that women are less competent.
Surely the worst impact of taking time out to have kids should be a slight delay in the career trajectory of the most talented women, not disqualification from board positions because they've now inevitably and irretrievably fallen behind their male peers.
It's only since a few years that for example technical studies try to attract more women, as these were before considered 'a man's thing'.
It's going to take a few generations for all of this to 'even out' and then we might see 50/50, but it could also result in 70/30 or 30/70, if it turns out that in a gender-neutral unbringing, one gender might be more capable of leadership than another.
Let's say instead of gender differences, we had people with different physics handicaps, we wouldn't pretend there aren't handicaps, ache same time we would not steer people but rather provide them all with the same opportunities and not encourage or discourage because of a particular handicap. Let the people, children, figure out what works and doesn't work for them, given their abilities and handicaps.
The biggest problem I see is people steering or lowlighting certain paths because of some preconceptions --a deaf person can't sing well, instead let them prove they can't sing, or that they can sing, regardless of hearing.
That sounds rather sexist lol :p j/k
instead of gender differences, we had people with different physics [sic] handicaps
That might be considered rather insulting. Having a penis, vagina, or whatever linear combination of the above isn't really comparable to being handicapped.
On the one hand, I feel that positive discrimination is just as bad as the other kind and that its proponents are not thinking things through as clearly as they should.
On the other hand, board members are humans too. Given the choice, and whether consciously or unconsciously, they will typically elect people much like themselves, because that's the kind of person they can understand and relate to. It's an understandable human trait but it does perpetuate the status quo.
I do wish the focus was less on gender and more on diversity in general. We have sizable ethnic minorities in the Netherlands but they are quite underrepresented in upper management and I'm not sure it can be fully explained by the socioeconomic and education gap.
The issue is at what point does the need for diversity kick in? If I start a startup right now with a friend, a person who is much like myself, very few people will criticize us for diversity issues at 2 people. But if we continue to hire friends, when does it become a diversity issue that needs addressing?
It's an arbitrary threshold, but seems like a good point in the life of a company where it transitions from a small company to a larger one, where you need to start making various informal policies and company customs and values more formal.
[1] http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ondernemingsraad_%28Nederland%2...
According to Wikipedia the average size of a board is 9.2 members, and as low as 3 members[1]. It's easy to imagine a company where the 3 most competent people all happen to be either male or female.
No, it isn't implied at all. (emphasis mine)
Statement: The phone should have a glass back. Response: The phone should be durable.
The only reasonable interpretation of the response is that it calls into question the durability of phones with glass backs. Otherwise, it is a non sequitur.
Similarly, the only reasonable interpretation of the quoted statement is that it calls into question whether a board composed of 30% women can also be 100% composed of capable people. Otherwise it makes no sense as a response.
> However, the Netherlands’ record for getting women into top management roles is dire.
Isn't happiness what's important?
We had a neighbor in our village who had chickens, who always kept the same number of black-feathered and white-feathered chickens. I never saw how this helped with anything. He did it for its own sake I guess. He just liked symmetries and equalities, always keeping his things ordered and aligned, he was kind of obsessive like that.
(As I understand it, some Scandinavian countries have brought in the legal right to paternity leave similar to maternity leave, which strikes me as a good start.)
Would a female executive marry a male who works part-time at a café?
the answer is no, it is exceedingly rare, because women marry up socioeconomically. no matter how successful a woman is, her preference is to marry someone equally or more successful.
people tend to provide extreme counter-examples to argue against this, but in the vast majority of cases, it's true.
The highly-visible counter-examples tend to come from fields with high gender imbalance, like your stereotypical doctor-nurse or boss-secretary matchups.
I think it's reasonable to posit that this effect would be weak or non-existent in an equal society.
It's not for the sake of family.
80% of employed women work part time in the Netherlands. This includes singles, double income no kids, middle aged women whose children have already left home. Only a small percentage of those working part time have young children.
When you ask them about it, they try to justify not working more. "Daycare is so expensive" (in another post I try to demonstrate that this excuse doesn't fly), "Working environment is hostile to women" etc etc.
If deep down inside people didn't feel at least a bit guilty about not working more, they wouldn't try to justify it. In reality, working part-time is a luxury. Americans prefer the luxury of a large home, two cars, air conditioning, maybe a swimming pool in the yard. Dutch people seem to prefer the luxury of few working hours and long vacations.
I don't see how a single comment can account for any/all complaints that people in the Dutch workforce might have.
Living (instead of working) is not a 'luxury', as other might say: work to live, don't live to work.
A luxury is anything beyond basic necessities like food and shelter. People in poor countries, working 12 hour work days for $10 per day or less, don't have the luxury of working part time.
I'm totally fine with someone choosing to work fewer hours or more hours than I'm willing to do, as long as they're capable of supporting themselves.
I'm not totally fine with people claiming they would like to work full time, but the government is making it impossible by not subsidizing daycare, out of some kind of conservative bias against working mothers, because that is simply a lie.
This is exactly my statement when I told my boss I wanted to work part-time. Now, I only work around 20 up to 32 hours a week. Also, I feel I'm way more productive this way: I only work when I "feel like working". Because of that, I'm way more productive when I work.
I have dreams for my future. Doing a day-to-day office job isn't one of them. In my "spare time", I'm converting my hobby and passion into my own company so I can, hopefully, earn money with my hobby and stop working completely.
Yes, I'm from the Netherlands.
Additionally, there might me some cultural issue involved. A few years ago I worked in Germany and the one thing I didn't like about the German workspace is that companies didn't really want their workers to be productive and efficient, they just wanted them to put in all of their official working hours and complete all of the formalities involved, while also frowning upon any activities outside work. That was one of the reasons why I eventually moved out. I wanted to accomplish things and grow, the companies I interviewed at wanted me to stay 9-5 and be satisfied with their routine. I grew to dislike this attitude and eventually made other plans for myself.
For the record, I've worked 32 hour weeks for ages now (and I've only encountered one potential employer who had a problem with that, though they agreed my request was totally reasonable). My wife works 36 hours a week, which is standard in government jobs (as well as in many other places).
Now guess what happened :p
You get fired after 3 years, so they don't have to give you a contract. Then they hire someone new with less skills, but at least for 3 years they don't have to give a contract and can fire you whenever they need to and of course pay you like a temporary external employee instead of a full-time on contract employee.
I think this is true anywhere but especially in the UK they 'can' do this because the benefit system (tax credits, housing benefit, etc) tops up the shortfall.
After the election, there's no reason at all to think this is going to get better.
However, the big upside is still underway: it is becoming increasingly normal for men to work part time. Already it's common for men to work no more than 32 hours, that's not even considered part-time anymore.
If this trend continuous, the Netherlands is shifting towards a much shorter working week than most countries, without any major upheaval or further government intervention. However much by accident rather than design, it does seem to put the country one step ahead of most when dealing with an economic reality in which full employment for everyone is never going to happen.
Young people don't seem to realize that there already isn't much AOW (social security) left for them. Unless you're 50+ now (the most powerful voting block is usually exempt from cutbacks), you will not be able to retire at 67. The retirement age is officially raised along with life expectancy. The 20 year old of today will not be eligible for AOW until their early 70's.
Because not everyone is physically capable of continuing to work until 70+, and employment opportunities for people over 60 are pretty much zero, you're going to need savings to bridge that gap.
Unfortunately most employers don't see it this way. Especially at corporations where the number of employees is large, I mean like > 1000 headcount. It becomes impossible for HR not to completely manage people's time through strict enforcement of working hours policies.
They employ you for 40 hours a week and thus expect you to be there for 40 hours a week. If you work for less than 40 hours it means either you're overqualified, i.e. being payed too much, they could replace you with someone that costs less and works slower, or they need to give you more work to do to make up for that 40 hours a week they're paying you for.
I hate it.
I retired at 30, not willing to take part in this craziness anymore, to live fully now and only work every now and then when I need money, although I'm also working hard on a solution that eliminates the need for money at all (and not only for myself, but for anyone willing to participate).
My motto about the future: If in my life I haven't made such an impact on at least one person that nobody is willing to take care of me when I'm not capable anymore myself, I have either done something wrong or society has become something I'm not willing to live in anymore anyway.
What also helps is that I don't hate my job. Maybe you just chose a career that didn't make you happy. Isn't there another kind of job that would make you want to work more?
Have you ever been taking care about an elderly person? Are you aware what an immense task that is?
And even if you do everything right and do end up with a person willing to do it for you, they also have to be capable to do it right. That's quite a bet to take.
The vast majority of elders do not want to be needy. They didn't choose to have their bodies betray them and require assistance for everyday life.
The TLC part is indeed spot on. It might be a good idea to plan on having many grandkids.
It may sound ridiculous to a lot of people, but for me it works and I take full responsibility. In case I get sick I will choose plant based medicine (tested and proven for millenia) anytime over modern medicine (which are a lot of times based on the same plants).
In any way, if I'm old and sick and would become dependent on expensive medicine, then I'd rather die and see if there is something on the other side or not.
(By the way, to anyone in general: I don't want to debate my life choices or beliefs, they are mine and no one can convince me otherwise, except experience itself. I will answer any question, but I'm not going to defend myself.)
So how is life in your delusional world?
My immune system does what it needs to do and I can eat from the ground, i live a lot from dumpster dived food, have walked barefoot for months through cities and nature. Even when I had an open wound from dancing in glass that I didn't feel at that moment, I have walked all night through dirty discotheque floors, rat infested city squares, before I found out the next morning when I woke up that there was a wound, black with dirt and crap in it.
Anyway, look up information about the power of the mind, you can manifest anything you need and whatever you believe in becomes real. I thought it was the biggest bullshit ever, until I found out it's true by experience.
Isn't it plain backwards to send a kid to child care and go to work to pay for it? Unless you are earning an awful lot of money at your job, it doesn't feel right. It just makes so much sense to me to have one of the parents stay at home with the kids, spending most of this beautiful time together.
Heck, I want to have kids soon, but first I want to figure out how to earn enough money to maintain my family being the only earner + not working more than 30-32 hours a week. This could mean having a lot less money at the end of month, but it's temporary until the little ones are a bit older.
I'm male by the way.
Paying salary for 1 full timer may seem a little lower than 2 part timers initially. But with better family life, I would think you will get better productivity and recover the investment by retaining workers better.
So, bean-counting makes you prefer fewer heads, and some of that cost is not just due to bean-counters, but very real.
"Britain" is, like "the United Kingdom", a common less-formal name [0] for the nation-state whose full name is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (and is the source of the usual adjective form associated with that nation-state, "British".)
Britain, of course, isn't a "country" as that term is used in the UK, of course; England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are the countries of the UK. But the use here isn't to identify a country in that sense, but a sovereign state.
Better pedants, please.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom : "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a sovereign state in Europe."