It's a fundamental, speechless recognition of a vast difference that has no supporting evidence for its existence beyond cultural choices. It's a horrified, irreversible recognition of a great wrong that you have no way to right.

That's a good way of looking at it. I might've talked about this before, but when I was working with Americans for a project I did in 2020 it was an...interesting look into the hypercapitalist abyss. Someone on the team having a breakdown over their health because of its ties to job security was quite the a Bass Pro Shop moment, so to speak.

I distinctly remember the Americans being annoyed at me and my colleague being fuck'n gone AGAIN every 8 weeks or so because we have reasonable PTO (in my case a slightly above average of 30 days/yr) that we reasonably use, during which we reasonably disappear off the face of the earth. Their annoyance was frequent but also brief in a - I now realize - "I don't want to think about this for too long, let's go discuss something else" kinda way. It might've just hurt too much in exactly the way you descibe.

This is not because Europe is a bunch of laggards, it's because Europe had less room for improvement.

Did you know we invented a term for that?. I'm glad you're catching up on worker's rights and you're right, I probably underestimate the leaps and bounds that have been made since I last visited the other side of the pond. I think we, as far as labour go, only got two things out of the pandemic: immense pressure on blue collar work (with very strong calls for a minimum wage raise) and a seemingly irreversible increase in the number of WFH days to two or three for most white collar work. Nothing earth-shattering - for me it seems energy insecurity and inflation has had a bigger impact on society than labour reforms.

I do now wonder what impact Brexit had on all of this, and thus also on the Economist's lukewarm take. It seems to me they basically slid further back the past years. They're not just geographically in between the EU and US, economically too, with classism thrown in for extra spice.