Business representatives demand a return to the 40-hour week

In December 1999, several representatives of German business and employers' associations demanded a return to the 40-hour working week in order to improve competitiveness and create more jobs. In 1999, average collectively agreed working time was 37.5 hours in western Germany and 39.2 hours in eastern Germany.

On 2 December 1999, the president of the German Association of Chambers of Commerce (Deutscher Industrie und Handelstag, DIHT), Hans Peter Stihl, appealed in an interview with the daily newspaper Die Welt for a "return to the 40-hour working week" which would make doing business in Germany much more attractive and thereby contribute to an increase in employment. According to Mr Stihl, collective agreements on working time should be more flexible so that "every establishment can determine its own weekly working time."

The demands for longer working time have been supported by various German business and employers' representatives. For example, the president of the national employers' association for the retail trade, Hauptverband des deutschen Einzelhandels (HDE), Hermann Franzen, said that the working time reductions in retail trade "had not created a single new job" in the past. According to Mr Franzen, an extension of working time back to 40 hours per week is "absolutely necessary" for both the improvement of the economic performance of shops and the reduction of work pressure on shop assistants.

The president of the Confederation of German Industries (Bundesvereinigung der deutschen Industrie, BDI), Hans-Olaf Henkel, pointed out that Germany has much shorter working time than many of its competitors and is burdened by extremely high hourly labour costs. Against this background, Mr Henkel called the reintroduction of the 40-hour week "the right way" to improve competitiveness and to create new employment.

Representatives of the trade unions have, however, sharply rejected all demands for working time extensions. The vice-president of the IG Metall metalworkers' union Jürgen Peters, said that the union would never accept such an "ancient proposal", since a return to the 40-hour week would threaten about 300,000 jobs in metalworking alone and about 1 million jobs in the overall economy. Considering continual increases in productivity, the unions claim that there is on the contrary a urgent need for further working time reductions in order to prevent additional job losses. Therefore, the unions have recently demanded a limitation of overtime (DE9901289N) and new early retirement schemes (DE9910217F).

Currently, collectively agreed working time in Germany varies mainly between 35 and 40 hours per week while the average collectively agreed working time stands at 37.5 hours in western Germany and 39.2 hours in the east (see table below). Actual working time is longer, since German employees worked an average of about 1.4 hours' overtime per week per head in 1998.

Source: WSI collective agreement archive 1999.