The World Today for August 05, 2024

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GREECE

Greece recently adopted a six-day working week to maintain its workforce as its population ages, but also to clamp down on tax evasion stemming from undeclared work.

Under the new law – which only applies to industries that operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the BBC explained – workers can’t work more than eight hours on their sixth day and should receive 40 percent overtime. Employers can also offer employees six-day work weeks when they are on the clock for only 6.5 hours per day, or 40 hours per week.

Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, a pro-business conservative, said the new policy was “deeply growth-orientated,” noted CNBC.

Someone earning $100 a day, or $500 a week, would therefore earn $640 under the law, added Al Jazeera. The news service also noted that the extra hours would make up for the more than 500,000 Greeks who have left the country since 2010 in search of better economic opportunities in the wake of the financial crisis that started in 2008.

Meanwhile, labor unions are complaining. Living costs in Greece are increasing while Greek workers, who aren’t lazy as they have been labeled, have become more productive in recent years after struggling to reattain the productivity levels that were high until the 2008 financial crisis, reported National Public Radio. Now Mitsotakis wants workers to toil longer while many other developed countries have been experimenting with shorter work weeks. In other words, Greece is bucking a trend to push through policies that are more family-friendly, promote a work-life balance as well as increase productivity.

“It makes no sense whatsoever,” civil servant union boss Akis Sotiropoulos told the Guardian. “When almost every other civilized country is enacting a four-day week, Greece decides to go the other way.”

Ninety percent of Canadians might prefer a four-day work week, for example, according to a survey cited by McGill University professor of management Jean-Nicolas Reyt in the Conversation. He noted that, in the 1870s, Canadians routinely worked 12-hour days, six days a week, or 72 hours per week. When Toronto printers demanded a nine-hour workday in 1872, they were dismissed as crazy.

Meanwhile, Belgium, Iceland, South Africa, Japan and New Zealand are all tinkering with reducing the working week.

Some countries have also sought to reduce the amount of time that employees must deal with work. In Belgium, Kenya, France, and other countries, for example, authorities enacted laws that prevented managers from reaching out to their teams via email during non-office hours in the so-called Right To Disconnect laws. The intent was to allow folks to have time off rather than remain perpetually on call, contended the World Economic Forum.

Still, as statistics show, the Greeks desperately need to become more productive – they are 30 percent less efficient than their counterparts in the European Union bloc, even though they work longer than anyone in Europe. Meanwhile, around one in five Greek adults are teetering on poverty, and while the economy is far stronger than a decade ago, it’s still behind its fellow EU members on measures. And unemployment, at around 10 percent (almost double that for youth), remains stubbornly high.

Analysts say it’s unclear if a longer working week will change those numbers. But one thing it might do is lower productivity, because Greece’s move goes against much research that shows increasing hours actually hurts productivity, Brigid Schulte of the New America think tank told the Washington Post.

“The proof will be in the evidence,” Schulte said. “If all of a sudden Greece turns around its economy, maybe people will take a second look. But I don’t think that will happen.”

THE WORLD, BRIEFLY

Show Me the Numbers

VENEZUELA

Mass demonstrations continued across Venezuela over the weekend, part of street protests that erupted nationwide following the July 28 presidential win of incumbent Nicolás Maduro amid accusations of fraud and irregularities, Merco Press reported.

Last week, Venezuela’s electoral authority declared Maduro the winner of the vote with around 51 percent of the vote, while opposition candidate Edmundo González received 46 percent of the vote. But Maduro’s opponents have said they have proof that the opposition won handily.

Thousands of people have taken to the streets to protest against the results, prompting authorities to launch a violent crackdown that has seen more than 2,000 people detained and 11 killed, Reuters wrote.

On Saturday, opposition leader María Corina Machado, whose candidacy to run for president was disqualified, joined the rallies in the capital Caracas, claiming that Maduro’s regime has lost its legitimacy and described July 28 as a milestone marking the transition to democracy in Venezuela.

Machado’s participation in the weekend protests was significant because she had been in hiding over fears for her life.

Critics and international election observers, such as the US-based Carter Center, have labeled the vote undemocratic because of irregularities and a lack of transparency, adding that the detailed polling data has not been released.

Venezuela’s government is also facing international pressure over the results and its subsequent crackdown. Over the weekend, leaders from seven European countries, including France, Germany, Italy and Spain, called for the Venezuelan authorities to publish the detailed vote counts to ensure transparency, Politico added.

Meanwhile, a number of countries, including the United States, Argentina and Costa Rica, have recognized González as the rightful winner. However, Venezuela’s allies, such as Russia and China, have congratulated Maduro on winning his third term.

The Venezuelan president has accused demonstrators of being part of a US-backed coup attempt and vowed “maximum punishment” for those involved. In an effort to quell unrest, Maduro asked the country’s supreme court to do an audit of the presidential vote.

Still, opponents and foreign observers have protested the decision, warning that the court is too close to the government to produce an independent review, according to the Associated Press.

Fanning the Flames

UNITED KINGDOM

British police arrested at least 240 people across the United Kingdom over the weekend as violent far-right-led demonstrations erupted in various cities, unrest fueled by misinformation about a deadly attack in the country’s northwest in which three children were killed, the Washington Post reported.

Protests and counter-protests took place in towns and cities, including Liverpool, Sunderland and Belfast, which escalated into violence. Some demonstrators threw stones at police outside a mosque in Sunderland, while in Liverpool a community center for low-income individuals was set on fire.

The demonstrations began last week after three children were stabbed to death and several others injured when their dance class in the northwestern town of Southport was attacked, with a 17-year-old since arrested for the spree. Shortly after the attack, online misinformation claimed that the alleged perpetrator was an illegal immigrant and a Muslim, prompting anti-immigration protests and violence across the country, including outside the prime minister’s office in London, according to Bloomberg.

Authorities later released the suspect’s name as Axel Rudakubana, a UK-born citizen of Rwandan heritage. He has been charged with murder and attempted murder.

Even so, far-right and anti-immigrant groups have continued their protests, with some defenders of immigration saying the demonstrations underscore a broader hostility toward multiculturalism and anti-migrant sentiment.

The newly-elected Labour government of Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has condemned the unrest, with Policing and Crime Minister Diana Johnson describing it as “criminal disorder.”

Politicians also blamed social media platforms, such as X (formerly Twitter), for facilitating the spread of misinformation and relaxed content restrictions. Starmer warned social media firms they need to enforce laws against the incitement of violence, which in the UK apply to online content hosted by platforms.

Embers Ignite

BANGLADESH

Fresh protests erupted across Bangladesh over the weekend, killing at least 91 people, after thousands took to the country’s streets demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina following widespread accusations of excessive force and government mismanagement, Al Jazeera reported.

Violence erupted in multiple cities as police, demonstrators and members of the ruling Awami League party clashed. Security forces have used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse crowds, while some demonstrators set fire to vehicles and attacked ruling party offices.

Dozens have been injured and 13 police officers are among the dead.

The unrest first began last month after students took to the streets demanding the abolition of a quota system that reserved 30 percent of highly sought-after government jobs for the families of veterans of the 1971 War of Independence.

Although the supreme court ruled to reduce the quota to five percent, the protests continued, evolving into a broader anti-government movement, according to the Associated Press.

The weekend unrest stems from the government’s response to last month’s violent demonstrations that left more than 200 people dead.

Hasina has labeled protesters as criminals engaging in “sabotage” and urged citizens to confront them “with iron hands.” The government has also accused opposition parties, including the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, of instigating the violence.

In response to the unrest, the government has imposed a shoot-on-sight curfew and declared a public holiday from Monday to Wednesday. Mobile Internet services and social media platforms, such as Facebook and WhatsApp, have been shut down to prevent further violence.

Since the demonstrations began last month, authorities have arrested at least 11,000 people in connection with the protests.

Despite the government’s efforts to quell the unrest, the protests continue to gain momentum, with a march to the capital Dhaka set for later this week to increase pressure on the administration.

DISCOVERIES

The Lonely Cycad

Plants, too, experience unrequited love.

A tree in South Africa, the Wood’s cycad, has only had male specimens for at least 130 years. So far, the species has been preserved thanks to cloning.

Now, a group of scientists have embarked on a search for a female specimen to allow Wood’s cycads to reproduce naturally. And because the job comes down to finding a needle in a haystack, they have sought help from artificial intelligence (AI).

Cycads are sometimes dubbed “living fossils,” because they emerged 300 million years ago, therefore predating and outliving dinosaurs, wrote project leader and biologist Laura Cinti in the Conversation. But more famously, they’re called “the most solitary organism in the world” by paleontologist Richard Fortney.

“I was very inspired by the story of the (Wood’s cycad), it mirrors a classic tale of unrequited love,” said Cinti.

Though they look like palm trees, cycads are not related to that species. This makes finding specimens in the wild a very arduous task – the only known wild cycad was found in 1895 in South Africa’s Ngoye Forest before it was uprooted and propagated in the early 20th century.

That initiative ensured the survival of the species – it was among the most endangered on Earth. Nonetheless, “they remain in this permanent vegetative state. A male without a female, this is a potent story,” Cinti told the London Times.

To find a female, Cinti and her team used thousands of aerial photographs of the Ngoye Forest taken in 2022 and 2024 and trained AI to tell apart cycads and palm trees.

Having only covered a meager percentage of the 10,000-acre forest, Cinti’s team has not yet found a perfect candidate. But hope remains.

When the day comes, “as a final step, ground truth verification is always necessary to confirm the findings,” Cinti told LiveScience.

The female tree will most likely be uprooted as well to ensure reproduction in controlled habitats, with the end goal being the reintroduction of Wood’s cycads into the wild.

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