German Chancellor Scholz, unions hit back at calls for longer working hours, pension reform

On International Workers’ Day, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD/S&D) and trade union representatives voiced opposition to calls by business leaders and pro-business parties for longer working hours and to increase the retirement age.

Amid the country’s ailing economic performance, business representatives as well as liberal party FDP (Renew) and centre-right CDU (EPP) have recently called for reforms of the welfare system, including scrapping a scheme that allows workers to retire early if they have contributed to the pension system for 45 years.

Deutsche Bank’s CEO Christian Sewing and the head of employers’ association BDA, Rainer Dulger, said at an event in April that longer working hours were needed to counter the current economic slump.

“The concept of work-life balance has somehow been overdone,” BDA chief Rainer Dulger said.

But with unions celebrating their traditional “International Workers’ Day” and public demonstrations announced in Berlin and elsewhere, Scholz rebuffed their arguments in a video statement published on Wednesday (1 May).

“Germany’s employees have never worked as many hours as they did last year,” he said, referring to numbers recently published by the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW).

“That’s why it annoys me when some people speak disparagingly of ‘leisure park Germany’ or when there are calls to raise the retirement age,” he added.

DIW data showed that the country’s workforce has produced a total of 54.7 billion hours last year, compared to 52.2 billion in 1990. However, the total number of employees has also increased from below 40 million to 45.9 million, partly contributing to falling average hours worked per employee.

The term ‘leisure park’ to describe the country’s attitude towards work was coined by former chancellor Helmut Kohl in the 1990s and recently picked up by conservative politician Jens Spahn (CDU/EPP), who told WELT that Germans would work 300 hours per year less than their Swiss neighbours.

Scholz’s view was echoed by trade union representatives.

“Employers’ organisations and politicians from the CDU/CSU and the FDP are outbidding each other with demands to dismantle the welfare state. This is playing with fire,” Frank Werneke, head of service union Ver.di, said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Yasmin Fahimi, head of Germany’s Trade Union Confederation (DGB) lamented the misplaced focus of the public debate.

“Employees are accused of lacking motivation, our pension system is maligned, people on low wages are pitted against people without work, the right to strike, and the welfare state are called into question,” she said at a rally in Hannover.

“It’s always the same, as in a neoliberal broken record” she added.

The call to dismantle early retirement after 45 years of work was also renewed last weekend at the FDP’s party convention in Berlin, as part of what the party calls an agenda for an “economic turnaround”.

[Edited by Anna Brunetti]

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