German Union Steps Up Fight for ‘Modern’ 28-Hour Workweek
industryweek.com
industryweek.com
42 people holding as much wealth as 3.7 billion might also have something to do with it:
https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2018/jan/22/inequalit...
Regardless of desires to be wealthy, inequality has a lot more to do with inherited wealth, not the ability to be lucky as an entrepreneur. There are plenty of billionaires (and millionaires, etc) who did nothing but enter the world with the correct surname.
We have hyper-concentration of wealth now. Yet there are new entrants entering billionaire class every year.
There are plenty of billionaires (and millionaires, etc) who did nothing but enter the world with the correct surname.
And there are plenty who did not have the correct surname at birth.
Your proof? Most of the 'new entrants' actually have quite a wealth of already accrued money. For example, Jeff Bezos had a loan from their parents for 300k, which is equivalent to for 15 people's yearly salary
If you are delusional and have no job security, then yes, you're worse off than the child.
What matters far more is that the unions are essentially asking for a temporary 20% pay increase (plus a 6% permanent one) for two years every so often. Making the, not unreasonable, assumption that pay is a major component of manufacturing costs that would suggest that if the world economy falters (consider Brexit, Trump, southern Eurozone issues, a war on the Korean Peninsula, Iranian protests) German manufacturers might suddenly find themselves very uncompetitive.
I get it though, your Rich Factory Owner can only conceive of screwing someone over rather than taking advantage of all the social benefits they have access to as Rich Factory Owner.
So while the rich are really rich they are also very few and in consequence spreading the wealth among the many poor has a much smaller impact than many expect without doing the math. I am not saying that it would have no impact, it could probably lift the about 20% of the world population still living in extreme poverty - $1.90 or less per day - above the extreme poverty line if spread among them but it certainly wouldn't make everyone on Earth rich.
If you do the math for other scenarios, for example calculate how much better of all the employees of a company could be if the top executives would just receive average wages, you almost always get similar results. That still doesn't mean that I am okay with such situations, far from. I think more equality would be a good thing on its own even if the difference for most people would be relatively small.
[1] https://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/publications/an-economy...
The idea is to reverse the flows of capital to improve the "natural" pyramid of distribution.
If you don't switch to 28 hours you're working for free 7 hours for 2 years compared to others. Probably it will also be available only for families, which sucks. Family is a choice.
That's the point - it's the choice they want you to make. It's how the system keeps running - including the pensions they will receive, etc. Don't get me wrong, I pay that "tax" too, but it makes sense to provide that incentive.
A byproduct of the unusually low unemployment rate and booming economy in Germany right now. The situation might be the reverse in a few years.
This drives me crazy. I could fill a lot of open positions right now. Oops, your candidate does't speak German.
I really really don't understand.
Possibly in Berlin, where is more alien friendly, to be able to get any job in English, in south, especiall south Bayern is quite difficult, even in IT ( which I really don't understant). Might be if all customers are in Germany, then there will be a gap somewhere, which someone has to fill and they don't really want or can.
In bigger companies ( like automotive, or even Siemens ), they do have customers and organisation from all over the world and English is the primary documentation and also common language.
I only wanted to say, that given a perfect candidate for a position, it might be rejected because it doesn't speak German.
The point is if the majority of people are native German speakers you take a major productivity hit moving to English, say 10% which increases your costs and demand for people.
Which is the problem with all-powerful unions. Works great when you have a booming industrial city like Detroit. But accelerates a downturn in bad times or decelerates potential boom times, negatively affecting the wider economy outside of the union.
In downturns those lucky enough to have a union job cling on to them and continue to push for more power, creating a secondary class system within the working class benefiting a portion of the populace while simultaneously making their company far less competitive (far more relevant today in our global economy), makes industry far less flexible to change, significantly disincentivizes hiring new workers, etc.
It's like Keynesian policy but with QE on all the time regardless of cyclical changes. Or how price controls on food markets have caused food shortages in almost every country in history who has attempted it (including notably in Venezuela repeatedly in the past decade). It's always done with good intentions and typically works well initially but it's rarely designed to be dynamic and flexible enough to reflect changing realities or appreciate the changes the union itself is having on the company/industry which far too often ultimately harm the union workers themselves rather than helps.
The same story can be told about the Scandinavian countries. Decades of unions strong enough to force employer organisations to establish central frameworks for wages, working conditions across entire sectors of the economy.
The problem with unions isn't the raises. It's rather that it makes people lazy. You need to hire more people not because there's more to do, but because most people are very comfortable in not getting fired. They just wait for retirement.
Shoot, I work at a firm that offers something like 2 months off when bundling paid time off together with corporate holidays, and that's not including all the other tiny time-off incentives that are included that don't necessarily get advertised to new hires. We're headed in that direction as it is.
Same here. I can't remember the last time I worked a 40 hour week. And the amount of actual work getting done on any given Friday is essentially zero. I have no doubt the company would do better by just closing the office 3 days a week.
We also have a law in Germany that forces employers to allow employees to reduce their hours. I believe down to 30 hours per week. This entails reduced pay of course, but still a growing number of my colleagues are opting for this or are seriously considering it. And I'm talking about people in their thirties who are in the prime of their career. You can have a very comfortable life working 30 hours on an engineer's pay grade.
A right to reduce hours to, say, 50% minimum could seriously improve quality of life for many. Of course you'd need some sensible limitations, i. e. a restriction to larger companies where any fluctuations would average out. But I've seen quite a few workplaces succeed with such a model. "Sabbatical" programs (get 85% of your pay for 7 years, with the last year paid but free of work) have even less impact on work.
This is of course assuming a European social system where health insurance etc. is taxes, so they're just a percentage of salary, not a fixed cost.
I've seen the "future" in France, nothing "nice" about it.
Permanently hiring someone (and emphasis on the permanent, firing someone on a CDI contract is extremely costly, far easier just to leave someone without work but still pay them until they quit) is so expensive that almost all new jobs (~85% actually) are for temporary contracts limited by law to 12 months. 65% are for <1 month contracts.
Think about it: 2 in every 3 people who get a job offer in France this week will be unemployed in a month.
And that's before we get into the cost of employment.
An employee in France making the country's average wage costs the employer (in absolute terms) almost the same than an employee in Switzerland making that country's average income (which in PPP is higher than France's).
I did the math a while back, and after accounting for all taxes, social security and fees, the Swiss employee is making 70% to pocket (in PPP) than the French one, despite costing almost the same to the company.
If you have to hire an employee, where would you hire, France or Switzerland?
A sign that the use of temporary contracts should also be a focus, just like wages and work hours. This is harder though.
> you have to hire an employee, where would you hire, France or Switzerland?
That depends...
They use temporary contracts because permanent contracts are too expensive. Making temporary contracts (which were actually created to flexibilize hiring) more expensive won't solve that issue.
> That depends...
I guess we both know the answer to that question. All other factors being the same, where would you hire?
Now look at the unemployment rate in those two countries. Why do you think that is?
Sure. But they hire 40h weeks not because hiring 50h wasn't want they wanted but because it's illegal. I'm not saying it's easy to outlaw temporary contracts but it's worth a try.
40h? France has a 35-hour work week.
> I'm not saying it's easy to outlaw temporary contracts but it's worth a try.
Temporary contracts were created to reduce unemployment, because permanent contracts are too expensive. The solution isn't removing them, but making regular labor contracts cheaper.
You're essentially advocating for measures that reduce employment. It isn't worth a try, it has been tried and failed. Every. Single. Time.
That's before we get into the fact that you're trying to deal with the symptoms, not the cause. This is the same as trying to outlaw homelessness. Homelessness isn't the problem, it's the symptom.
Yes, in the example of france the norm work week is 35. Otherwise the same
> Temporary contracts were created to reduce unemployment, because permanent contracts are too expensive. The solution isn't removing them, but making regular labor contracts cheaper.
Well making regular contracts cheaper means lower wages and/or lower fees/taxes on labor. Making full time contracts cheaper means more security and possibly lower unemployment, at the cost of wages (and/or tax income depending on what is lowered).
> You're essentially advocating for measures that reduce employment.
Countries with high wages AND high taxes on labor (nordic countries for example) tend to have higher unemployment but that's just natural. As always it's a tradeoff between the needs of employees and employers. That balance can be found in different ways. Sweden doesn't have minimum wages om , for example.
Indeed, and as we can see, current contract model is negatively impacting employment. Making it stricter won't help.
> Countries with high wages AND high taxes on labor (nordic countries for example) tend to have higher unemployment but that's just natural. As always it's a tradeoff between the needs of employees and employers. That balance can be found in different ways. Sweden doesn't have minimum wages om , for example.
So you're saying that French people are better of unemployed as it is.
And guess where the jobs are moving to? Yep, Germany and Switzerland, which are more competitive.
Well, I'm saying that most every improvement to labor laws that benefit employees make it more difficult and/or more expensive to hire. That was the case with the 5 day work week being introduced, 2 week holiday (then 3, 4, and 5) etc. The argument is always that it makes a country less competitve and unemployment higher. But I'm pretty happy to live somewhere with 5 week holiday. So there has to be a balance somewhere.
Yes, and it protects those with a job and more qualified, and who pays for it is those unemployed, especially young people coming into the labor market.
Strict labor laws at some point end up increasing inequality. Surprise!
PS: And that's what happens in France. Inequality isn't between those making a lot and those making a little, it's between those who have a job for life, and those going from short-term contract to short-term contract for years, usually unable to rent or buy a home or a car (those usually require a CDI).
Been there, seen that.
Is there a correlation you mean, between inequality (e.g. Gini) and labor laws (unsure how to measure that on a scale)? To me it seems the countries with strong labor movement in the 20th century today have lower inequality.
Perhaps this is changing in the modern era - with the trend being that labor now protects the interests of the employed vs the interests of the unemployed (whereas through the 20th century it was the working people vs. the employers in a more classic Marxist setup)? That might well be the case, and I agree I see some of that. But if we don't look at the past 20 years but instead the past 120 - then I think you agree that equality today is higher where there are better workforce protection.
It could be argued that today we have a Marxist-esque class conflict between the highly-paid and highly-privileged classes of the employed (usually permanent) and the low-paid and low-privileged classes (usually temporary or contractors). Limited to the wealthier countries of the first world, mind you.
It does seem to work for the US and France, where a lot of benefits are tied to employment status. It falls apart for Germany, though.
But if you could hire an equally-qualified employee in two countries for the same cost, and in one country the employee will take home 70% more for roughly the same work, where would you hire?
A better metric is the percentage of people working on temporary (CDD) or permanent (CDI) contract. In France, 85% of all jobs are permanent and about 10% are temporary contracts.
You are twisting the statistics. Of course you don't sign permanent contracts as much as temporary contracts: you sign one and you keep it for 3, 5, 10, 20 years.
The fact is that 80 to 90% of employees have a permanent contract. It is just that the small pool of employees with temporary contracts generate a huge number of contract because, well, they are temporary. And the very short temporary contracts will generate an even bigger number of contracts that longer temporary contracts.
Also, the limit for a temporary contract is not 12 months. In the general case, it is 18 months (there are cases where it is 9 months, and others were it is 36 months).
> An employee in France making the country's average wage costs the employer (in absolute terms) almost the same than an employee in Switzerland making that country's average income (which in PPP is higher than France's).
No way.
Average wage in France is 2300 € net / month, which is 3000 € gross, which costs the employer around 4000 €.
Average income in Switzerland is over 5500 € gross / month. I won't even bother to calculate the employer's cost to give an employee such income, because the figure is already way higher than the French one.
Oh, no. You forgot about the tax wedge. Everyone forgets about the tax wedge.
Swiss tax wedge: ~20%
French tax wedge: ~50%
In France, you cost your employer about 2X your salary. In Switzerland you cost your employer about 1.25X your salary.
Source: OECD.
So your Swiss costs €6,875/month and your French costs €6,000/month.
[1]: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
Despite costing in the same range (€6,875/month vs. €6,000/month), the Swiss employee is probably making about €4,500 to €5,000 net, while the French one is making €2,300 net.
Cost of living in Paris (from your source) are about 30% lower than those in Zurich, so let's divide the French income by 0.7, then we get:
Swiss employee: €4,700/month net PPP
French employee: €3,285/month net PPP
So the Swiss employee is making on average, in this calculation, 45% more money for the same work, using GP's numbers.
In the good times, the steel workers union got great benefits from Bethlehem Steel. Those times changed, and all those people lost their jobs. Tens of thousands of jobs never coming back.
There's always a guy that comments without reading the article. Don't be that guy.
So instead of sub-40 hour work weeks, we should maybe introduce partial yearly roles. So for example if you want to do 30 hours per week, simply work 3/4 weeks per year (39 of 52), but do work these weeks 40h.
A 40 hour work week for 50 weeks a year is 2000 hrs. I've never been able to do it, but I believe I could be far far more productive working 25, 80-hour weeks or 20, 100-hour weeks - probably split into two or three separate chunks.
Can you elaborate? This seems interesting and not intuitive to me. Personally, I feel more productive at around 20-30 hrs/wk
I should emphasize that the 40 hours should be spend well and the employee should use enough time for relaxation, rest and leasure. 40 hours for e.g. a head of family in busy waters may quickly be detrimental.
>work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion
I'm less focused sometimes because I know I have time to do something than if I know I don't. And I might be doing more work if I had less hours to fill and knew I had to use them.
I've seen also an inverse relationship in quality of work and work streaks also in other fields, for example a direct experience for me was automated textile production. More hours in this case has a direct relationship with more product, but results in more stupid mistakes and more importantly I've seen less overall feedback from the production line, where employee are just more eager to say "fuck it" and simply do the work as opposed to try to help in improving the production process. There is a fine line between using your employees as a resource or a brutal work-force.
This was an eye opener for me. There is definitely a balance in every part of the production line, and less work is generally good for everyone.
I work best when I'm relaxed and able to focus. Long workdays are very detrimental to my focus and attention.
I wish I could remember where I read it, but I did see something about the ideal workday being around 6 hours at the most. Any longer than that, and the extra time is simply wasted on not being productive.
It seems this kind of action is only possible for certain organizations in certain circumstances. In '95 this same organization was able to get down to a 35hr work week, but it's worth noting that metal is relatively expensive to ship and they're the largest union so there are some unique circumstances here.
EDIT: Seems my point is misunderstood. It's not that people shouldn't strive for less hours, it is that a sufficiently large amount of leverage is really the only way these things happen. Given that there's plenty of retaliation against those who try to unionize, it's pretty critical that they have plenty of leverage, first.
Obviously, this is anecdotal but no company in the world is going to release any figures saying that their employees work longer hours than they are employed for.
If Unions are relevant, it means they control negotiations for their whole segment of the labor market. This is the case at least in Scandinavia, and I suspect it is in Germany too.
So for example: if the auto workers union say that the work week should be 35h and the minimum wage €2k/mo, that means you can't set up a car plant and build cars with workers paid less, or working more.
It's mostly big auto companies that are unionized. They know that a) They can't attract the talent they want with worse conditions than all their competitors, b) it makes it easier to negotiate, because you're not negotiating with every employee, only one union, c) it indirectly puts a cap on what they're paying engineers. Engineers wages would probably be much higher if the big companies weren't unionized. With the union, you get the same raises as anybody else, but on a higher salary level. d) They can just put you on a salary level that they deem appropriate and you don't have much way of rising up.
That's the case in scandinavia too, but there it's "optional" (scare quotes intentional). In Sweden for example, if you open up a factory and refuse to have a union agreement with your workers, you'll find that your deliveries might not come, or your trash might not be picked up (for example), as unions (including OTHER unions entirely) will try to force the employer to make a union agreement. The law makes those kinds of actions legal.
In germany there are other examples such as unions having guaranteed seats in the boardrooms of companies, to ensure the same kind of balance.
This is exactly the theory behind socialism. Capitalism is great at increasing our productivity, but past a certain point, you can't continue valuing productivity more than worker happiness. Socialism is less efficient than capitalism, even Marx admitted that, but at some point it begins to make sense to shift our values. When will that point be? Probably not yet, maybe not as soon as people think, but probably not never. If the metalworking industry is productive enough so that it makes sense to shift their values, then more power to them.
What we need to do is change the mindset of what is considered a normal workweek. The shift from 7 to 6 to 5 days and 14h days to 8h or 7h days was also a change in mindset more than a change in political system.
In a capitalist system you also need the mindset of most people to change at the same time. I mean a lot of things that we need for living that have a somewhat constant demand (rent/house prices, food, toilet paper, ..) will have the price at which profit is maximal. Which is why with the advent of women working you didn't have families with two incomes being able to afford twice as many houses, but families with one income not being able to compete with two income families to buy a house. The prices of necessities will always adapt to what people can afford.
If everyone switched to a 28h workweek at the same time, it wouldn't be a very big problem because all the other prices would adapt and you could afford the same basic lifestyle with a bit more basic luxuries. If you're the only one switching you can't afford a basic lifestyle anymore.