Antonio, Domingo and Pepe are old friends in their late 40s and 50s. All unemployed, they meet most mornings for coffee and cigarettes in Madrid's Puerta del Sol square and rant about the government.
The nation's civil service is a particularly attractive target. The men grumble about what they imagine is the life of a government worker — long coffee breaks, siestas and lots of paid time off.
"They earn much more than they're worth," Antonio says. "That's something that's got to change. They earn a lot, and they hardly do anything."
Jobs For Life
Spanish civil servants do earn a lot, compared with their private sector counterparts. Virtually all the best and brightest young graduates want to work for the government, and many are willing to stay on waiting lists for years — without pay — in hopes of snagging a position.
Civil servants took a recent hit when the government decided to cut their holiday bonuses this year, but even so, Spanish public workers are still the envy of their countrymen.
When Spain's economic crisis hit, the private sector immediately started shedding jobs and cutting wages. New labor reforms have made it even easier for companies to do so, and unemployment now tops 25 percent.
In contrast, most public employees still have jobs for life, says economist Gayle Allard of Madrid's IE Business School.
"They have had their wages frozen. Hiring has been frozen. But it's not the kind of severe adjustment you're seeing in the private sector," Allard says. "You hear people say, 'Wait a minute! In my company, we've cut all of our costs 30 percent. What's their problem? We're doing this, why can't they do it?' "
Strong Unions, Strong Numbers
One reason is the civil service's strong union contracts; another is the sheer number of civil servants in Spain. Bureaucrats, doctors, teachers and other public workers amount to 2.6 million people, more than 11 percent of the population. That makes politicians think twice about crossing them.
Spaniards also have a different attitude toward the state. The Pew Research Center recently found that while 6 in 10 Americans say they want to be free of interference from the state, more than 6 in 10 Spaniards say the opposite — that it's the government's job to make sure nobody is in need.
"It's a funny thing," says Allard. "I think Americans ... have a hard time understanding it, because we don't assign such a high value to security. But for Spaniards, that's really, really important."
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