Re: [OT] Lazy Inefficient European Socialist Losers?

From: Bill Sloman (bill.sloman_at_ieee.org)
Date: 08/12/04 

Date: 12 Aug 2004 14:01:37 -0700

Scott Stephens <scottxs@comcast.net> wrote in message news:<atCSc.242101$%_6.142270@attbi_s01>...
> Thanks to Stu at misc.survivalism;
>
> http://tinyurl.com/48zy9
>
> > The grass is not greener Bruce Bartlett (archive)
> >
> > August 10, 2004 | Print | Send

<snip>
 
> > One reason for the short workday is that Europeans seem to get sick a
> > lot more than Americans. According to a July 25 report in The New
> > York Times, on an average day 25 percent of Norway's workers call in
> > sick. A 2002 study in Sweden found that the average worker there took
> > more than 30 sick days per year. Makes you wonder just how good their
> > health care systems really are.

<snip>

This all sounds like a load of rubbish. The productivity figures are
wildly different from those quoted in "The World We're in" by Will
Hutton,
ISBN: 0349114714, available from www.amazon.co.uk for about $12 plus
postage.

The sick leave figures I didn't snip are particuarly comical - in the
Netherlands 5% absenteeism due to sickness is taken as evidence that
employee morale is rock-bottom. At the last place I worked it was
around 1%. From what I recall of my time in the U.K. the pattern there
wasn't much different.

I'm reminded of an occasion when I got a cheque for some remote
consulting I'd done in the U.S. and the U.S. bank had inverted the
dollar to guilder exchnage rate, sending me about a quarter of the
money intended - U.S. "experts" really don't know much about the rest
of the world.

------
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

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