America may have its foundations in a group of people who just wanted the freedom to practice their religion without interference, but ever since, America has been famously billed as “the land of opportunity,” and opportunity attracts people who want to take advantage of said opportunity. In short, over the many decades, people who came to America were (and are) people who wanted to take advantage of the opportunity to work: industrious, adventurous, and so on. Immigration is a filter that is biased toward the selection of people with a strong work ethic.
No doubt the US has its equivalent of the Japanese “salaryman,” for whom long hours at a desk convey the appearance of doing a lot of work. But the US is famous for “start-ups” in which the founder and his/her colleagues really do work insane hours, even to the point of compromising their health by getting inadequate sleep and eating an unhealthy-but-convenient-and-cheap diet, for a shot at potentially becoming obscenely wealthy. Amazon, Google, Apple, and countless other wildly successful companies did not become the juggernauts they are today because their founders sat around sharpening pencils for 15 hours a day.
What about the Irish (white) slaves? From 1641 to 1652, 300,000 Irish were sold as slaves.
African slaves were very expensive (due to “shipping” costs) during the late 1600s (50 Sterling). Irish slaves came cheap (no more than 5 Sterling).
England continued to ship tens of thousands of Irish slaves for more than a century. Records state that, after the 1798 Irish Rebellion, thousands of Irish slaves were sold to both America and Australia.
Most jobs in Europe offer paid health and dental only when that’s required by law (some countries’ healthcare systems have the companies pay part of each employee’s contribution, some do not); in Spain, if a “help wanted” ad from a US-owned company offers “health insurance” it usually means that it’s been written by someone in the US who isn’t familiar with either Spanish law or Spanish customs. The same ads will sometimes contain language about being an “Equal Opportunity Employer”, another thing which in Spain is a legal requirement at the constitutional level.
Europe is open to innovation much more than the US. If you have an idea in Germany or France you only have to get it spread through a much smaller area. If it is successful then it will spread to other countries. Or a better version will displace it. In the US you can’t do anything without a major corporation providing national support. You can’t sell a widget unless you have 10,000 of them shipped to every branch store in the country. And then the thing is owned by a corp that will sue everyone who tries to improve on it. See Edison, Bell, or the Wright bros. The cell phone was developed in the US but the inventors couldn’t get access to the bandwidth through congress, until it became a success in Europe. Budweiser became a top brand when it developed a beer that can be shipped all over the country without going off (more than it is, I suppose). For years American food was focused on shelf life, (possibly because they wanted things you could ship overseas). This has gotten worse to the point where there don’t seem to be local brands, only local divisions of (three or four) national companies.
Visit Europe and you will see lots of things that aren’t in the US, things that are new and will be here in a few years or things that are old, not a great success, but kept around because, why not? Three wheeled cars, paternoster lifts, canals.
Stone circles.
As to your first objection, I know perfectly well that racism was and is pervasive in most European countries. What they did not have was plantation-type mass slavery of black people.
As to your second paragraph, I am sure Americans would take vacations like Europeans if only they could afford to.
Huh, well that is something I had no idea about, health insurance in Europe. How does that map to how health care is provided, in Spain (since that is where you seem to be).
Paycheck, paid time off, health insurance and retirement contributions seem to be the 4 main components of the basic compensation package these days. Some employers offer some, some employers offer all, but regardless, those are what I would consider to be parts of a “standard package” these days.
When you’re comparing compensation between different countries, you have to allow for the differences between the way the countries work. For example, in some countries employers have nothing to do with healthcare, it’s paid for out of general revenues or perhaps through a dedicated tax. How do you compare compensation between a country like that and my compensation, where my employer pays about $16K per year for my health insurance premium on top of my salary?
In Canada, paid time off isn’t part of the package because it’s required by law. In my province, you are entitled to three weeks off per year starting out. Goes up the longer you work for that employer.
Health insurance isn’t part of the package either, because of Medicare. Some employers will give supplemental health benefits (prescription drugs, eyeglasses and dental, mainly).
All employers have to pay matching contributions to the Canada Pension plan and to Employment Insurance. Some employers may have a retirement plan - usually defined contribution, nowadays.
It’s not just a question of money. It’s that European workers have much greater legal rights to paid vacation time than do American workers.
Which again raises the question : what is so different about the American social and political system than workers in the US do not have as much statutory rights as workers in Europe?
True. In the UK, the vast majority of salaried jobs don’t come with any health insurance, because why would they. The NHS is funded through taxation. Some jobs have ‘private health insurance’ as an extra perk, bit like having a car allowance, or free gym membership, but it’s by no means standard.
Paid time off (minimum 20 days plus public holidays) and pension contributions are mandated by law. Along with additional paid maternity/paternity which is more complex so I won’t bog the thread down with those.
In Spain and for workers there are the following sources of healthcare and ways to pay for it (people not currently employed have access to the same, but don’t pay SSTax): Seguridad Social. This is both a source of healthcare (public clinics and hospitals, plus private clinics and hospitals that are associated with it) and the tax that pays for it. A special type of private-associated healthcare is Mutuas: these manage job-related illnesses and injuries, but the money comes from the same tax. The exact values for the tax are set yearly; current values here (not available in English).
The % of total compensation (includes salary and “payments in kind” such as housing, company car, etc.) is usually around 30%; right now it stands at 23.60% paid by the company and 4.70% paid by the worker (withdrawn from salary), total 28.30%
That would be for an employee; there are special regimes such as autónomos (self-employed not in the rest of this list), cleaning self-employed, farmers, athletes, artists… which pay according to different tables and which, being self-employed, pay the whole chunk ourselves.
There are lower (the Minimum Monthly Salary) and upper limits: if you make less you don’t pay this tax, if you make more you pay the upper limit.
Private: out of pocket. Most of my private healthcare has been like this. It was usually a matter of convenience (services available at better hours than if I went through the public system) or of wanting services not available in the public system (when I had Lasik it counted as “not necessary”, therefore the public system wouldn’t have covered it; my great-aunt who could only see dark cars if they moved got it through the public system).
Private insurance: the only thing the patient needs to worry about is whether the specific clinic is “in network” or not (no worrying about specific people in the clinic, no copays, no nothing: just hand your card to the admin and she handles everything). Clinics may have some services which are not covered by your plan but if so they will always make it super-clear beforehand. The newest player in the game.
Some jobs offer this but in reality it makes little sense to most people; the immense majority of those who carry it, it’s because of the conceit that “private is always better”. Many a person who thought that having private insurance would mean having his smallest worry treated as if he had gotten one of the nicest docs in a TV show has been surprised when the private clinic sent him to the local public hospital. The immense majority of jobs which offer it don’t even pay for it: they just offer access to the plan, which again is… often you can get the same plan by walking into the nearest insurance broker and asking for it.
Retirement contributions: SSTax pays for pensions, with private retirement plans available as a “saving tool”; company contributions are pretty much unheard of. The only time I’ve encountered that in Spain it was an offer “in lieu of seniority”. If we gave up our automatic seniority bonus (1% of base salary for year worked), we got signed on to this retirement plan and the company paid in as much as we did, yay (4% of base salary each). Some lab tech whose name I can’t remember I promise I’m completely innocent Your Lordship and have no idea who may it have been took about 5 minutes to create a spreadsheet showing that we’d be losing money if we took the offer. A dude already known for his big mouth and penchant for trouble took it to the worker’s reps, who politely declined the offer.
In the US it is a legal requirement only at certain levels (as so many labor laws in the US do) and only for a list of specific items (which is treated as limited when its originator probably did not mean it that way); in Spain posting “we will comply with the most basic laws in the country” is stupid on account of the fact that discriminating by any reason not directly tasks-related can get you reamed so hard your grandkids will inherit the ability to shit through their mouth (the problem is one, working up the will to go to Labor, and two, being able to prove it, but when it’s been proven it’s been painful for the idiots who did it). Are you also offering to let me pee? Breathe? You will even go to the effort of paying me? You’ll comply with the Law of Gravity too, not only those of Man? WOW!
And excuse me, but where I said those ads are written by people unfamiliar with Spanish laws and customs? One has to be some kind of extreme imbecile to miss that US labor law does not apply in Spain. We’ve got the gall to have our own.
The United States has the highest net migration of any country by far, in spite of our health care, work culture, racism and all the other negatives mentioned.
So to me that implies there is at least a perception of opportunity in the US that doesn’t exist as strongly in other countries.
Anecdotally, my personal take is that the US is a place where we place a higher value on letting people achieve as much as they can, even at the expense of the working and middle classes. Europe seems to place a much higher premium on social safety nets, even if it makes it harder to “get rich”. I did some work in the Netherlands some years ago. We had a similar discussion with some of my local coworkers there and they said the attitude was most people don’t “get rich”, but even poor people “do ok”.
As for specific studies, I think you need to be more specific about which aspect of “work ethic” you are referring to.
Interesting wording there; you’re using ‘achieve’ and ‘get rich’ as synonyms. To me, they have a clear difference.
Maybe it’s just my friend group, but simply ‘getting rich’ just doesn’t seem to be a goal in itself for as many people in Europe (though as the lottery and suchlike show, it is for some), it’s more about what you do. It could be because, in the presence of national healthcare and various other safety nets, the amount you need to save for a decent retirement is a lot lower, so the point where quality of life is more valuable than money is lower.
Someone working 60+ hours a week isn’t going to impress people here, they’re more likely to get people concerned about burnout and people questioning the point.
And usually, when people here work 60+ hours it’s also seen as a sign of bad management; I think we’re less likely than Americans to have people working multiple jobs (either full time or “just below having to be considered full time so the company can avoid providing benefits”, a situation which doesn’t even exist in (most of?) Europe*), but note that in the US when people talk about that they’re not talking about those who sit on the board of multiple companies but rather of people who can barely make ends meet.
My SiL just had to take medical leave due to a work-stress-related illness: she is in fact working a lot more hours than she should, and wouldn’t ever have thought of asking for compensation (either time back or pay) if it hadn’t been for the new regulation forcing people to clock in and out. But she barely makes minimum wage, and barely makes minimum wage whether she’s working 40 or 55. It’s a case of bad management combined with not standing up for yourself, not of “this is the path to power and money”.
The kind of benefits that American employers avoid with that kind of tricks are mandatory here. If someone doesn’t get them that someone is working completely under the table, or for a company whose managers can’t count while they themselves are very bad at saying “dude, where’s my vacation?” (or other employer-managed, required bennies, such as employer-paid healthcare insurance where this situation applies).