Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Is the typical Spanish daily schedule about to change forever? For decades, campaigners in the country have complained that the average Spaniard's habit of keeping extremely late hours and taking delightfully long lunch breaks was making everyday life harder for citizens. This week, change could finally be on the way, as 110 professional bodies in Catalonia have signed up to a plan to change the region's daily timetable by 2025, shortening the classic three-hour lunch break so that employees can finish work earlier in the evening.
Such a change would radically reshape ordinary people's lives—and controversially, it could drive a wedge between Catalonia and the rest of Spain, where the national government supports similar changes (and has adopted a shorter break for public offices) but hasn't yet fixed a timetable for action.
You could call the plan an end to national harmony, a blessed release for hard-pressed workers, or an attack on the Spanish way of life. Whatever you do, however, don't call it the end of the siesta.
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 23 2017, @08:24PM (1 child)
http://imgur.com/r/funny/Ss2qt [imgur.com]
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @02:47AM
Not off topic, just early for the next fine article, apparently.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by opinionated_science on Sunday July 23 2017, @08:27PM (8 children)
Most of southern Europe where, prior to the modern age, it was too hot to work outside in the midday sun. Hence, long lunch breaks evolved as part of the culture. Italy, Greece, Portugal and France.
This difference is most stark looking at the southern US, where air conditioning made longer practical working hours possible in many professions, but culturally the US is of largely northern European basis (UK, Holland, Germany etc..).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by kaszz on Sunday July 23 2017, @08:35PM (7 children)
Let's hope they have reserved power capacity to run all those air condition units that will now need to run in the middle of the day.
Oooppps didn't think of that!
Heat island anyone?
(Score: 2) by frojack on Sunday July 23 2017, @08:39PM (6 children)
Its sunny there, no?
Problem solved.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday July 23 2017, @08:48PM (5 children)
Spain is sunny and during the mid day it may be extra hot so by having air conditioning used at those times will increase the power demand and worsen the heat island effect.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 23 2017, @08:51PM (4 children)
Power the AC with solar cells.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday July 23 2017, @09:18PM (3 children)
Not enough sun lit area to do that.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday July 23 2017, @09:41PM (2 children)
Shade the work space with solar cells, then the A/C doesn't have to work so hard...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday July 23 2017, @11:09PM (1 child)
Not really working with high rise buildings in cities....?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday July 24 2017, @02:28AM
You can shade the side of a building - it's not common, but works quite well when done.
The solar cells can be angled to catch the sun and still provide a view of the ground below.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 23 2017, @08:27PM (6 children)
Most people working office jobs don't have a 3 hour lunch break in Spain. You can find that on some (smaller) public facing shops (groceries, press stands, bars, etc.), and maybe that's what most tourists see in smaller, touristic places, but most people work either 9-to-6 (bear in mind Spain is on CEST time instead of Greenwich even though the meridian actually crosses the country, so this is basically 8-to-5) or on 8 hour shifts in places that are open from really early to really late (8am to 11pm or the like).
Not saying that such works don't exist, but they are not as prevalent as the excerpt suggests. I'm 35 and have worked for 6 different companies, never had that. One of my friends, a hairdresser, has a long lunch break (2 hours, not 3), but none other does. And, since it's been mentioned, I know a lot of people that do like to take naps - they either do it on weekends exclusively or have jobs that end before lunch, as most people don't have the time to map in the middle of the work day.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 23 2017, @08:40PM
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 23 2017, @10:09PM (2 children)
Hola, but you still eat late dinner, say past 11pm?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @01:55AM (1 child)
Different Spaniard here, no we don't. We may go out for dinner with friends and it may go on and on, but that's more like a special event. Monday to Friday, most people are done with dinner by 9, or close to 10.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @07:17PM
Just to reinforce the point, I am the original poster and, as the parent mentioned, dinner at 11 PM can happen but is very uncommon. Dinner that stretches until after 11 PM is more frequent when you are with friends, especially on Fridays and Saturdays if you are eating out. However, most people have dinner between 8 and 10 PM, and, again, bear in mind that due to us keeping the same time as Central Europe while being the westernmost part of the continent (together with Portugal and not counting islands), this is more akin to 7 to 9 in other cultures.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @08:09AM (1 child)
I moved to South France 3 years ago. For a while I did the long lunch thing with co-workers but little by little it drove me insane. Just sitting there and social talking with the same people for about an hour every single day. Then going back to work and sitting with the same people. The days we had meetings made me want to quit, it was hours and hours on end of sitting there doing nothing. The meetings are another story - "faire le tour" where every person speaks one after the other with no discussion. Awful. 20-30 people x a few mins each.
Eventually I went back to "normal" US style grab something and eat at the computer while doodling on the internet or working.
I saw the same pattern with another guy who came 1 year after me. He'd always ask if I wanted to join them and seemed enthusiastic about these novelty long lunches. I would politely decline without getting into reasons. After 6mo I saw he was also sitting at his desk during lunch like me :) I think we had a shared understanding.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday July 24 2017, @10:49PM
For small shops, the long midday break is also a time to get some administrative stuff done, especially if your job serves customers and thus has to finish a bit late.
You close the shop at peak heat around 13:00 or 14:00, after the lunch break customers, go to the bank, shopping, or to fight the administrations for a while, then reopen at 16:00, when the temperature is down and people are out, fetching their kids, walking and grabbing some stuff. That allows you to close at 18:00 or 19:00, while not working too many hours and taking care of logistics.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 23 2017, @08:50PM (6 children)
Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late. Uh, I use the side door. That way Lumbergh can't see me. And after that, I just sort of space out for about an hour. I just stare at my desk. But it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual work.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday July 23 2017, @10:14PM (5 children)
I'm starting to see more and more fingerprint scanners for hourly scum here in America. Fingerprints are a lot harder to fake then getting another employee's badge and tapping them in even though they're out getting high or screwing the boss' wife.
The siesta never made sense to me. Here in America we call that a "split shift" and is highly undesirable and usually gets an extra pay differential when done regularly. Hell, I'm kind of salty that we can't choose to waive our lunch breaks altogether and just go home early. For awhile long ago I would enter the lunch break in my timecard for legal reasons, but keep working through it and just leave a half-hour early -- but the boss caught on to it and started enforcing proper, legal lunch breaks.
In America hourly scum working long hours can legally waive their mandated second lunch break, but they must take at least one 30 min. lunch break if they spend more than 6 hours working during a day.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Sunday July 23 2017, @11:11PM (3 children)
The key is running your own company or being a contractor. Or simple being well off to not rely on work. Human is the center of this problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 24 2017, @01:50AM
When it comes to Ethanol-fueled that is a severe understatement.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday July 24 2017, @02:12AM (1 child)
Or just being salaried. I've worked through lunch (or should I say, "worked" through lunch...) for many, many years, and left work after 8 hours, unless I was making up time or in a schedule crunch or something. When you're salaried, management doesn't usually pay that much attention to when you come and go exactly.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday July 24 2017, @07:18AM
I beg to differ on management. They definitely seem to care..
Which again put emphasis on making sure that you rule your own workday.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday July 24 2017, @11:50AM
Did you just get office spaced?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 23 2017, @10:03PM
I read another article that framed the changes as part of changing the Timezone.
General Franco moved Spain to Central European time, aligning Spain with their ally Germany. There are moves to change the timezone back to GMT (same as Portugal)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 23 2017, @10:20PM
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday July 24 2017, @09:15PM
So spain should have always been less well off than, say, Italy, which has no such break. A quick glance at economic indicators says it is completely unrelated. A productive society is like a race car. It covers distance faster, it breaks easier, it never covers as much distance as a diesel taxi.
> post industrial society
> no jobs for everyone
> rational answer: work less, take turns.
> actual answer: make workers replaceable, make employed people work overtime, make unemployed people spend time in barely relevant activities making them eligible for work
work is the way the elite DoSes the rest.
Account abandoned.