WEDNESDAY, JULY 7, 2004
Europe goes for longer working hours
MARK LANDLER
FRANKFURT: For Michael Stahl, a technician at a cordless telephone factory in the town of Bocholt, summer is usually a carefree season of long evenings in his garden and even longer vacations. His toughest choice is where to take his wife and 3 children on their annual camping trip: Italy and Croatia are on this year's itinerary.
Two weeks ago, Stahl got a rude jolt, when his union signed a contract with his employer, Siemens, to extend the workweek at the Bocholt plant to 40 hours from 35. Weekly pay remains the same. The new contract also scraps the annual bonuses every employee receives to help pay for vacations and Christmas expenses.
After nearly 27 years at Siemens, Stahl, 42, feels he has no choice but to put in the extra time. Like millions of his fellow citizens, he is struggling to accept the stark new reality of life in a global economy: Germans are having to work longer hours.
And not just Germans. The French, who in 2000 trimmed their workweek to 35 hours in hopes of generating more jobs, are now talking about lengthening it again, worried that the shorter hours are hurting the economy. In Britain, more than a fifth of the labour force, according to a 2002 study, works longer than the EU's mandated limit of 48 hours a week.
Europe's long siesta, it seems, has finally reached its limit a victim of chronic economic stagnation, deteriorating public finances and competition from low-wage countries in the enlarged EU and in Asia. Most important, many Europeans now believe that shorter hours, once seen as a way of spreading work among more people, have done little to ease unemployment.
"We have created a leisure society, while the Americans have created a work society," said Klaus F Zimmermann, the president of the German Institute for Economic Research.
"But our model does not work anymore." A longer workweek also looms for assembly line workers at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Sindelfingen, in Southwestern Germany. There, the company wants to curtail breaks during the workday.
Mercedes has not threatened to abandon Germany. But auto workers shivered recently when Opel, which is owned by GM, announced that it would assemble a compact minivan at its plant in Gliwice, Poland, passing over its main factory outside Frankfurt, which had bid for the job. Even in Germany's public sector, the work is piling up. The state of Bavaria has extended the workweek to 42 hours from 40. Chancellor Gerhard Schrvder wants to extend federal work hours to 40 from 38.5. Deutsche Bahn, the state railway system, is demanding up to six more hours a week from its engineers and conductors.
Flagging tax receipts and large budget deficits are the main cause of the state's newfound push for hours. In France, however, the government is making a broader case that the 35-hour week, which applies to public- and private-sector jobs, is throttling the country's growth.
In Eastern Germany, where auto workers refused to rally behind the once powerful union, IG Metall, when it called a strike in June 2003 to shorten the workweek to 35 hours from 38 hours. IG Metall was forced to abandon strike, dealing the union a blow from which it has not recovered. The message from the workers was: We will work more, if the alternative is watching our jobs move across the border to Hungary or Poland.
(NYT News Service)
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