@levelsio@levelsio
🇵🇹 If you have ever dealt with any Portuguese business (and I have with many in my 5 years here) you know why
Portuguese in Portugal simply do not care about work, some foreigners find that refreshing, but it results in a country where you can't find anyone to do work because nobody wants to work
And when they do work, the work is generally bad, like imagine stepping into a time machine back to 1970s bad, they also can't follow the spec you agreed upon beforehand, and then when it's 60% done they disappear and ghost you
When we did home renovatiom, you hire ppl, they arrive late at 9am (you agreed 8am), they then drive away to get materials, come back 11am, do actual work for an hour, then at 12noon announce they go for lunch, come back around 2.30pm, walk around a bit, do some work, and then leave early at 4pm
It's not just construction workers, it's almost every interaction you have here with a Portuguese business, the quality is just low, the service non-existent or customer-hostile, and it's not the language, I speak fluent Portuguese, I'm respectful and friendly which is why I never ever had this amount of issues elsewhere in the world
And I know it's not just my experience, it's everyone I know here, even Portuguese complain about Portuguese!
It's not completely their fault though, the hostile tax system for both people and businesses literally gives you an incentive to never ever scale your business beyond I believe around €150,000/year, because you end up in a completely different category and tax tier that decimates you with more taxes and more bookkeeping
So every business tries to stay small, and doesn't want more customers (how many times have I walked into a Portuguese cafe or shop and the staff or owner *sighed* "not another customer")
Add decades of socialist governments that hand out free money to 50% of the country (and even the right wing parties here are socialist btw, they have to be or they don't get votes) and you don't have any incentive to work left
Why work when you don't need to work?
The majority of the young smart Portuguese people with actual ambitions understandably move elsewhere, because if there's no incentive to grow a business, there's also no jobs for them, and the whole thing becomes a vicious cycle of increasing poverty
Which is why I said Portuguese in Portugal at the beginning of this tweet, because Portuguese outside of Portugal are ambitious, want to work, want to improve their lives!
Bringing in lots of foreigners like me by the government as a way to pump money into the system, we spend a lot and it pays for the welfare, healthcare and retirements of Portuguese now, but it's not a structural solution (and we also instantly became the scapegoat for the government's decades of mismanagement)
It'd be relatively easy to fix this though if people in Portugal would put on their thinking hat:
💡 Make Portugal a great place to start and run a business, model yourself after Singapore but with extremely low taxes (maybe 5-10%) for companies/startups and make it easy for them to hire (and fire) people, the money you lose in taxes you will get back in increased economic activity over time (but it will hurt for a little bit)
Because even the foreigners who move here and start businesses get caught up in the reverse incentive spiral of Portugal:
Why even work?
