No pictures in this post, just observations.
Portugal has issues with employment. Overall, unemployment is quite high, esecially among younger workers (I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, but just trust me - it's a big deal here). However, of the jobs that do exist, a disproportionate number are in the public sector. I'm not a right-wing nutter, I don't have hostility towards the idea of government jobs, But in Portugal, they probably take it too far.
First, a note on unemployment. It's obvious by the amount of men sitting idle throughout the day, nursing drinks at the cafe, milling around the newstands with nowhere in particular to go. The more entrepeneurial among them find ways to earn a little money. In a city where driving is a hassle and parking is a hellacious nightmare, you'll see guys become what I call "parking scouts." They'll give drivers a heads up about a vacant space somewhere, hold it for them, and often help guide them in if it's a tight parallel parking job. All this in return for a "tip" of whatever the driver feels like contributing.
You also see stores, like the appliance store where we bought our refrigerator and washer, offer delivery of their goods. In reality, what they do is after you've bought the item and returned home, the proprietor goes around the neighborhood finding guys with nothing else to do who might like to earn a few Euros by hauling a refrigerator up five flights of stairs and installing it.
People are making due however they can. Outright homelessness isn't a huge problem, although it is visible. But that's partly because the government offers so much support to the people. However, that benificent attitude is also, partly, why the government accrued such a deficit, which is why it needed to borrow so much, which is why it needed to be bailed out to stay solvent when the European economic crisis hit.
Of course, another big source of government spending is paying all of its employees. The over-reliance on the public sector for jobs is pretty obvious, and I'll give you some examples.
In America, at least, trash pickup is a weekly occurence (and is often privatised also, but that's not the point). Here, trash is picked up daily. Every night in the wee hours (except Sunday nights) a truck, and two or three workers, comes by to collect the trash. That's great for sanitation, but not for keeping costs down. Think about how many more man-hours that requires the sanitation department to cover - all on the public dime.
Another example is the postal service. Americans are used to a regular mailperson covering their route, plus someone else to cover for that person, and that's it pretty much. Here, we've had multiple mail carriers come to our address to deliver mail, on the same day. There doesn't appear to be one carrier, one route, but rather multiple carriers covering the ame territory.
Also, when you go into the actual post office itself, they have workers assigned to specific tasks. So, for basic functions like buying stamps and sending a letter, they might have four people waiting to service that need. But then there are other employees sitting behind the desk, waiting to service other random functions, often with nothing to do until that one person who needs to complete that one random task walks in. They could trim the payrolls by making the workers perform multiple functions.
Now, again, I don't mean for this to sound like a conservative rant. This is merely an observation of what appears to be an intractable problem. In a country with high unemployment, the idea of trimming the public payroll to cut costs isn't exactly a popular idea. Besides, without also trimming social spending, those employees that would be out of work would still be costing the government money anyway. The least painful way out of the situation would be to try and encourage growth in the private sector in industries that would hire people. And that is a whole different ball of wax.
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