The title is a little unclear. They are asking for the right for union members to switch from their current 35hr week to a 28hr week for a two year period then switch back. Sounds good for young family or other family situations.
It's also asking that employers top up their salary whilst doing so, that appears to be the sticking point with employers. It is a major step beyond the state doing the subsidising, as can happen with maternity/paternity pay. It also strikes me as one of those measures that assumes that the good times (good order books, low unemployment) are here to stay. It rather feels like they're making themselves a hostage to fortune. Given some of Germany's success has come from the Euro reducing what would otherwise be appreciative effects on the deutschmark, it is worth remembering that governments / states are happy to benefit when the factors beyond their control are positive, less so when they turn against you.
Even if we buy into that (and I fully agree with ddebernardy) you're assuming that those 42 people's accrual of wealthy will continue to stimulate the German electrical and machinery based sectors. I'd cast doubt on that, they probably already have Miele appliances in every one of their homes, all the BMWs and Mercedes they need for when the supercar is inconvenient. Unless they are in the market for a submarine there isn't really much more they can do to drive demand. It is likely the middle classes, and the newly rich middle classes abroad who are driving German exports.
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 think you're missing the point, and you actually agree with grandparent. When people point to extreme wealth inequality, they usually argue that redistribution of wealth will give said money to people who actually use it to consume, thereby getting it back into circulation and benefitting their local economy.
Hi, I'm Rich Factory Owner. If you take my profits and redistribute it among the people to consume, that's a great opportunity for me and my buddies to raise prices to make up for the difference!
Or you could just get some 0% loans from FatCat Banker and satisfy the demand that way.
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.
That depends on the price elasticity of yourself and of your consumers. In a society with extreme inequality it's not a bad presumption that consumers have high price elasticity and producers low price elasticity, at least for non-essential goods.
We've been over this several times now. Oxfam uses very disingenuous criteria, and their numbers are not to be trusted. They consider debt to be negative wealth, which means that a middle class family with no net savings and a mortgage on their house is "poorer" than a starving child with 2 cents on their pocket.
That specific example is a bad one as you say. A better is perhaps student loans. I recommend checking out BBCs More or less, they has covered the issues with Oxfams claims several times.
Even in the case of student loans, that's still not an incorrect way to count net worth. The only problem with it is that we don't have a good way to measure the value of human capital.
I believe the point stands. If a penniless, homeless child has a worth of 0, and I have a house valued at 80,000 with a 90,000 mortgage, am I really worse off than the child without a home? Assuming I have a job and can make payments.
If you assume you can make payments, then you are equivalently assuming your job has present asset value (or that you have human capital). So yes, a full accounting will show you are not actually underwater.
If you are delusional and have no job security, then yes, you're worse off than the child.
One of the Oxfam reports [1] states »The 1,810 dollar billionaires on the 2016 Forbes list, 89% of whom are men, own $6.5 trillion – as much wealth as the bottom 70% of humanity«. Let's assume they accumulated all this wealth in just 10 years, how much better off could everyone have been if we evenly spread the money instead of putting it into the pockets of just 1,810 people? If we spread it across all 7.6 billion people over 10 years everyone would receive $85.25 per year or $7.12 per month or $0.23 per day.
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.
They certainly helped to improve the situation of many but I am not sure that they managed to affect a billion people. And you can certainly do a lot of good with a couple of billion dollar but you can not make really many rich. And that was my main point, the wealth of the very top is not what makes the poor poor just due to an uneven wealth distribution.
I am not sure what you are suggesting. My point is that there is not really that much money to redistribute. To make it concrete, let's say you have a company with 10,000 employees making an annual profit of $1B before labor costs. In that case you could pay everyone $100,000 annually. Or you could take away 1% from everyone paying them only $99,000 and give yourself a nice $10,000,000 pay check every year. You are now 100 times better off than your employees but they individually just lost 1% each. So while being 1% better off might have some compounding effects in the long run this hopefully illustrates that there is often not really that much wealth at the very top if you see it in relation to the large number of people you want to redistribute it to.
The inequality doesn't bother me so much, but I do think such inequality gives labor a bargaining position - a position the union in this article is wisely using to its advantage.
That's a gross over-simplification of wealth accrual. Hyper-concentration of wealth will most certainly prevent new entrants from entering the coveted class of the 1500 worldwide billionaires.
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.
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
The market system is a competition, so by definition everyone is (at least potentially) trying to stop you from achieving wealth. Just ask anyone who started a business, for example. Saying that the only obstacle is in the individual is, at a minimum, disingenuous.
And that's assuming a hypothetical perfect market. The real world has monopolies, rent-seeking and other obstacles that make it harder for new contenders to enter a market.
There are more than enough measures available to employers in Germany in bad times (eg Kurzarbeit, "short work", which all but saved the German economy in 2008), so bad times needn't be an argument for restricting participation in the wealth of good times.
28 hours with limited impact on wages. Hmm, I don't agree.
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.
The reason employers in Germany are against this proposal is that currently it's hard to find qualified employees to backfill the gaps. They'd rather pay individuals more than hire more replacement workers.
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.
> The situation might be the reverse in a few years.
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.
Unions in Europe doesn't work as in the US. There isn't anything like a union job. Everyone can become a member of the union and the tariff is negotiated centrally between unions and employer organisations. Germany have had formal unions since 1850 and strong unions for 100 years.
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.
But German unions are actually quite rational agents who have agreed in the past to not press for raises or increased benefits because it affects their companies' competitiveness.
German unions always start with big first offers. This is just anchoring. Then they settle for less. Last year they also asked for 5 or 6%, we got 2%. In an industry with more than 10% year-on-year growth for the last 5 years that's paltry, especially because there were no raises during the downturn.
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.
It's not like Germany doesn't have immigration... There's the whole pool of the EU who can pretty much immediately start working in Germany. Immigration for skilled workers in Germany with employment prospect is far easier than for a lot of other countries (certainly easier than e.g. into the US). There's also a significant influx into the work pool from refugees and asylum seekers, although that should certainly happen more smoothly and with more support.
That's just not true in many companies nowadays. E.g. in the automotive industry (which is 1/7 of the german economy) I have a growing number of colleagues who don't speak a word of German.
Well "growing numbers" vs. reall acceptance is quite a long way.
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.
Many startup companies in Berlin are English speaking as their daily operations.
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.
I mean, as automation takes over and more of the work becomes knowledge work, this next step doesn't surprise me much.
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.
While I agree, knowledge workers shouldn't have to work 40 hours a week (due to simple cost-benefit of their true output), it just isn't the observed reality in most knowledge-work industries (at least in America). I wouldn't be surprised that, in 50 years, tech has gone the way of finance, where, in order to attain that highly coveted lifestyle, you have to be willing to work 90+ hours a week at the beginning of your career, just to flatline to the comparably reasonable 60+ hours when you progress. This trend is already the norm in large tech companies with regard to their new hires; just throw heads at the problem, as long as it meets the deadline nothing else matters.
35-38 hours pers week is the observed reality in Germany, though. 90+ hours is virtually unheard of here. As is working on a Saturday. In fact 60+ is already seen as inhumane. As soon as you work 50 hours in any given week, the employer will have to pay you much more money. Hence, at my employer I literally am not allowed to work more than 48 hours per week and only Mon-Fri, unless the project is in extremely bad shape. And even then I would have to put in an application and the worker's council might or might not approve it on a case to case basis.
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.
>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.
This is obviously intended mostly as an opening salvo in negotiations, and has little chance to become reality. But there are similar ideas that seem almost like common sense, yet are pretty rare in reality:
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.
One of the challenges is that the cost of a lot of benefits would stay the same even if someone worked a 20 hour week and was paid 50% of their full-time salary. So you're left with potentially higher employee costs, cutting the salary more than 50% to work half-time, or cutting out benefits for part-time workers.
This doesn't really make sense. They would be paying out the same before taxes, just spread out over more years. What you get as an employee might even be higher because taxes are progressive.
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.
Employers do have fixed costs per employee. E.g. office space, a desk a computer, accident insurance etc. Fewer employees working more hours each is cheaper than more employees working fewer hours. Even paying me 1.5x for overtime hours turns out to be financially beneficial for my employer once you figure in fixed costs.
Germany already has the right to reduce working hours (for companies with over 15 employees). Employers need to cite a very good reason to refuse the request. However, you don't have the right to ramp up yours hours later on (but if there is an open vacancy later, you need to be preferred).
I'm happy that at least one country has unions that are going strong. It seems that in the UK they self-destructed (Thanks, Labour party...), and the US has never really had strong labour unions.
This article is over 3 weeks old talking of warning strikes to begin 2 weeks ago. Something more current couldn't be found, at least after the warning strikes were to begin or did begin.
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?
The fact that 85% on all new jobs are temporary contracts is nothing surprising, given that somebody with a permanent job (CDI) will usually stay much longer at her job. So for each permanent contract there will always be many more temporary ones.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> A sign that the use of temporary contracts should also be a focus, just like wages and work hours. This is harder though.
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?
> 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.
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.
> But they hire 40h weeks not because hiring 50h wasn't want they wanted but because it's illegal.
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.
> 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).
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.
> So you're saying that French people are better of unemployed as it is.
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.
> Well, I'm saying that most every improvement to labor laws that benefit employees make it more difficult and/or more expensive to hire.
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).
> Strict labor laws at some point end up increasing inequality. Surprise!
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.
I don't know if it's the strength of labor laws, per se, so much as the cost difference between different categories of employment. That can probably be quantified.
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?
I'm blessed with work. I'm glad I don't have some union telling me I can only work 28 hours a week.
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.
The important context here is that in Germany you already have a right to reduced hours. You just don't have a right to getting your old hours back. This is important because the hours might very well have been given to other employees, permanently hurting your income and/or your career. (unless you find a different employer) Hence many new parents not daring to ask for reduced hours. This new demand/proposal by the union would result in a similar "re-employment guarantee" as those new parents who stop working completely for a number of months get already.
I mean currently it doesn't matter. We're always asked to up our contract to 40h again. The only question is if you go part time and then a crisis hits. In that case employers would be reluctant to bring you back up.
> I bet you are a white anglo-saxon republican, who has a lot to loose (or at least thinks he has a lot to loose).
I guess racism is fine when directed at a supposed white person. Amazing that you can determine a person's race based solely on their opinion, and even more amazing that you found it relevant.
And what if he/she isn't white? Does that make his/her thinking wrong? Did he/she step off the plantation? Why is a person's ethnicity at all relevant here? Should we all declare our skin colors in our profile so you can properly analyze our arguments based on your prejudice?
This explains today's tarnished image of German engineering. It really hurts me to see what's happening with the engineering found at Volkswagen et al.
It has become clear to me that sub-40 hour work weeks don't really work from many perspectives. The most important factor is that many jobs require a minimum degree of attention. More focus does translate into better results.
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.
This has not been my experience, not at least in research or IT/research sector. More hours do not translate in more results _or_ more focus.
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 used to work strict 35 hours weeks in Germany. I think my productivity was higher then. Most people were actually working during that time. Now I often sit in meetings where nothing gets done and people just go through the motions. Having a hard upper limit is an incentive for management not to waste time.
1) I personally need a certain amount of focus to be really productive. Pure focus on one thing with enough "cadence" brings me in the zone.
2) Employers often have the idea as well. Although part-time jobs grow year-over-year, the ones getting promotions are still usually the employees dedicated 40 fulltime. I don't know if this is just a matter of perspective or based on tangible results (e.g. proven better productivity).
3) The "10 000 hour rule"
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.
If you ask me a 40h workweek is very susceptible to Parkinson's law
>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.
>It has become clear to me that sub-40 hour work weeks don't really work from many perspectives. The most important factor is that many jobs require a minimum degree of attention. More focus does translate into better results.
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.
40 seems pretty arbitrary don't you think? Why isn't it 45 or 35? It's probably because everyone else is doing 40. So you are missing others' office hours if you do 35. But you have to consider everyone doing 35 as the alternative here.
I've always found I am most productive during short, intense intervals.
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.
The standard workweek in Denmark has been 37 for quite a few years are and has not really shown any issues. In most physically demanding jobs thought theres a 1:1 or higher "afspadsering", which means you save up 1 or more hours paid free time for ever hour of overwork, kinda like what you describing, but never for deskjobs.
Unfortunately unless worldwide culture changes such that demand for produced goods drops dramatically in favor for intangibles (humanities, happiness, etc.) any small union that does this will basically become irrelevant in no short time. It's important to note that the union in the OP has huge leverage.
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.
We've shifted to the 10-hour work day and the 8-hour work day before, despite a worldwide economy with an increasing appetite for stuff, and despite employee protections being much, much weaker back then.
We've also gained mandatory arbitration and at-will employment; let's not get ahead of ourselves. Not to mention most knowledge-workers work more than 40 hours a week with no hope of overtime. Of course, at least in America, we won't see 'white collar' jobs shift from the 5 day work week, but they have shackles of a different kind.
The number of emails I get from Americans (across multiple jobs) on a Saturday and Sunday afternoon would argue differently.
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.
By that logic, manufacturing in Germany would have seized decades ago. The fact that it hasn't, and that other high-wage countries (USA, Scandinavia, etc.) are still flourishing, shows that such Economics 101 simply don't represent the real world.
We could point to German products which already sell for premium prices (say a Miele vacuum), they don't appear to have been killed by cheaper similar products from elsewhere.
Because Miele are known to outlast anything else. They don't only have the premium price, they actually offer premium quality, which can't be said of many premium brands.
> Unfortunately unless worldwide culture changes such that demand for produced goods drops dramatically in favor for intangibles (humanities, happiness, etc.) any small union that does this will basically become irrelevant in no short time. It's important to note that the union in the OP has huge leverage.
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.
The problem with shifting to socialism completely is lack of incentives. Also central planning doesn't work. Voting with money by what you buy has shown to be a much better planner than any government could hope to achieve.
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.
> If you doubt this, consider a company who has (or can find) equally productive employees who will work 56 hours a week for the same wage. This company will produce twice as many trinkets.
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.
Actually you can. Companies in Germany don't have to be part of a union. My previous company was non-union, paid lower wages and had more overtime hours. Still they weren't profitable and they sold a few years ago to a competitor. My current company is unionized, and plenty of people still have non-union contracts (mostly lower management and up).
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.
> Companies in Germany don't have to be part of a union.
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.
Trinkets are made by robots that work 168 hours a week. More and more work is about creative endeavors. Can you have twice as many ideas sitting at a desk for 56 hours a week vs. 28 hours a week?
