Hey, I know something about this! I moved from silicon valley to NL about 8 years ago.
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.
Thanks. I'm from Europe, therefore really needing some explanations (to the opposite direction of the title subject of explaining European logic to the non-European readers):
> 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?
The American professional mindset is that you are hired for a role, and a good employee does what it takes to do that role. There are different rules (in California) for professionals who plan their own work and/or supervise others versus those in a service role, but the details are pretty meaningless... the effect is: if you're a professional you do what it takes to make the project succeed and make a good impression.
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.
I'm not quite sure most Americans find it 'funny' but rather do these things more so out of fear. Fear of job loss, fear of missed advancements, fear of missing out, etc. This also seems to explain why Americans as a whole take so little vacation time even when they are entitled to take time off [1].
This is just it - worker protection in the Netherlands is much better than in the US or UK; an employer can't just fire someone, for one. An employee cannot work for more than X hours a week - and if it's requested to work overtime or odd hours, the employer has to pay for it (up to 200% if working Sundays).
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.
Part of it is that the most of the Walmart employees probably couldn't afford a prolonged strike. The company would hire scabs and wait them out. And the news would portray those people as being "entitled" and "whiny". In America, it's seen as if businesses are allowed to do everything they want, and if you don't like it, then you should quit. Even if what the business is doing is illegal.
> worker protection in the Netherlands is much better than in the US or UK
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 UK has FAR better worker protections than the US. These two countries should not be mentioned in the same sentence when it comes to worker protections.
Well, I'm American and it sure seems insane to me, so I choose not to participate, and that's that.
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.
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
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.
While somewhat true, it's pretty bad that you basically have to just roll over and accept it if you want to own a house in an area not in economic crisis. You can live as frugally as you want, but a half-million-dollar mortgage sucks up a lot of income.
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.
Just because a literal gun isn't used doesn't mean there isn't force involved. If you're not going to be able to pay rent without that job, then that is definitely force.
Sure you could be forced temporarily, but not indefinitely. If the situation persists, it must be somewhat you allowing it.
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.
That's a very... nice way of putting it. One thing I've come across is employers who talk about having "unregulated hours" - you can come and go as you please as long as the work is done! Quickly, you discover that there's always work to be done. If you're done with client work and it's only 3pm, we have some internal stuff you could be working on. What if client work comes in at 4pm? Guess you need to stay later to get it done.
This is what inevitably ends up happening to me. Granted, I do get to go home at 5pm most days, but right now as the busy season is winding down, I find I have more time for duties I have had to let slide. Oh wait, nope, the big boss feels that those duties aren't as important as this pile of stuff he was going to do, but gosh darn it, he needs more time to browse Youtube! So I end up with a stack of BS that's above my pay grade while he fucks off in his office all day. Mean time, my actual duties stay on the back burner, and my other boss rides my ass about that and doesn't want to hear about what I've been forced to do by our big boss.
Those first two American workplace traits won't work well unless you include a third American workplace trait: They're far less subservient to their bosses, if they have bosses at all. Not like how the project is being done? You're expected as an employee to just take control and do it the way you think is better, asking for forgiveness later if needed.
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.
That may be the case in the City (I have images of interns jumping from City skyscrapers in the back of my mind...) but not in the general labour market in my experience. Generally speaking, unless you've committed to something, screwed up, or contracting (£$£$), then you generally leave at the end of your shift or working day. However, I am genuinely intrigued why you think this - could you elaborate? Maybe I'm overworking without even knowing it.
I do work in an investment bank, but it's not a case of interns throwing themselves out of windows. It's more a case of "I'm a professional, and I gave my word I would complete X by a certain date, and if all that takes is a couple of extra hours then I will stay and complete it, rather than be unreliable."
As a Dutch person I was under the impression that the Dutch society is less hierarchical than the American society. Perhaps somebody who has worked in both countries can shed some light on it?
I don't think you can compare the US to Europe as a whole either, the workplace dynamic in southern Italy is completely different than in Norway.
My experience is that the Dutch are among the most 'anarchic' people I know. Everyone has an opinion on everything, and bosses try to just be 'one of the guys', and avoid exerting their authority overtly, as it's likely to backfire. Obviously this doesn't apply to all jobs, but I've experienced it a lot.
Americans, but to a lesser degree people from other nationalities too, tend to be much more authoritarian and are less inclined to hide the hierarchies.
I've experienced Dutch bosses struggle with 'being bosses' in Germany, as their 'flat' approach confused their employees. I've also had German bosses try to be 'one of the guys' in Holland, but not quite pulling it off (to sometimes hilarious effect).
I find this all fascinating that resonates well with me. I used to work in Germany but found them too formal and official in both working and personal relationships. Perhaps I should have tried it in the Netherlands.
Oh yeah. After three years I learned to appreciate the Germans to an extent, but I could never shake the feeling that, as a 'group', they're a bit like the boring, responsible, often humorless older sibling to the Dutch.
Both 'groups' have their own pros and cons though, to be fair. The Dutch can be horribly rude and argumentative...
>> The Dutch can be horribly rude and argumentative...
As a Russian, so can I. It can be a useful trait under circumstances, but I generally try to keep it in control.
If I get an idea to work in Europe again, I'll pay closer attention to the Dutch opportunities. It's important for the people to "click" on a cross-cultural level in order to work well as a team, and I'm afraid I didn't click nearly enough back in Germany.
Anyway, no culture is perfect. We're supposed to learn from each other and work on our bad sides as recognized in others and by others.
In my experience the Dutch get along pretty well with Russians. The main sources of 'conflict' I've noticed usually have to do with the fact that the Dutch like to rub their 'liberalness' in other people's faces, and many Russians I've met tend to be a bit more conservative/traditional in their values.
That said, my experience is also that it's more bark than bite. We love arguing and we love telling others our views unasked, but in practice we tend to be pretty, uh, pragmatic about our beliefs. We're essentially a country of merchants/salesmen, we have been for a long time, and getting into real arguments over beliefs is not good for business. It's something I both love and hate about our culture.
(This is generalizing, of course, but I've been shocked to find out more and more how strong a 'culture' can be, even on a national level.)
My dutch manager has a nice anecdote about how he worked in France and got in trouble when he walked to the labs and talked to the analysts there to get an idea of a project. The Project leader felt extremely bypassed and pissed. In Holland, if you would be pissed you would be considered a dick. Surely if your project members can't be trusted to know things about their project and to be positive about you, you should be fired.
In my company our group leader is judged by all employees every year and we openly discuss what we don't like about his management style. He earns a lot of respect by listening and changing or defending why he doesn't change.
The best managers find a perfect balance between competitive behavior, ego, humbleness and the ability to delegate and trust employees. Yes, the silicon valley eagerness is rewarded and encouraged but you really won't get anywhere if you are a dick. Guess that would make a dutch Steve Jobs impossible. Perhaps it is why we don't have a silicon valley equivalent.
Nations under dictators are effective but they are only nice places to be when she/he is benevolent.
I can understand why the Project leader felt slighted. It's their job to know the status of the project and to present that. If someone comes in and bypasses them, you're kinda saying that they're not needed.
He just wanted to get a feel for the problems of the project and the people. What lives in the project, what are the people like.
I guess your reaction illustrates my point nicely I don't even consider this "bypassing". Why not feel proud of your project members? To feel bypassed is saying your are the preferred person for all communication, surely anyone can decide for themselves who they want to talk to. Would you feel afraid they say bad things? Then you are not a good leader. If you are a good leader your team makes you look good. That's how I'd see it. If someone talks to your team he probably has a reason, why even think anything about it?
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.
For most people they are doing generic work for a company. If you finish a task they give you another. There is an infinite amount of work to do. Therefore for the majority of people your statement means little. The employer would like them to work all hours to deliver more value. Every hour you work over 40 hours per week is a win for them and they are insatiable.
So how many hours per week do you actually work and is there any number of hours stated in your contract? I need these two variables to be able to reason about your claims.
Thanks. Can the other side of your contract complain if you simply don't come to work on some days? If they can complain then I believe you must have something specified, when not hours, then days.
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.
Because you have guys CEOs like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs that think it's okay to publicly flagellate their employees for missing work to witness the birth of their child.
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...
>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."
I've never had a "contract" with an employer which specified the number of hours I was to work in a week. At most tere might be a verbal agreement on "core hours" in the office to be available for meetings, but there was certainly no upper limit on the number of hours to be worked and no concept of overtime.
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.
Well, one, in America, workers don't have rights to stand up for. If you say no to working unpaid overtime, you're labeled "Not a team player" and fired.
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.
Both parents working is a trap. We used to need one parent working, then they changed mortgage lending to incorporate two incomes and surprise: land prices doubled.
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.
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."
That doesn't sound sensible to me. Land use controls don't force families who want better school districts to pay for housing. It's the differences in schools that make families to seek housing in the most-wanted areas, and most-wanted areas are naturally more expensive.
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.
Yeah, if the school quality is correlated to school financing, and school financing is correlated to property taxes paid, then existing homeowners must have paid a high amount of property taxes to propel their school district into a wealthy one.
Anybody who's overpaying for good school district is chasing home ownership in the area that's expensive to begin with.
can't reply to the throwaway dude as HN threading is nuts so replying here.
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.
This is going off on a tangent but I think you are spot on. It isn't just two incomes fueling the credit increase but also the insanely low interest rates. I don't think female workforce participation will/should go down, but I wonder if interest rates will ever go up to reasonable levels and pop the real-estate bubble (e.g. in Canada)? I have friends with crappy income situations buying houses for 600K+. I've been trying to hold off for as long as possible but we would really like to plant our roots somewhere (poor immigrant to the Western world so owning land in my new homeland was a dream from childhood). In places like Toronto and Vancouver, buying a home for people of modest means seems financial suicide (perhaps only if you have taken Econ courses). We live in messed up times.
Why can't it simply be that as most households moved from 1 to 2 income, the market adapted?
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?
You can't have a free market in land. There are too many constraints such as planning permissions and the fact that the supply is fixed overall.
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.
I think easy credit has a lot to do with the rise in housing prices, as does the additional income earned by two spouses, but it's not quite so simple to compare housing, say, 30 or 40 years ago to today. What we call a house, and the amenities we put in the home, are quite different.
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.
I once owned a townhouse in South Florida. Here are the sale prices over time:
1999 (built): 99,000
2001: 140,000
2005: 309,000
2010 230,000
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.
My parents owned a house in Milwaukee. They paid $30,000 or so for it, in 1980. They sold it for $30,000 or so, in 1988. It's still worth $30,000 or so. This scenario was repeated hundreds of thousands of times in Milwaukee alone.
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.
The land is only part of the equation, as with dense housing you can stack apartments on top of one another and amortize the land cost among larger number of buyers.
> 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.
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.
LOL, too many meetings, to little direction, too many asshats in attendance. That is the general description of meetings I am in, which unfortunately, is frequently.
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.