Poles in work-life balance crisis

As many as 42 percent of Poles sacrifice their private life by working extra hours and taking extra jobs, finds a new survey.

Poles are more hard-working than any other European nation.

Every forth Pole works overtime and almost the same number agrees to work on weekends or evenings.

I dislike sweeping statements like these. It's as easy to find a trash article on the internet stating the opposite.

thenews.pl/9/7/Artykul/23890,Poles-in-worklife-balance-crisis


Sean that's the Daily STAR, A paper for tits and sensationalism;that is trash for sure, what part of the article I have shown is trash..I just cut and paste, no personal comment. Just threw it up for discussion...

And once again Moderators will you change my name to Milky O Mark . So the local spammers can be confused
For me Sean, that article you showed there from one of the soft pûrn mags, serves the purpose of dis-information and distracts the British people from whats going on in their own country, in reality(Im sure you know the game bla bla bla),similar to the click of snarks here, who systematically divert all talk away from the harsh reality of Poland today.

yeah, but it's a sweeping statement by any measure.

The European Union's working time directive imposes a 48 hour maximum working week. that applies to every member state except the United Kingdom (which has an opt-out meaning that UK-based employees may work longer than 48 hours if they wish, but they cannot be forced to do so).[11] France has enacted a 35-hour workweek by law, and similar results have been produced in other countries such as Germany through collective bargaining.

Do people bend this law? of course some do especially if the work is seasonal, a roofer is just not going to be working on top of a roof, in minus 30, in two metres of snow. I find people here work much earlier and go home much earlier than in Ireland.

Most bureaucrats work from 6 till 2 and I think most offices work 7:00-15:00, while banks still take the ****, my local opens at 10, I mean come on.... I was told that people here work and finish earlier so they can have quality time with their families or tend to their allotments. But these are just my observations, maybe someone could find an article on the internet that says the opposite :)

Maybe its something to do with the rural population and farming. In Eire, the school summer holidays are much longer than Europe for this very reason.

On other point, I think the poorer the country and the higher the unemployment the more emplyers take the ****.

Many don't appear to be out of kilter but I know quite a few work very long hours to make ends meet. However, let's keep things in perspective. They have MANY holidays and the weekend is spent recharging their batteries. It's not as if Poland is the epicentre of entertainment anyway ;)

The article isn't very explicit. It states Poles are working overtime. It doesn't indicate if they are being compensated financially, in return for the extra work hours they've contributed.

Did an interesting exercise at our workplace - people were complaining about overwork and unpaid overtime so we started to properly measure, recorded everyones time and paid out those who were working extra.

But the actual average amount of overtime in a 1000 person company was only 4 hours per head, so circa 3% extra and 1 hour per week. If you were to take out the time employees spend tossing around on facebook, talking on their cellphones for personal business, making coffee, smoking etc then I'm not convinced they are working themselves to death.

In Mark's world, you are talking about perks of the job!!!!.The capitalist employers make all the profit so the workers are entitled to waste half the day in lieu of the poor wages they receive.

This is something you may wish to read: any comments

According to Poland’s central bank adviser, Miroslaw Gronicki, there have been serious problems with the balance of payment statistics and the ‘errors and omissions’ have reached 4% of GDP.

This is most likely the result of imports being seriously underestimated.

We think imports could have been underestimated by as much as EUR10-15bn in 2010. This would mean that GDP (as well as GDP growth) has been overestimated. As a result, all of Poland’s key macroeconomic ratios would look worse: higher budget and current account deficit as a share of GDP and higher debt-to-GDP ratio (probably above the key level of 55%).

These ‘statistical issues’ raise a numbers of questions about the overall quality of Polish macroeconomic data, which is likely to be negative for the Polish FX and fixed income markets.

Imports have been underestimated by EUR10bn

According to the comments from Mr Gronicki, the ‘statistical issue’ might have been caused by a underestimation of Polish imports. We would tend to agree with this. We have looked at Polish import data and at the export statistics of Poland’s major trading partners (Germany, China, Russia, France and Italy). We have simply compared Polish imports from Germany with German exports to Poland. The numbers should be more or less the same. For China, Russia, France and Italy, this is in fact more or less the case. However, in the case of German-Polish trade, it seems that Polish imports from Germany are as much as EUR10-15bn lower than German exports to Poland (see graph on page 1). The question is: do we trust the Polish or the German data? We would tend to trust the German data as the difference between the two sets of data is more or less the same size as the errors and omissions in the balance of payment statistics. If this assumption is correct, we might be in for a marked revision of not only the Polish import data, but also a downward revision of Polish GDP data – perhaps going as far back as 2004.

In terms of the risk of data revisions, it should be noted that the Czech statistics office and the Czech central bank recently (10 March) revised its trade data significantly, which led to a significant negative revision of the Czech current account data. This might be an indication of what we could expect in the Polish case – just on a bigger scale.

Potential revision of GDP data raises serious questions
If we were to get a large downward revision of Polish GDP data going back in time, it would raise a number of serious questions. The direct consequences would be:

The current account and budget deficit in Poland in 2010 as share of GDP might have been close to double digits (or at least 7-8% of GDP). This is a ‘twin deficit’ of a similar size to Hungary in 2005-06 when the country was forced to implement significant austerity measures.

The public debt might already have topped 55% of GDP – potentially triggering a ‘forced’ tightening of fiscal policy due to Poland’s quasi-constitutional limits on public debt. This obviously raises serious political questions as the Polish government has consistently said the debt would not top 55% of GDP. In this regard, it should of course be noted that there will be parliamentary elections later this year.

The Polish government has said it will meet the demands of the European Commission to cut the budget deficit to below 3% of GDP in 2012. A large downward revision of Polish GDP data would make it almost impossible to reach a budget deficit of 3% without implementing Draconian budget cuts. Lack of action on fiscal policy could heighten the conflict between the European Commission and the Polish government on this issue

But can they really sting the average punter any more than they are doing? To attempt to do so would be met with a backlash.

Its a double edged sword, Seanus, on one hand create the illusion that you have the best performing economy in Europe and encourage everyone to spend or release the facts and watch your economy shrink, as people close their wallets. Remember the Pol gov, has continually played on domestic consumption as the secret of success.

Milky wrote:


doesn't everybody?

what constitutes "extra hours"? 9 hours instead of 8.5 hours?

milky wrote:


just a dumb statement.

It's all about maintaining the deception!

good point..


It's all about disposable income,which for the Poles the "majority' have little or none, so, a backlash would be inevitable, or else people will just spend a few more hours a week in church praying.


Its a cut and paste, not my words buddy...

Bloody good post.


The truth in a nutshell......... well put.

GUS report,, info gathered from 16 million Poles.
10 million work 40-49 hours week
1.1 million 50-59
650000 over 60 hours

I would much prefer to have employees who work 30 hours a week, happy, efficient and productive than workers who turned up for 50 hours who are lazy inefficient and unproductive.

Employers who consider hours in the office as a benchmark over productivity and skills - need retraining.

Merged:

Poles have Europe's third highest job satisfaction, international survey show

Polish Radio WEBSITE (capitlaisaiton for HB's benefit!) reports:


thenews.pl/1/12/Artykul/316505,Poles-third-in-European-job-satisfaction-ranking

Talk about economic miracles, one government turned Poland from a country of ruthlessly repressed poverty stricken people being constantly swindled by sneaky Magdalena roundtable hobgoblins with an economy "in ruins" into an increasingly prosperous country with record low unemployment in less than two yeas?!

Either
a) PiS are the greastest economic geniuses in human history (who'd of thunk it?)
b) their campaign was a load of horse hockey and they're mostly reaping the benefits of 8 years of PO rule...
c) there is no other option

and lowest budget deficit in 25 years.
PIS economic success of its reforms is undeniable,even by PIS opponents..thats why PO and leftist dont even try to attack PIS with economic arguments ect. but focus their attack rather on social issues,such immigration, "destroying"democracy .anty woman policies or anty EU values politics and other BS

Basically yes, the upturn in the Polish economy started to occur before the PiS junta seized power, not that the conservative PO were perfect. They're reaping the 'benefits' of a non-unionised low wage economy during a period where there is relocation to Poland in order to take advantage of free movement of goods and capital combined with lower wages and a lack of any sort of collective bargaining. That and a mass migration to the UK etc, removing a lot of the woes of large-scale unemployment.

Something which is basically storing up trouble for the future.