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Comment by worklaptopacct | Hacker News Reader

Germany's employment laws are made for jobs in manufacturing. Germans love to boast their worker-centric legislation, but what's the use of it if most hard labor is just being outsourced to less worker-friendly countries? I'm an IT professional (shocking on HN) who's trying to get into a side gig because I enjoy doing my job and learning new stuff. If I were to follow the law to the letter, I could just forget about it, because it's illegal to do paid work for more than 40h/week in here, even if you're self-employed. If I get trouble for this, I may just consider moving out.

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I get your sentiment and agree that we're horribly over-regulated in a lot of ways but that's a misconception about the Arbeitszeitgesetz.

    1) §3 restricts working time to an average of 8 hours per Werktag (~business day?), i.e. Saturdays are included. This makes the weekly total 48 hours.
    2) It clearly states that it applies to employees only, e.g. §2 Abs. 2.

When you're self-employed, you can obviously do as many hours as you like. This is purely for employee protection.

That being said I'm thinking of moving out of the country for a work opportunity :shrug: Personally I think the problems are mostly cultural (alignment with manufacturing jobs as you said and a big lobby for crusty automotive corporations).

I was looking through dozens of websites explaining this and it seems I might have fallen victim to SEO optimization. Thanks.

On the other side, while the compliance burden and tax regimen are huge, it is at least possible to _be_ compliant. This is in comparison to Poland, where taxes are vague on purpose and tax collection organs are allowed to just randomly go after you because they decided that the law actually meant something else all the time. And then you get retroactively fined for non-compliance.

That's actually the only benefit I see: you can trust the laws to a degree. But there are so many that it's difficult to keep up with it and implement them, especially when bootstrapping/indiehacking/side gig'ing.

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