Spanish public holidays, should they be moved?

 If your Spanish neighbour's son has done no work then he will get no money off the state at 18.  You have to have worked for two years or more before getting benefits.  

I think the point in the UK is that the benefits should not be worth more than the average wage.

no easy answers to all this i guess, but i dont want to live somewhere where there are tons of people living on the streets, or more than there are now in UK anyway, and certainly benefits have to pay for people to live in some basic manner surely, i dont know, saying all this though i dont want the scammers to get away with claiming benefits they dont deserve or need, i suppose thats the never ending problem isnt it? how do you root out the cons effectively without hurting the needy?  As far as my neighbors son is concerned, he's still a lazy git, lol and anyway heres the law in Spain about that, not hard to see how this can be gotten round if you have a family member that has any sort of business, anyway i know they get round it somehow cause how come you see all those pictures of young Spaniards outside the unemployemnt offfices, they sure aint doing it to get nothing.

Unemployed after working less than one year

Workers who have been employed for less than one year do not have the minimum requirement of contributions to receive unemployment benefits; however they may apply for an Unemployment Subsidy (Subsidio por Desempleo) providing they meet the following conditions:

• They are legally unemployed
• They register as a job seeker and sign an Activity Agreement (Compromiso de Actividad)
• They have contributed at least three months of Social Security payments if they have family responsibilities, or six months of contributions if they do not
• They do not have an income of more than 75 percent of the Minimum Professional Wage (El Salario Mínimo Interprofesional)

lawrencemarbella, the plain answer is, if  you don't want to live in this country, move back to the UK.  Simples!  As that annoying little globalist monkey thing says on UK TV!  That is, if you are not already in the UK and sniping from afar.

Agreed Donlochnagar, as i said in an earlier post i'm leaving as soon as poss mate, unfortunately its not possible to tie up everything immediately but beleive me im making every effort to spend as much time as possible not in Spain, i have no intention of staying here and sinking with this ship.

Laawrencemarbella, so where are you going?  Brazil, India, China?  BTW, don't think of the UK or the US, because they are going down the swanee as quick as anywhere else in Western Europe and when the markets realise just how indebted the Uk and the US are, they will sink like a stone.  I'd rather be poor in the heat than the cold!

Hmm, i think US and UK are just fine, enjoy the weather donlochnagar.

oh and another thing to ponder.  Spain has a spectacular history of national default, if it were a criminal it would probably have been given life in prison a long time ago for its form.  Spain has defaulted and gone bankrupt no less than 4 times in the 16th century and heres the kicker, its done it a further 7, yes i said SEVEN times in the 19th century!  when will they get a grip, god only knows.  Also Spain has the dubious distinction of being the very first nation to ever declare bankruptcy.

Lawrencemarbella, hee hee!  the UK and the US fine?  Look at the proprtion of debt to GDP.  Spain is much better than both!!!  They were bankrup in the 16th century?  THE BASTARDS!  And some times in the 19th? HELP MA BOAB!  I don't suppose that would be anything to do with our friends, the bankers and the other elephant in the room?

Sorry donlochnagar, wrong again mate. Uk's debt to gdp is approx 86% Spains is 72%, but these figures are meaningless unless you understand their overall impact on a nations ability to borrow and therefore function.  The only, ONLY, important benchmark is a countries ability to repay its debts, thats it, nothing else, NADA!  the UK could easily sustain a debt to gdp of more than 100%, it wouldnt be desirable but it wouldnt be the end by a long shot, The Uk can and will be able to service its debts. Spain on the other hand is already having problems borrowing on its own with a debt to gdp of just 72%.  To sum it up very clearly, NO ONE DAMN WELL BELEIVES SPAIN CAN REPAY! what are they going to do, grow some more oranges? cant even do that right, whatever happened to seville oranges, they even scewed up that market!

lawrencemarbella, Spain has two financial problems, 1)being in the Euro and therefore being unable to determine it's own fiscal future and 2) having a housing boom fueled by cheap German and international banking cartel money.  They and us should have been like Iceland and told our  'banking friends' to GTF and that we were not going to pay them as has happened many times in the past.

why is it always everyone elses fault donlochnagar? youre talking like the drug addict that puts all the blame on the pusher, and also how come Germany always seems to come out somewhere in the mix of bad guys eh? Boy you must really be hoping that all this stuff you keep spewing is true, that Spain will recover, that all will be ok here, probably because you like a lot of Brit expats have too much invested here and selling up and returning is not a possible option, maybe maybe not but your wishes for a recovered Spain, where prices of almost everything stops rising, where property prices stop falling and people start buying property again and where the sun continues to shine, well listen up, the only thing thats going to happen for sure is the bit about the sun, the rest of it is a pipe dream and i think you know it really. Good luck to you sir, youre going to need it and much more if you stay here.

Lawrencemarbella, let me tell you how confident I am of Spain's recevery.  I just completed on my property on Friday and I am in the process of starting a business.  I've left the UK, because it is a shithole with a people who increasingly have lost any decency, manners or concept of community.  Good luck, to you when you move back.  As I write this I am listening to the news that the IMF expects the British economy to shrink by 0.4% this year and only rise, (ha), by 1% in the following year.  Yes, an industrial miracle indeed.

Donlochnagar, hope you have 30 years to wait.  Have fun and good luck anyway.

 30 years!!! Slight exageration don't you think? As you said Spain's debt to GDP is not the problem, the problem here is financing and liquid cash, cashflow. Spain needs long term cash financing to get out of this problem and stimulate growth. But we haven't gone back to  Franco's time, Spain is still a developed country and can bounce back 10 years is more reasonable! Yes it is Spain's fault that the construction boom reached the limits it reached and that loans were so cheap, the Bank of Spain and the government should have regulated it even better instead of a few filling their pockets and off shore accounts. But the SPanish aren't at fault. They didn't value the properties they were buying  the banks did. Of course Spain can recover but it will depend on financing help from the EU without ridiculous interest rates that will just smother any progress the country makes. Companies need financing without it Spain will never grow. However what has all this got to do with the question?

The issue affecting Spain's ability to repay debts is not long-term, but short-term. Spain is a large economy and has plenty of ability to grow in secotrs such as aerospace and precision engineering at the top end, and agriculture and tourism at the low end. The problem is that Spain has minimal short-term liquidity, essentially Spain can't afford to repay her short term debts, but can pay her long term ones. Debts taken out pre-2008 have low rates on them, but those taken out to get through the crisis have seen rates spike and thse short term bonds are crippling the current account. Getting out of this is difficult because the banks continue to be clogged by bad loans because of the housing crash, as it means banks continually need more support and no one really knows just how many bad debts the banks have.

The "Bad Bank" might well help this, but the idea of this bank turning a profit for the gov't is largely fantasy. Whilst it might get the bank system cleared out it will need a lot of money up front, and will take a good while for the housing glut to be soaked up and for consumer demand to turn around.

I think the idea that Spain is going to be knocked back into the 70s is somewhat hysterical, but at the same time we need to be realistic as well. This crisis has been going on now for five years, and it isn't going to "all be over by Christmas". I reckon it's going to be another 5 years until the situation is stable, and another 2-3 before there is meaningful, sustained, growth. But for that growth to last out another cycle the banks are going to need complete overhaul and regulation and the EU is going to need to sort of out some kind of proper economic and political union that doesn't decent in gratutious nationalism at the first sign of trouble.

mac75

Ok so do you think all the Spanish holidays will help repay the debt in the short term? :)
to get back on the thread.

Honestly, I think it's a drop in the ocean. Having worked in HR in , my approach, given falling wages and low morale, would be to preserve holidays along with child-care arrangements to reduce sudden absence such as sick-days and maintain productivity. Known holidays are much less disruptive than sickness, and a less stressed, more motivated workforce is more produictive, more reliable and has a lower total cost in terms of absenteeism, turnover and management than one that has fewer benefits.

A lot of HR policy in the 90s was based around this, and was found be extremely effective, but HR people are rarely listened to at the board level and most decisions are taken looking only at one number on a spreadsheet and do not factor in the whole institutional cost of these sorts of decisions.

 I was just kidding with that comment. You are probably right, it is a drop in the ocean given the circumstances, but with a long term view It is something that need to be attended.

 One small but important point which no-one has yet raised....whilst it is true that Spain's crisis stems from the enormous volume of private and corporate debt, largely generated during the construction boom, the then Government was powerless to regulate the flow of cheap credit that came, mainly from German financial institutions, once Spain had joined the eurozone.

The Maastricht Treaty, if I remember rightly, enshrined into EU law the free movement of goods, people and capital.  There was no way any Government of any EU member state could have regulated the inward flow of capital, even if it wished to...and most didn't.

Unlike Greece, where debt is mainly Government-owned, Spanish borrowers, both corporate and private, went on a massive borrowing spree largely centred around the construction sector.   Spain has the largest proportion of home-owners in the EU at over 80%.    A large number of Spaniards own second homes.

When the boom turned to bust, as booms eventually do -capitalism is cyclical - millions found themselves without work. Government borrowing soared to pay for the rising welfare bill.  Treasury bond yields rose to unsustainable heights.  Many people were unable to repay the loans they had taken out to buy property. We see the results all around us..Se Vende...

There has indeed been slight upward movement in house/apartment sales in recent months but thos has been accompanied by falling sales prices.  It would seem that there is still some downward movement on prices to come before they bottom out.

Meanwhile, national and regional deficits combined with pressures for regional independence -Catalunya will not be the only region to break away if the Catalans achieve independence - and the certitude of a request for a bail-out after next month's elections all combine to create a situation of extreme volatility and the likeihood of a return to anything resembling 'normality' in the next five years is remote.

This message was last edited by praguepix on 16/10/2012.

SPAIN'S government is considering moving three main bank holidays to a Monday in 2014 to avoid long weekends

See the news blog

Looks like they are taking it seriously.