The Belgian four-day week arouses great interest among Germans. According to a Forsa survey, 71 percent of Germans would like to see German employees only have to work four days a week. This would mean changes for companies. When German trade unions want to reduce working hours, they encounter resistance.
Last week, the Belgian government agreed on a four-day week. The total working time remains the same, unlike many proposals in Germany. However, employees can choose to do their job in four days in order to have one more day off. If you have a 40-hour job, you can go to the company for ten hours Monday to Thursday and have Fridays off. “It’s about giving workers more flexibility and freedom,” says Prime Minister Alexander De Croo. Employees should be able to balance work and private life better.
According to a Forsa survey, a large majority of Germans like the Belgian model. It is particularly popular with employees with higher educational qualifications – and with 30- to 44-year-old employees. At this age, many employees are raising children. Since more and more mothers and fathers have a job, it is becoming even more difficult for parents to reconcile work and children.
A four-day week might help with that. However, it creates new problems if, for example, working parents have to be at the company several hours longer than before on the four remaining days, as is the case with the Belgian model. The question is also how strenuous regular ten-hour days are for employees. In Germany, for example, unions have been promoting models in which working hours are reduced overall with fewer working days.
“The survey shows that a four-day week is attractive for many employees,” says Thorben Albrecht, head of politics on the board of IG Metall Süddeutsche Zeitung. “Especially in personal and company-related upheaval situations, this model can be very useful. However, unlike in Belgium, it should be combined with a reduction in working hours to prevent excessive daily working hours.”
A controversy: by how much will wages fall?
Proponents of the four-day week like to refer to an Icelandic field test in which thousands of employees worked 35 or 36 hours instead of 40 from 2015 to 2019 – with the same wages. This has made employees happier without any loss of productivity. After the field trial, the unions negotiated so that most Icelanders are now entitled to shorter working hours.
Companies demand a lot from a four-day week. You have to organize the employees so that there is a replacement around the fifth day of the week – or the production lines in the factory run continuously. The biggest point of contention has proved to be whether employees who work less hours receive proportionally less wages. Many cannot afford that. So the unions usually demand wage compensation. However, companies rarely want to pay as much money for less work.
IG Metall has long been fighting for shorter working hours for the currently four million employees in Germany’s largest industrial sector. In the 2021 collective bargaining round, she made the four-day week a big issue. It was not just about free time, but also about saving jobs. In the transition to decarbonization and digitization, companies should have less work done in order to prevent layoffs. The employers rejected the idea precisely because of the demanded wage compensation. They called them “total poison” and “dangerous to industry.”
In the end, a four-day week was agreed as an option for companies. A special payment can be used, so that employees work 32 instead of 35 hours a week, but are paid for 34. “We want to enforce this instrument even more strongly in the companies,” announces metal policy chief Albrecht.
Apart from tariff models, there are individual companies such as Meier Bauelemente in the Upper Palatinate, which introduced a four-day week in 2019. The employees are more relaxed as a result, company boss Christoph Meier reported in 2021. There are hardly any sick days. The changeover was problem-free and without any disadvantages: “The customer’s construction site never has to rest.”