BERLIN — In the United States, punching the clock for a strict 40 hours a week is mostly a myth — most workers put in far more than eight hours a day.
But in Germany, the 48-hour workweek is enshrined in law, as are breaks and downtime. Answering emails and phone calls after hours is verboten, too.
While these strict rules are the result of a long-held tradition of protecting workers in the nation’s highly structured, export-driven economy, the result has been that, despite their reputation for industriousness, Germans work the least amount of time on average in the industrialized world, according to 2016 statistics from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and unemployment in November was a low 5.3 percent.
But now, in light of a changing economic landscape, and with the realization that more flexible labor laws offer a critical competitive edge in an increasingly global, digitized and service-driven economy, some German economists and politicians want to challenge the country’s traditional work culture and reform the hallowed labor rules that preserve it.
“The big challenge ahead is digitization, the general shift of the global economy toward a more service-oriented economy,” said Carsten Brzeski, chief economist at ING-DiBa in Frankfurt. “Germany is still pretty much an old economy based on industrial production, so the challenge is to make the shift without giving up the past.”
It’s Germany’s industrial past that has led to its economic dominance today, said Mr. Brzeski. The industrial power of Germany’s highly specialized, family-owned, midsize companies has made the nation the economic powerhouse of Europe, a world-class export machine and the world’s fourth-largest economy by gross domestic product.
Ramped-up production, combined with low spending on imports and expansive public projects have allowed the German economy to flourish: Germany is running a $17.5 billion surplus, a figure that could effectively double by 2022, according to a November report by Germany’s Ministry of Finance.
Although the German economy may look good on paper, it faces major challenges in the near future that must be addressed if the nation wants to remain competitive, said Christoph Schmidt, president of the German Council of Economic Experts, which advises the government.
The production-driven industrial economy of old is giving way to service-based companies that use the internet to connect with firms and clients in different time zones. Such marketplace demands simply don’t mesh with the 9-to-5 workday codified in German law.
“Quickly bringing together international teams, immediately responding to the request of customers located in different time zones, and facilitating the work of colleagues by infusing a piece of information from one’s home office have become vital aspects of the modern-era work flow,” said Mr. Schmidt. “This conflicts with the traditional working time arrangements of the fading industrial era.”
But changing deeply ingrained labor practices and protections can be politically risky, as governments in neighboring France have shown over the decades. Germany’s prosperity and export prowess have largely kept such clashes at bay, but many wonder how long the good times can last.
Meanwhile, German small and medium-size businesses — which make up 99 percent of all German enterprises and constitute 56 percent of the country’s economic output, according to statistics from Germany’s Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy — are struggling to attract qualified workers.
Slow to adapt
Traditional family-owned and -operated businesses, often located in rural epicenters, have been slow to digitize operations to allow for more flexibility so that employees can work remotely from home and have more autonomy in decision-making within flat corporate hierarchies.
Such factors are paramount to a new breed of millennial workers seeking to live in urban areas, whose work forms an integral part of their identities, said Mr. Brzeski. The result: a profound and growing mismatch between the structure of many of Germany’s most successful firms and the inclinations of younger workers looking for a foothold in the modern global workforce.
“This war for talent means [German companies] have to be more flexible,” he said. “You have to offer more flexibility as an employer because you have millennials who currently demand flexibility, a good work-life balance, more mobility, more home offices — these kinds of things are a big challenge for the German economy.”
To accommodate such demands, the German Council of Economic Experts and private researchers are calling on the government to loosen restrictions on when employees can work throughout the week — without sacrificing the 48-hour maximum workweek, an upper limit codified in European law.
While the move is supported by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats and other conservative factions in parliament, more left-leaning political parties worry that breaking down restrictions could allow for companies to take advantage of employees — shattering the “healthy” work-life balance long seen as a birthright of the average German wage earner.
Some analysts are even calling for a 28-hour workweek to provide relief to workers in physically and mentally demanding fields. They point to a recent study out of Sweden that found that limiting nurses’ workdays to six hours per day, or 30 hours per week, meant more full-time jobs for all employees, fewer sick days and fewer absences from work.
But such limitations in Germany, a nation already struggling to adjust to the global, hyperconnected, 24/7 economy, are “impractical and dangerous,” said Michael Theurer, the parliamentary speaker for labor and social issues for Germany’s pro-business Free Democrats.
“We’re already noticing that the pressure to compete globally is increasing, and we want to keep pace with the digital economy at a time when we’re lagging behind in Germany,” he said. “We can’t shut ourselves off from work models oriented toward flexibility in creative and digital industries.”
Creating a more flexible work environment also may bolster employees’ ability to spend quality time with family and friends, said the Council of Economic Experts’ Mr. Schmidt. At the same time, more traditional, industrial companies will still be able to bargain for further protections in collaboration with Germany’s influential unions even if restrictions are dismantled, he said.
“Workers in manufacturing and other sectors with strong physical requirements will continue to be protected by union arrangements anyway,” he said. ” Modernization of German society thus requires shedding the shackles of the industrial era in the very interest of workers themselves.”
All things considered, clinging to old work models that led to Germany’s economic prowess isn’t a worthwhile bet, Mr. Brzeski said.
“You cannot turn the dial back. The world is changing due to digitalization and different work-life balances,” he said. “You can’t just hide under a rock and hope it will go away by overregulating the market.”
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