Cartoon text: "Since I'm going to stay poor, a little more free time is welcome".
Reduced working hours. Cartoon of 06/07/2024 in CTXT
The PSOE and Sumar agreement to reduce working hours, which was presented in January, and which will affect some 12 million workers, continues to provoke the expected reactions from Garamendi and the eternal cries of the tourism employers' association and the majority of hotel and catering businessmen.
While the exact dates for each phase are not yet known, it is estimated that full-time working hours without pay cuts will be set at 38.5 hours in the autumn and 37.5 hours by 1 January 2025.
The neoliberaloid media, in a recurrent exercise of anti-journalism, have for some time now been launching their usual panic headlines based solely on opinions with catastrophic data invented by psychics from various business associations.
The Exceltur people, by profession their business, write futuristic headlines of many billions for El Economista (which does not question them even a little) with what they estimate they will stop earning (not losing) according to their forecasts and wishes of the growth of their profits.
This other catastrophist prophecy is signed by BBVA Research (an ultra-capitalist propaganda racket that sneaks news every so often into the media on the cheap) and Fedea (another lobby of the same ilk) and El Economista is delighted to eat it all up and make it its own without verifying a single comma. Then what usually happens with this type of alarmist and self-serving headlines with false estimates.
We already know how these people work, under the false premise of misunderstood productivity and competitiveness and "freedom for their own" they consider any measure that benefits the worker and/or improves his situation as a violent attack on the economy (that of the employer).
You are poor
To find out if you are poor you can do a very simple test. Ask yourself how long you could live without working before retiring. If you can't work out how long you could live without working before retiring, the verdict is in. You are poor.
But it could be even worse, the 13th EAPN-ES State of Poverty Report found that in 2022, one in three poor people (32.9%) were in paid work, while among employed people, the risk of poverty was 12.5%.
"Although nowadays, having a job alone does not guarantee sufficient income to live a decent life. The increases in the minimum wage or the latest labour reform have been fundamental tools to prevent thousands of people from falling into poverty. But the figures show that it is not enough.
Working to be poor. This is what the labour market has become, in line with the sociopathic idea of an obligatory and inevitable unlimited growth of company profits at the expense of the degradation of wages and working conditions. By profession, poor.
Half of the people assisted by Caritas in 2023 were employed, according to its report.
Third parties, oe, oe, oe, oe
According to Eurostat data, Spain is the third country in the European Union with the highest number of people living in poverty or social exclusion.
In 2023, 94.6 million people in the European Union were at risk of poverty or social exclusion, 21.4 % of the population. These Eurostat figures place Spain as the country with the third highest rate of poverty and/or exclusion, only behind Romania and Bulgaria.
