Labor

How does a government act when it genuinely wants its existing labor force to thrive?  From a Claremont article about Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán:
“[W]e want a Hungarian Hungary and a European Europe,” he said. So he sought alternatives to Muslim migration that would allow him to keep Hungary’s full-employment economy from stoking inflation. He has stepped up efforts at reintegrating into the economy the backward but considerably more fecund Roma minority. He has lowered the minimum school-leaving age from 18 to 16. He has remobilized retired people. He has pushed the unemployed onto workfare.
And he has made it possible for the German factories that are the backbone of Hungary’s manufacturing economy to ask for up to 400 hours of paid overtime from their workers annually. So short of labor is Hungary that two strikes in January 2019—one in the 4,000-strong Mercedes plant in Kecskemét, one at the vast Audi plant in Györ, with 13,000 employees—ended with 20% and 18% raises for workers, respectively. In the past year Hungary has (very discreetly) offered residence to Venezuelan refugees of Hungarian background. And Orbán has drawn up a plan offering a $30,000 loan to first-time mothers that gets written off when the mother bears a third child, and grants every woman who raises four children an exemption from income tax for the rest of her life.

4 comments:

Grim said...

Hungary is the land of the Huns, and they haven't forgotten that. It's a model that doesn't quite work in America, though; we've never been a state that was also a homeland for a people.

Anonymous said...

Hungary also defines itself as not. "We're not German, or Slav, or Romanian," although the definitions tend to blur at the edges. I've been watching this off and on since 2014, and it's been interesting to watch.

I suspect one thing that helps Orban is that Hungarian-ness rests more on accepting the language and culture, including some flavor of Christianity, than strictly blood-and-soil. I'm not sure the EU media are interested in that distinction. I know there are hard-core blood-and-soil nationalists in Hungary, but the Hungarians I've talked to (a small sample, true), emphasized the importance of becoming Hungarian culturally. I think that goes all the way back to the 1200s, and the aftermath of the Mongols, but the Habsburgs had a similar policy after 1693.

LittleRed1

Texan99 said...

The ethnic Hungarians are spread all over. The article quotes the old quip that Hungary is the only country in the world that borders on itself.

jabrwok said...

If he's giving taxpayer money to Hungarian mothers then I hope it's just to *married* (REAL-married, IE man/woman marriage) mothers than to any bint who gets knocked up. Otherwise he's sowing trouble.