In Praise of Trabalhadores

no OT in the PT

People have mostly only good things to say about us having moved to Portugal, but there are a few tropes I've heard often that have remained unrealized in my lived experience.

One is the bureaucracy. It is supposedly legendary in Portugal, and I won't say that in my short time here I haven't had my share of frustrations but ultimately when and where isn't bureaucracy a pain in the butt? We've had to wait longer than expected for some things, and shorter than expected for others. When things do work it's not always clear why. We went round and round with the electric company and couldn't get anywhere until a Portuguese speaker stepped in to help out. But get this - after we finally got the electricity on, the electric company wrote us a letter saying in effect Sorry for making you go round and round, here's your refund.

I'm still waiting on an SEF communication but I'm sanguine we'll get it sorted out. So far Portuguese bureaucracy is no worse than any DMVin the US. A special exception should be made for the airport in Lisbon - if you are not flying on an airplane with the letters TAP on the side, god help you because the customer service reps won't be able to, for reasons they can't explain and you wouldn't understand anyway.

Workers are another subject everyone agrees on - you can't find good help, there just aren't enough good skilled workers, every project takes way way way too long. I read it everywhere, hear it everywhere. But every experience we've had with workers has been not just good but stellar. The solar panel installers (Mario and Joao) were strong, smart, funny and good company. They were on the property for about three days, working hard in the baking sun. When a neighbor's car blocked them from driving up the driveway and saving themselves a good hundred yards of carrying, they didn't even seem irritated, just started knocking on doors and asking neighbors Is that your car or do you know whose it is? Give us the keys we'll re-park it for you.

It took more than an hour (in fact closer to two) for the owner to be contacted and arrive to move her car, and in the meantime one of them carried on an extended conversation with two little girls leaning out of a second story window across the street.

They say you have a cool wagon, one of the workers said, gesturing at the little girls, who waved shyly from their window.

I do. It's awesome, for sure - green with yellow trim, with high sides that fold down to form a platform and sturdy enough to carry me around in it all over the property, which is what I made the h do when the wagon arrived, which is how the kids across the street came to covet it - they can see bits of our courtyard from their second story window and must have seen me getting my ride - maybe heard me too, as the h went really fast and I may have screamed a time or two.

Your house needs work but my house needs even more work, joked one of them. Really, I ask, and he looked rueful. It’s hard to get the money together to fix it up, he says, even with two jobs.

I had a great job at the Honda factory in London, he said. I made a good salary, had a great flat, a car, a big screen TV. It was a really nice life. Then the plant closed and I came back here, and there's no comparable job, in fact there are hardly any jobs. I do this (solar panel installation for IKEA) so I can at least be outside all day. It’s still a nice life, eh? he said, spreading his hands as if they held the whole sunny sky between them. It is this exact attitude I think of as the Portuguese attitude.

If you need someone to help you in Portuguese, call us, the solar panel installers said when the project was over, leaving their cards. They call and check in now and again and we will have them out to manage another project soon.

Our gardener Tiago is a one-man crew, tackling all kinds of jobs in three weeks that I thought we'd take months or even years to get to. For big jobs he brings his dad over, and for carrying jobs like hauling buckets of stones for a pathway, he brings his strapping son. There is something neat about three generations of men from the same family, working together. They arrive each morning at 8 on the nose, greeted by Jake who delights in running to their truck and saying hello as each one climbs out.

Every day they break for lunch precisely at noon, and then it's back to work until 5 or 5:30p. Sometimes at the end of a really hot day, or when we are celebrating - e.g. getting electricity, or when we found out it was Tiago's birthday - we'll take mini bottles of cold Sagres out to their truck and share them before we all knock off for the day.

The work they do is excellent - detail oriented and high quality. When they haul away branches, for example, they rake up all the little twigs and leaves that have fallen off, so the area looks ready for a cocktail party.

Thank you for the hard work, I tell Tiago when we are having a beer. He waits patiently while I search for the words in Portuguese. Nos somos gratos. We are grateful. At that, his face softens, and he sits up a little. He speaks into his phone and shows me the screen where the message translates to It feels better to the self to always do your best work, from small projects to big.

I nod. My dad always said if a job is worth doing it's worth doing right. You do a good job because you expect no less from yourself, not to impress others.

“Trabalhar é bom,” I say and unexpectedly all three men raise their beers in salute.

They don't just do the stone work and gardening work either - they keep an eye out for what else we might need and offer to help, everything from driving us to the farmer's market on Saturday to calling the electric company on our behalf. They do all of this though we don't yet speak each other's languages. Tiago speaks Portuguese and a little French, his wife speaks Portuguese and a little English, I speak English and a little Portuguese, the h speaks English and a little French - somehow we make it work. Shared values has a lot to do with it, I suspect - every day the h is out there working another part of the property with an assortment of power tools. They see his skill at using them, the quality of his work and nod approvingly. If a job is worth doing, it's worth doing well is written in their body posture, the way they point their faces at the sky as they listen to each other discuss a project.

Just don't expect to be able to pay someone extra to work overtime, or on weekends or holidays - that is not really a thing in Portugal. People value their vacations and weekends and and they will not willingly suspend either for work. It's an attitude I approve of and only wish I'd seen the wisdom of work-life balance much sooner than I did. It took me too long to make the leap out of 80 hour weeks in corporate America into a more entrepreneurial life where I reap not just the monetary rewards but the satisfaction ...along with plenty of potatoes, carrots, cabbages and beans.

It is true that we have seen workers at cafes putting away a couple of breakfast beers (always in the mini bottles) and lunch beers/shots before heading off to work. We've heard of workers that have returned to work three sheets to the wind, making the owner cancel the rest of the day's work, fearful of someone falling off a ladder. But these experiences are easily matched in America, where a plumber once left all of his tools at our house, having gone on a weekend bender and then ghosting us. We've had painters show up a week late, and once a cabinet installer ran up $2,000 worth of long distance calls on my landline, apparently speed dialing everyone he knew when I stepped out of the room.

In preparing to bring indoor plumbing to the main house, the gas company came out to review the property - not just one person but the owner and the crew of three who would be working the job. We nervously expected them to tell us it was a three month job that would likely extend to a six month job, and our hearts sank when the owner looked serious and said Well, it's going to be a big job so...... then she did some calculations and conferred with her team and said I can give you a formal quote of course but right now we estimate it should take about a week. The workers nodded, looking sympathetic. We hid our elation and said Wow, well, okay....

In case you are worried about such a big project not being completed on time, I'll be here personally overseeing it, the owner added.

In Portugal so far, our experience with workers has been outstanding. Between Tiago's family of men, and the h and I, we are pushing projects forward at a pace we can barely keep up with. Not only do we have the vegetable garden planted, they have cleared the road that was blocked by a fallen tree and years of overgrowth, cleared a sunken garden of decades worth of seedling trees and brambles, uncovered a workshop and the path/steps leading to it, which we didn't even know was there. Along the way fallen walls and stone staircases. have been rebuilt as well - all projects I projected to not even start until second quarter next year.

Soon I will be looking to hire some helpers with the washing and sanding and scraping that precede painting - I've started the work myself and have developed a process. The plan is to set someone(s) up in one room/one floor/one house while I work in another. It is tiring work, sometimes making all the little muscles of your back contract at once when you roll over in your sleep and causing you to yell loudly I NEED AN EMERGENCY MASSAGE even though it's the middle of the night and the nearest giver of massages is sound asleep.

It will be good to move the prep work ahead faster with some help. I see flyers at the grocery store and on telephone poles of the neighborhood, enterprising women trying to attract new clients for their cleaning business and I am optimistic. Despite its laid back attitude, there is plenty of hustle in Portugal.