It's very hard to a lott of Euro companies o fire or layoff employees, so I think they look at them as fungible human capital and when they hire them the expect to work the shit ~OUTTa them except for the annual holiday ritual. Merrikuns work more total hours/year than Euros, butt I'll bett most Euros work a lott more shittier hours than we do.
I don't know. Of course I haven't lived in Italy in a long time, but the people I knew there weren't worked to death. They weren't paid as much as their counterparts in US companies would have been, but they got plenty of time off, and rarely had to stay at work past six.
I had an on-again, off-again boyfriend called Aldo. He was the second-in-command at the Milan offices of Credito Bergamasco, a smallish but respectably wealthy bank. Aldo was offered the top spot when he was in his early 40s. He turned it down. I asked why, and he said, "I didn't want the responsibility".
Needless to say, in this country, that'd be a certain career killer. He would have been sent to some wretched branch bank in the back of beyond, or perhaps even fired. None of that happened. He remained in the number two post till he was in his sixties, when they sort of forced him to become a director and work in the bank's Bergamo headquarters. But that didn't last long--he reached retirement age within a few years--and for that time, he was paid a higher salary, which mattered because it affected the size of his pension.
The Italians, at least, do care about their quality of life.
