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Are we? Please tell my boss, he apparently wasn’t informed about this.
Germany explores 4-day workweek amid shortage of labor willing top work for less than they’re worth
FTFY
Yep, Germany’s relatively strong economy the last few decades was in large part due to a rapidly growing cheap labor sector (also cheap Russian gas), which now leads to stagnation because most people have no money to spent anymore and the industry that refused to modernize is not internationally competitive anymore. That’s what more than 30 years of almost uninterrupted conservative leadership gets you.
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Working a day less would cost me maybe 400€ per month due to lower taxation, lower health insurance premiums etc. Working four hours less and stretching the other four across 4 days would cost me 200€. All in all, a low price for basically double the time to work on my own projects.
Once again:
There’s no such thing as a labor shortage. It’s just a wage shortage that they’re gaslighting us about.
Here’s the thing I don’t understand though. Where are the people? Like they need money to survive… What are they doing?
There are just more (low paying) jobs available than there are people. The people are just working different, better paid jobs.
Suffering from Long Covid. In the UK (and other countries) the number of newly disabled shot up by 600k since 2022. The US is reporting 25% of its population is suffering from Long Covid and the studies show 25% of that (so 6%) are severely unwell and bed and housebound. By the 3rd infection in Canada they found 38% had Long Covid, its about 15% per infection and despite the news saying all is OK only about 5-15% recover.
Labour is disappearing across the world due to Covid in enormous numbers. The last count by the WHO was 110million but the individual studies late last year show a picture of the problem being much larger than that, probably more than a billion people with new health conditions and hundreds of millions who need permanent care. Its bad enough about 30 million have died world wide and still are dying every week at rates 20-40x that of Flu, but all year around, but its disabling a much larger number of people.
Its going to collapse the economy, people that disabled can’t work and don’t spend money. The problem is its well hidden behind all the profiteering and labour wage suppression from 2008 so a lot of people are thinking its more of the same tactic but the high employment percentages and move to using teenage labour and reduction in skilled workers and shortages in doctors, teachers and other high contact social work shows a picture of a massive societal problem.
Finally. Increased productivity means we can achieve the same results with fewer working hours.
What the article doesn’t mention (or I haven’t seen it when I skimmed through it):
- This is only a pilot project for half a year, after that it’s probably back to the grind, unless the company decides otherwise
- Only 45 companies are testing it and around half of them are very small (10-49 employees). So this is not the big thing this article is suggesting.
- Craftsmanship and industry only make up for 6% of the companies doing this test. The biggest labour shortage is currently in these areas, so this is a slap in the face to young workers, because it implies that companies in these areas still don’t care about better working conditions, like they’ve done for the past few decades.
At least they’re doing one thing right this time: They reduced the amount of hours to 80%. So if you’ve worked 40 hours a week before, you’re now doing only 32 hours. This is a real four-day-workweek, which honestly surprised me. Mostly, companies try to just shove the same amount of work into four days, which is really stressful.
From personal experience, most companies are not adopting the four-day-workweek out of principle, especially when older people are running them. I have the privilege of a 32h week with Fridays off, but I’m also working at a very young and very small company. It’s not the norm and we still have a long way to go.
What also doesn’t help is that major conservative parties, our finance minister and bosses of big companies and banks are openly against it. When you go into mainstream media, there’s a new article almost every day telling young people to start sweating because they’re “ruining our economy”.
That won’t go away that easily.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
It sounds counterintuitive: While Germany, like many countries, struggles to find enough workers, dozens of companies are starting an experiment that will see employees work a day less.
If companies can maintain their current output with employees working fewer hours, this would naturally lead to higher productivity levels.
This model could also potentially draw more people into the workforce by engaging those who aren’t willing to work five days a week, helping to alleviate the lack of labor.
Recent data from the German health insurance company DAK shows that workers in Germany took 20 sick days on average last year.
Holger Schäfer, a researcher at Cologne’s German Economic Institute (IW), says it’s a fantasy to expect a 25% increase in productivity in exchange for a 20% reduction in working hours.
Economist Bernd Fitzenberg of Germany’s Institute for Employment Research (IAB) says a 4-day week could mean higher costs for companies if “spreading working hours over just four days is not offset by productivity gains.”
The original article contains 746 words, the summary contains 160 words. Saved 79%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
@throws_lemy guess it’s pretty bold from them to test this despite labor shortages. Good move!
Labor shortage? I mean, that was not even true back when it was easy to get a job. But nowadays it’s just an utter denial of reality as labor market turned heavily back to employer side and across all industries people find it difficult to land any job, at all.
