Tuesday, May 11, 2004
Achtung! In Germany 9-5 may be history
AP
FRANKFURT : The 220 technicians at a Siemens phone repair lab in Germany faced a choice: work five hours more a week - or don't work at all. They found there wasn't much to decide.
By giving up their 35-hour week, won by German industrial workers in a seven-week strike 20 years ago, the employees kept their jobs from heading to low-wage Hungary and won a no-layoff pledge from Siemens. German workers are increasingly facing the prospect of longer work weeks, as industry tries to cut sky-high labour costs, under pressure from cheaper wages abroad and a sluggish economy at home.
"The question was simply this: Either make 220 people unemployed or accept these drawbacks," said Michael Stahl, head of the employee council at the Siemens plant in the northern town of Bocholt . "And after going back and talking with the workers, we decided together to accept these disadvantages."
With millions of cheaper, often highly skilled workers in ex-communist countries just to the east, and Germany 's jobless rate at 10.7%, at least some on Germany 's factory floors appear ready to compromise. Several other major German companies are discussing longer hours with employees in some departments. Automaker DaimlerChrysler is talking with product development workers, tyre company Continental with chemical workers, and auto supplier Robert Bosch with employees of unspecified departments.
In most cases, discussions are still under way and the companies are reluctant to divulge information until a deal is reached. Bosch said it considered cutting hours as the last resort. Siemens and its CEO, Heinrich von Pierer, drew sharp criticism from the IG Metall industrial union, which represents some 2.5m workers in manufacturing and electronics.
But even IG Metall agreed to increase the limited use of 40-hour weeks for some workers in a new agreement reached with major industries in February - employees would be paid for those extra hours, but not at overtime rates. Under the contract, workers can agree at the company level to work longer to save their jobs, but union higher-ups must endorse the decision. On their own, workers and management can also agree on 40-hour weeks for limited numbers of highly paid, white-collar research and development workers.
Siemens' Mr von Pierer says longer hours aren't a solution for all its 170,000 workers in Germany , out of 417,000 worldwide. But he says some places, such as Bocholt and a nearby mobile-phone assembly facility in Kamp-Lintfort, must lower costs or see 2,000 jobs leave. "I want to keep the jobs here," he said last week.
Employee representative Mr Stahl said moving to Hungary offered Siemens a 20-25% cost savings. "We tried to show in various ways how it would be possible to match this cost advantage here," he said. "Unfortunately it wasn't possible to do it by other means. We were instead forced, if we wanted to keep the work, in the end to introduce a longer working time. Just by doing that, we achieved a cost saving of 14.3%."
The rest of the savings came from dropping extra pay for night shifts and by linking another cherished German labour tradition - the "Christmas money", or year-end bonus of a month's pay - to performance. He warned that the deal only worked because the Bocholt lab had enough phone repair work to fill the extra hours, so it shouldn't be seen as a model. "This was a step back and one must be very careful with such steps."
IG Metall officials have vowed to fight the trend. Their leader, Juergen Peters, has called industry's push for extra hours "madness" . His deputy, Berthold Huber, said, "If the head of Siemens doesn't get down from his political high horse, the company will face a huge confrontation." IG Metall's right to strike, however, is limited under German law while a collective bargaining agreement is in effect.
During the 1980s, as unemployment rose steadily in Germany, the union began a push for lower hours on the theory that would spread available work among more people.
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