The Economist explains

Why Europeans slack off in August

Why do workers across the continent take as much as an entire month off?

By S.N. | AMSTERDAM

MANY Europeans wishing to build a house, see a dentist or buy a baguette this month will have been disappointed. A surprising number of businesses continue the long-established practice of collectively taking off July or August. Pictures of hammocks and palm trees adorn the websites of small businesses across the continent, wishing customers a happy holiday and telling them to try again in September. “Summer is near and Frankie will take a nap for a while,” says the site of Frankie’s Social, a bar in Limassol, Cyprus, without giving any indication of when they might open again. Why do Europeans take off August en masse?

The idea that summer is for play, not work, seems hard to shake for many Europeans. The habit is especially ingrained in old manufacturing sectors. During and after the industrial revolution, entire factories in northern England would decamp to the same beachside resorts. Until the 1980s Volkswagen, a German carmaker, would charter trains at the start of summer hiatus to move thousands of Italian workers from its plants in Wolfsburg, which turned into a ghost town, to their homes in Italy. One reason is that an assembly line does not function very well without a full complement of workers, so it makes sense for them to all take time off together. It is also a good opportunity to perform any maintenance or upgrades to the factory floor.

Yet the practice of downing tools in the midst of summer has spread well beyond the industrial sphere. It is harder to apply the same logic to restaurants and cafés, particularly those serving tourists. “We are open the rest of the year, seven days a week, so these days are earned,” says Rita Zubelli, who works in an ice-cream parlour in Milan that shuts in the height of the summer heat. In such sectors the practice of a shut-down seems driven more by habit and the social acceptance of holidaymaking in other sectors than by much business logic.

If you’re a tourist looking for an ice cream, a local trying to find a plumber, or even a journalist trying to write a story, Europe’s attitude to summer can be deeply frustrating. Yet despite, or perhaps because of, their leisure-seeking ways, Europeans are the most productive workers in the world. Dan Rogers, from Peakon, a consultancy, thinks the dip in employee productivity over holiday periods could be a reason to simply accept the European summer: “From an employer’s perspective, if your employees are less productive, and your business partners less responsive, the sensible decision would be to shut up shop.”

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