{"id":7658,"date":"2018-06-22T11:52:06","date_gmt":"2018-06-22T09:52:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=7658"},"modified":"2018-06-22T11:53:46","modified_gmt":"2018-06-22T09:53:46","slug":"portugal-jobs-and-banks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/7658\/","title":{"rendered":"Portugal, Jobs, and Banks"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m back from Portugal, where I spent almost the entire time in dingy bars watching the world cup and drinking heavily with an American mate, joined briefly by a Venezuelan ex-colleague who happened to be transiting in Lisbon airport on his way back to Angola. I saw a tiny bit of Porto and nothing at all of Lisbon, which made me rather glad I&#8217;d <a href=\"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/4312\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">been there before<\/a>. That said, I had a great time: catching up with friends and getting drunk in foreign countries is as good a holiday as any, even if it could just as well take place in your basement. The first thing I&#8217;ll do today is eat a vegetable: I don&#8217;t think I saw one the whole time I was there. I consumed copious amounts of pork, bacon, sausage, potato, and grease though. I was also offered, quite brazenly, all manner of illegal drugs in the street of Lisbon, something which didn&#8217;t happen last time.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, this morning I found this on my Twitter feed:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-lang=\"en\">\n<p dir=\"ltr\" lang=\"en\">Tomorrow&#8217;s front page: Airbus prepares to take flight <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/hashtag\/tomorrowspaperstoday?src=hash&amp;ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">#tomorrowspaperstoday<\/a> <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/xFrATQlEbR\">pic.twitter.com\/xFrATQlEbR<\/a><\/p>\n<p>\u2014 The Times of London (@thetimes) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/thetimes\/status\/1009912347702497280?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">June 21, 2018<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s the second story I find interesting. Leaving aside the high probability that not a single person working at <em>The Times<\/em> knows the first thing about fruit picking and they&#8217;re likely just repeating whatever they&#8217;ve been told, since when was a job being <em>fun<\/em> a requirement to taking one? It&#8217;s little wonder we rely on foreigners to pick fruit if the local youth are permitted to refuse jobs and collect welfare because the work being offered isn&#8217;t fun enough for them. Perhaps <em>The Times<\/em>, rather\u00a0than engaging in Brexiit scaremongering, could have gone into the reasons behind this extraordinary sense of entitlement in today&#8217;s unemployed and reflected on their role in supporting the various governments under whose watch it developed.<\/p>\n<p>Incidentally, the chap I was drinking with in Portugal works in banking and, according to him, the giant American banks are shifting thousands of jobs from London to Paris. I asked how they&#8217;d cope with the unions and labour laws, and he said they&#8217;ve done their homework and they&#8217;re simply not going to deal with the unions. If they run into any labour disputes, they&#8217;ll simply up and leave. I have every reason to believe what my friend says is accurate, but I suspect these banks have been lured in with promises of special dispensation and once they&#8217;re installed the reality is going to hit them right between the eyes. I wonder how long it will be before the CEO of an American bank realises by law he must form a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.service-public.fr\/particuliers\/vosdroits\/F96\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">work council<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Any company with at least 50 employees must set up a works council (CE). This committee is composed of representatives of the staff and trade unions, with a mandate of 4 years maximum. It is chaired by the employer. It has economic, social and cultural attributes. To carry out its missions, it has hours of delegation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>We&#8217;re not in London any more, Toto.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m back from Portugal, where I spent almost the entire time in dingy bars watching the world cup and drinking heavily with an American mate, joined briefly by a Venezuelan ex-colleague who happened to be transiting in Lisbon airport on &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/7658\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[99,111,13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7658"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7658"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7658\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7660,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7658\/revisions\/7660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}