Before Labor Day on May 1st, there are again discussions about the four-day week. SPD, Linke and IG Metall advocate reducing working hours and point to the advantages. The employers’ association BDA, Mercedes CEO Ola Källenius as well as Union and FDP reject the demand.
SPD leader Saskia Esken told the editorial network Germany that she “can well imagine that we can achieve good results with a four-day week”. She referred to studies “according to which people work more effectively in a week reduced to four working days because they have higher job satisfaction”. Because: “You have more private life.” Parents in particular need other, more flexible and shorter working hours in order to be able to better organize their family obligations and needs. Esken also spoke out in favor of wage compensation.
According to the chairman of IG Metall, Jörg Hofmann, he expects that the four-day week will increase the overall volume of work. “Eleven million employees, mostly women, work part-time. That’s almost 30 percent of all employees subject to social security contributions, which is one of the highest percentages in Europe,” Hofmann explained in an interview picture on sunday.
According to Hofmann, the employee surveys by IG Metall showed that with a four-day, 32-hour week, more women would be willing to return to work full-time because the model also works with a family. “If only ten percent of women were to go part-time to four-day full-time, the volume of work would increase more than the immigration of 400,000 skilled workers a year that the government is aiming for,” Hofmann continued. The labor market has changed and working hours are now at the top of the list of priorities for young people rather than earnings.
The left demands wage subsidies for smaller companies for a transition to the four-day week with full wage compensation. Party leader Janine Wissler presented a plan as to how the reduction in working hours could actually take place. This includes starting with pilot projects and then introducing the four-day week in three stages over a period of two years. From Wissler’s point of view, employees should be able to choose freely whether they work four or five days.
Employers’ association BDA sees “a wrong signal”
The employers’ association BDA, on the other hand, firmly rejects the demands for a four-day week with full wage compensation. “Significantly less work with full wage compensation – economically that’s a milkmaid calculation,” said BDA chief executive Steffen Kampeter picture on sunday. But he has nothing against individual solutions in the companies. The BDA is very much in favor of making working time legislation more flexible, but reducing weekly working hours “sends the wrong signal in our situation”.
Mercedes CEO Ola Källenius is also against it. “If our first priority is to work less with full wage compensation, we won’t win a game internationally,” said Källenius picture on sunday. The industry is in a century-long transformation, and you have to roll up your sleeves.
The Union and FDP also criticized the idea of the four-day week. The deputy chairman of the Union faction in the Bundestag, Hermann Gröhe (CDU), warned that this would damage Germany’s economy. “Reducing working hours and making work more expensive in times of a shortage of skilled workers would do a disservice to competitiveness,” said Gröhe daily mirror. The labor market policy spokesman for the FDP parliamentary group, Pascal Kober, told the newspaper with regard to Esken’s proposal: “Where a four-day week can be agreed, employees and employers can agree this themselves without resorting to political advice must.”