Well, in a lot of ways work in Europe is surprisingly like….work in America.
Let me give this obligatory caveat before I start: Europe is not uniform. Work in France is reputedly different from work in the UK or Germany.
I live in the Czech Republic. Business culture here is more or less like in Germany.
Most people get to work at a certain time; clock in; work; take a lunch break; work some more; then go home.
Factory workers and the like have set hours;(usually 6 am to 2 pm; with second and third shifts at many factories); some office workers might be required to work 40 hours a week, but might have some flexibility about when they choose to come in(between, say 6 and 8); and some salaried professionals have tasks that they need to accomplish and have much more flexibility in hours.
Managers and executives tend to work at the weekend, too, unpaid, and unofficial sending emails and so on.
I suppose the great majority of Americans working in Europe are professionals or teachers; Europe doesn’t have a great need for American waiters or factory workers or street cleaners. They have those.
Me, I am an English teacher and I own a school that employs about 30 people. So my job is different than the average job: I have, at times very LONG hours; but I also have about 12 weeks off in any given year.
On the other hand I have a lot of responsibility and a rather heavy workload(the heaviest at my school) and sometimes I have to work at the weekend. When I want to hire new teachers from abroad, I conduct Skype interviews at weekends, and sometimes that can take up to 6 hours. I spend weeks in the summer, when I don’t teach at all, making a schedule for the new school year, coordinating it with teachers’ wishes and clients demands.
During the school year, my days range from really light — on every other Wednesday, for example, I teach from about 7.30 am to 12.20 pm and then I’m done. But on other days I amexcessively busy. I work in two towns on Thursday and I start at 6.30 in one town and end at 745 pm in another town. I spend about 70 minutes driving between classes and I have a 90 minute break at lunch to eat lunch and plan my afternoon lessons. Otherwise, I’m working full on, non-stop.
Health Care:
Pretty much everybody who works in Europe has health care. Period. It doesn’t work exactly the same in every country but there it is. In my country, you just can’t get a job without health insurance.
Health insurance is automatically taken out of your pay check; for self-employed people on a sole trader’s license, they are responsible themselves for paying for insurance. If they don’t pay there are heavy, heavy fines. And they can lose their license. The only people who don’t pay are certain part time workers, children and of course, the unemployed. They are covered by the state.
Some people like to say this is ‘'Free Health Care.” That is, of course, nonsense. It is paid for by the employee and employer(or just the self-employed person.) However, it is true that when I visit a hospital or a doctor I don’t pay anything. Medical insurance actually FUNCTIONS here. In the US I’d probably pay twice as much for insurance and still have to pay when I visited the hospital.
And medicine is very very cheap, often free. (I take statins, blood pressure medicine, an asthma inhaler and aspirin regularly. The only thing I pay for is aspirin which is 100 kč or about $6—for a package of one hundred aspirin.)
A few years ago I was rushed by ambulance to the hospital, two hospitals actually and underwent bypass surgery and convalescence in the hospital which lasted for 25 days(complications). At the end of it I was asked to pay 750 kc for the stay…which works out to…maybe 30 dollars?
I was very pleased with the care in this hospital, by the way, which is in Brno. (Though I am not pleased with my local hospital in the small town I live in.)
As a result, of course, more people call in sick.
Europeans often laugh when I tell them ‘In America, we don’t get sick. We can’t afford to.’ But it really is true. I can’t EVER remember calling in sick in the USA; though I was sent home a few times once the manager took a look at me. Even so, I still didn’t go to the doctor’s. I just, you know, got over it.
Now in the past, naturally, some people took advantage of this and called in sick. So nowadays the way it works in this country is if you are ill you do NOT get paid at all for the first three days.
Afterwards, if you are ill, the state will pay you a fraction of what you officially earn. (Maybe 25 %).
It can take a while to get into your bank account, I must say.
Overall it is a good system and I think it contributes to the relative health of the people.
Job Security:
Full time employees have more job security than in the US. Companies are obliged by law to pay two months severance pay if they fire a worker.
However, a dirty little secret is that there are plenty of legal ways around it.
For example, most of the teachers working for me, including my girlfriend/co-director, work on a sole trader’s license. This means they are responsible for paying taxes/social/medical payments themselves; and there is an automatic write off of 60 percent for these people. Meaning that their official income is far, far lower than it actually is. So by employing them, I can pay a certain amount, and they pay perhaps 15 percent, all told, in social and medical and basically nothing in income tax because their official income is too low. Whereas on a full-time contract, I would pay the same, but 40–45 percent of it would go to social/medical/tax.
But the downside is they have no guarantee of severance pay or anything like that. And ultimately less gets paid into their pension fund. (many sole traders have private pension plans.)
If I was to fire somebody, I could do it: I would simply tell them that we had no hours for them. Now, I might give them some severance pay anyway if they had a situation at home with children or whatever.But I’m really not legally obliged to do it.
Happily, I am careful about who I hire and thus have never had to fire someone who was working a significant amount of hours. That would be dreadful.
Another way around this severance pay issue that I have seen is that companies just make short-term contracts, say, for six months. When the six months is over, they can then terminate the contract without severance pay.
And it is done a lot.
So don’t be lulled by the surface of the law.
Don’t be lulled by the wages either. Wages in Europe may seem lower, but remember we are set for health care; and there are loopholes like the one I just mentioned, where people are officially making only 40 percent of what they are actually making.
Parental Leave:
Having a child is so much less stressful in Europe. No ten thousand dollar bill for delivering a baby; as a result, 'alternative' methods of giving birth seem to be a little less popular. Gee, I wonder if the cost of health care has to do with that?
And after birth there's maternity leave. Every country in Europe -- indeed, nearly every country in the world -- has a developed parental leave system. It differs from country to country, of course. In the Czech Republic, one of the parents(usually, but not always, the mother) can take from 6 months to 3 years off in order to raise their child. The employer must hold the position the mother held(if he doesn't than he is obliged to pay three months of severence pay) for that time period; and the mother receives some money from the social state. This is usually not much; it's based on the wage of the mother; and often doesn't reach above minimum wage(approximately 7000 kc/month net, or 300 dollars. But considering the money saved for health care and child-care, it is probably enough for anyone, except single mothers, of course. Single mothers obviously have the same struggles with money here as they do anywhere.
Vacation:
Probably the biggest and best difference between working in Europe and working in US is the vacation time.
IN my country I believe workers(again on a full-time contract) can expect 4 weeks of paid holiday. Many companies give an additional week as a perk, so lots of professionals have 5 weeks of vacation.
As a teacher and a language school owner, I basically have nearly three months of holiday(counting Christmas and summer, spring break…but as an administator and language school owner I do quite a lot of administrative work on the computer in the summer. Still, I am able to take it easy.)
Now, if it seems that that is awful generous of the employer, remember: wages are lower in Europe. One of the reasons is the holiday pay. Obviously an employer in the USA could do the same: just pay 1/12th less per month and he is covered.
There are so many destinations in Europe that are affordable and easy to get to, beautiful and awesome.
. Here in the Czech Republic, I can easily choose between the Adriatic Sea or the Baltic; both places are within a twelve-hour drive. The Alps are 8 hours away, the High Tatras, 4.
For further destinations, there are very cheap airlines. (I can fly to the UK for as little as 600 kc—$36 dollars!—if I am lucky.)
There is a cliche that Europeans work to live while Americans live to work. I feel that that gives the impression that Europeans are lazier than Americans. I don’t really think that is true, at least not in my corner of Europe. There are some lazy people, sure, like anywhere, but on the whole most people are hard-working and efficient. The lazy people don’t usually achieve a high positions. They don’t have good jobs.
But there is some truth to that cliche.
When I first came here, I literally had no idea what to do when I didn’t work. I had two weeks ahead of me with nothing to do. I actually kind of freaked out! I literally begged my boss to give me some work to do.
I’ve gotten over that now.
Honestly, when it comes down to it, I would much, much rather live and work in Europe than the USA. I’m not putting the USA down: it is my home country and there are some things I am proud of it for. I understand that in some fields, the USA is the place to be. But for the average joe, life is more comfortable in Europe. Moving here was the best decision I ever made.
I agree with your words, although I had a good experience in the local hospital as well
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