Tuesday, April 5, 2016

This is Serious Totalitarianism: Spain's Prime Minister to Outlaw Siestas


The Spanish Prime Minister has announced moves to cut the working day by two hours and bring an end to the siesta, in an attempt to bring the country into line with its European counterparts. reports The Independent.

Mariano Rajoy, the head of the centre-right coalition government, wants to scrap the universally-observed three-hour midday break.


Rajoy said: "I will find a consensus to make sure the working day ends at 6pm."

Spanish workers currently tend to start work at 10am, staying until 2pm when they have a siesta up to three hours before leaving at 8pm.

Amazing, why can't this be left up to workers and businesses? Rulers love to rule.


 -RW

4 comments:

  1. Indeed they do! I lived in Spain for 2 years, and I would hate to see such a well known feature of their culture destroyed by edict. If the people decide that their love of the Euro, the European Union, its Central Bank, etc. drive them to want to be more like their European neighbors, that too would be sad, but it wouldn't be as result of State-derived force and coercion.

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  2. Messing with a man's Siesta sounds like a good way to end up with a revolt on your hands.

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  3. Couple things:
    - First of all, the guys in the picture are not spaniards, nor their hats, and pretty sure not the place.
    - The working day in Spain expands from 8am to 22pm, and people usually work from 9am to 7pm.
    - The so-called siesta is just the lunch break, and people do not sleep during that timeframe. That was of agricultural origin, to avoid the hours of Sun and many societies used to do it.

    Please don't fall into clichés. Indeed, they want to regulate the working day length, which is up to debate, but the issue is not related at all with any 'siesta' and people work as hard in Spain as in any other country, and the lunch break is not an obstacle to that.

    Sources: I'm from Spain

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  4. There's been a lot of news in the international newspapers about the topic these days, so please allow me to clarify something.

    First of all, the guys in the picture are not spaniards, nor are the hats and quite likely, the place isn't Spain either (you would never see such a thing on the street).

    In Spain, people do not sleep the 'siesta' during lunch time. That's an old tradition that has been dropped long ago. The usual working day expands from 8am up to 22pm, and the average hours that people work in my country is surely over 40 and below 50 hours a week (which is more than 8 hours a day).
    There are two types of working days, which are the continuous and the divided one, with the second having a one to two hours break at midday, that is just cultural nowadays and is exclusively used for lunch. That has an agricultural origin, and that was the moment when people used to the sleep the so-called 'siesta'. But again, that does not happen anymore.

    Then we can discuss if regulating the working day is a good or a bad thing, but don't fall in clichés that continue damaging the image of my country.

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