i made a statement, backed it up by mentioning productivity, and then made a reference to a real world example that I have observed, unlike the article that just mostly made platitudes.
if you'd like further evidence, the EU area has an unemployment rate close to 12%. companies are not anxious to hire europeans for one reason or another.
Almost all the EU unemployment is in the countries with long working hours and shorter vacations, oddly enough. Scandinavia, Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands don't have high unemployment. People work reasonably short hours, take long vacations, and the many consulting companies here have no problem getting contracts, both within Europe and worldwide.
The European countries with major economic problems are in the south and east, where they tend not to have as generous vacation and hour policies in the first place. If you work with a Greek or Spanish consulting company, they will be there any time you want, bringing everyone into the office at 3am on a Saturday their time, if you ask for it. Good luck getting a Danish company to do that! Yet the Danish companies are not having trouble getting work.
Platitudes? On the contrary, the article made a lot of claims to back up the central point, and backed almost every one of them with research papers.
The countries with a high unemployment rate are also poorer and lack other benefits, most notably the mentioned vacations. We're talking about developed EU countries, and that's what we're comparing against the US.
France, Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain are developed nations, they just don't suit your argument. They all have or did have very long vacation days per year.
And you cant just cherry pick a few european countries and compare against the whole of the US. If we are going to play that game, why not pit them against silicon valley, manhatan, etc.
Greece and Portugal barely qualify for being developed. Greece in particular is basically a third world country that sits on Europe's doorstep. They got into the eurozone through gross fraud and manipulation of their own economic statistics, then borrowed money at German rates for years to enjoy a first-world standard of living. But the fundamentals in Greece were not first world at all. One memorable quote I saw in an article about this was, "We imported flat screen TV's and exported tomatoes".
What's happening in Greece is basically the huge pain of reality reasserting itself. Greece is more like a poor Asian or African country; enormous corruption, largely unskilled workforce, rampant tax evasion, no real industries to speak of outside shipping, huge imbalance of payments and so on.
Portugal is in much the same boat. It's "developed" in a sense, but like Greece up until very recently was actually a military dictatorship of the like you'd expect to see in the developing world. It's not developed in the same way Germany is.
With respect to the others, Ireland and Spain are indeed first world nations, suffering very badly thanks to the financial crisis. Ireland took on its banks debts and became poor in the process. Spain had a huge construction bubble.
Most EU unemployment is in the countries comprehensively raped by the IMF/EU Central Bank/European Commission cabal, who swooped in after 2008 demanding huge cuts in social spending so that the bond investors who were partly responsible for the crisis would be inconvenienced as little as possible.
Greece, Portugal, Ireland, Spain and Cyprus have seen huge leaps in unemployment, underage prostitution, suicide, child and adult mortality, and drug use as a result.
They used to be solid economies, with EU-wide unemployment running at around 7%. Now they're hollowed out shells.
'Employers' have nothing to do with this. It was purely a political decision, based on bad economic science (at best) and north-south racism at worst.
And the forcing of disparate country economic systems into line with the single euro based German one which meant they had no way out.
As the economics editor of the Guardian said of the Euro is a bad idea who's time has come.
The PIGS politicians also fiddled the figures to there own ends which lead to a property boom and crash in their country's - so those country are not totally innocent.
if you'd like further evidence, the EU area has an unemployment rate close to 12%. companies are not anxious to hire europeans for one reason or another.