I'm from Germany and none of my friends works 40h anymore.
They're all down to 50-80%
This is even regulated by the law, your employer has to allow you to reduce your work time, only in some extreme cases they can deny it.
Works like a charm.
They're all down to 50-80%
This is even regulated by the law, your employer has to allow you to reduce your work time, only in some extreme cases they can deny it.
Works like a charm.
In other words, going part-time is a commitment to the job-level you're in, in my experience. It signals to management you're good, reliable, ready to stay in that position perpetually and do a decent job, but not up for anything ambitious. Whether this is true is a different story, but it's how in my experience it gets interpreted.
That works fine if you're a 45 year old parent making 2x the median wage in a mid-level manager position working 36 hours (one week 5 days one week 4 days), 32 hours (4 days a week) etc, because your salary doesn't need to grow, plus even at parttime its sufficient. But at the start of your career making 70% of the median wage, going parttime both hurts career growth and isn't always financially feasible.
Either you get free time when you're young or you have to work longer.
Employees are generally not expected to work beyond that amount, and when they do, it's with the understanding that they can go around and reduce their working hours the following week (or whenever works for them & their manager) to cover the delta.
Some of my friends even got an indirect raise out of it, because employers couldn't pay more, so they worked less for the same pay.
Germany: https://tradingeconomics.com/germany/gdp-growth US: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth
Owners demand perpetual growth. People demand comfortable lives and occasional vacations. Most achieve that in Germany. There probably isn't a single better "poster child" of a prosperous society with anywhere near the same population.
If I grow my own food and play board games with my family, it doesn't boost the GDP. However, if I go to MacDonald's and then send my kids to daycare while I go to the movies (3 economic transactions), it increases the GDP since those services are now commoditized.
Increasing the GDP might boost the standard of living in really poor countries, but there's a healthy ceiling until it becomes growth for the sake of growth.
Whoa there, GDP is absolutely correlated to the standard of living, this is not contentious. That it's not a direct measure, true, but it's definitely 'a' measure. Moreover, growth or contraction in per-capita GDP in a nation is definitely correlated with increasing/reduced economic prosperity even in 'rich' countries. Yes, many things are 'not measured' particularly leisure, but most things of material value are. The GDP is one of the 'least bad' measures we have.