The German language has no straightforward equivalent to the “good life”, let alone la dolce vita or la vie en rose.
In a country that has contributed more than any other to the modern notion of the work ethic, the prevailing tone was set half a millennium ago by the strident Protestant reformer Martin Luther: “God does not want lazy foot-draggers. One should work faithfully and hard, each according to his occupation and office.”
After two years of recession, though, and with zero growth forecast for the rest of this year, the idea of Germany as a country of relentless strivers and Arbeitstiere (work animals) is increasingly coming into question.
Days after taking office as chancellor last month, the conservative leader Friedrich Merz used his first speech in the Bundestag to rekindle debate about the national working culture.
“We need to work more and, above all, more efficiently in this country,” Merz told parliament. “With the four-day week and work-life balance we will not be able to sustain our prosperity.”
Since then the argument has only gathered momentum, even as Merz backtracked a little in the face of an avalanche of newspaper columns insisting that citizens were not idle layabouts.
IG Metall, the country’s most powerful union, has retreated from its demands for a four-day week. Some business associations have started lobbying for the abolition of Christian bank holidays such as Boxing Day or Easter Monday on the basis that the majority of the population is now secular.
On the face of it, Merz does have at least the rudimentary makings of a point.
Crudely, economic output is what you can get done in an hour multiplied by the number of hours you put in. Since productivity growth has more or less stalled, it is not intrinsically stupid to look at the other factor in the equation.
International comparisons consistently show that the average working week in Germany is among the shortest in Europe, alongside those in France, Belgium and the Netherlands.
According to Eurostat, the European Union’s statistics agency, it is 34 hours, compared with 36 in France, Italy and Spain, and 39 in Poland (the Office for National Statistics says that Britons worked for 37 hours a week on average last year).
“Chancellor Merz has hit the nail on the head,” said Gitta Connemann, a state secretary and the government’s tsar for the Mittelstand, cherished small and medium-sized businesses. “The numbers point to a bitter truth. Germany has among the lowest annual working hours in the OECD. The volume of work is going down, even though we have ever more workers.”
Earlier generations would be deeply envious. An analysis by the Trade Union Confederation found that the working week had been more than 70 hours long when the country was first unified in 1871, about 48 hours in the economic boom after 1945, and 40 at the time of reunification in 1990.
Most studies suggest the average worker takes more sick days in a year than their counterparts in any other European country. The figure has nearly doubled since 2007, from 8.1 to 15.1 working days.
Then there are the public holidays. While these are not outstandingly numerous by European standards, varying from nine a year in Berlin to 13 in certain Catholic parts of Bavaria, they are often unofficially padded out with “bridging days” off when they fall next to a weekend.
Tomorrow, as workers take advantage of their statutory day off to mark Whit Monday, it will for many of them be the fourth de facto bank holiday in a month, after the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, then Ascension Day — when fathers traditionally trundle out into the countryside with carts full of beer — followed by a bridging day to sleep off the hangover.
Against the backdrop of Luther’s invective against idlers, the sociologist Max Weber’s theory of the Protestant work ethic and older Germans’ instinctive suspicion of their millennial and Generation Z colleagues, there is inevitably a moral dimension to this question: are sections of the population simply workshy?
Most experts say the answer is no — there are compelling technical reasons for the low number of hours per worker. Silke Kriwolutzky, director of the social economic research institute Söstra, said the phenomenon had much to do with the popularity of part-time work, especially among middle-aged Germans.
This has its upsides. The flexibility allows an unusually high proportion of the working-age population to keep plugging away, albeit at a reduced intensity.
Jürgen Kerner, the deputy head of the IG Metall union, points out that Germans are in fact collectively working more hours than at any previous point in their history, give or take a very marginal decline over the past 12 months.
“If you want people to do more work in Germany, you can’t issue polemics against work-life balance,” he said. “On the contrary, you have to do more for the compatibility of work and life. Women in particular are involuntarily stuck in a part-time trap [because of the patchy availability of childcare].”
For Eike Windscheid-Profeta, an economist at the Hans Böckler foundation, which is aligned with the trade union movement, the shorter working week is also, in the grand scheme of things, a symptom of success. “Over the historical trajectory, working hours have fallen because of technological developments and the resulting possibilities to save time,” he said.
Yet it is a source of frustration for many employers. David von Rosen, a billionaire and serial entrepreneur, rose to prominence with a fashion company that furnished Steve Jobs with his trademark black turtleneck sweaters, but has since founded other firms in Germany, Gibraltar and Dubai.
“Working hours absolutely need to rise,” he said. “As a country, we’ve been too complacent and comfortable, too used to the status quo and stability. We’re attached to our established economy, and it’s no longer supporting us. We can either become more ambitious and work more now, or we can continue with the status quo and see living standards decline.”
In Dubai, von Rosen said, he had encountered an entirely different attitude: “People are motivated and hungry, ready to work in order to win. And the government rolls out the red carpet for you. They are ‘open for business’ and understand entrepreneurs as customers and enablers, not as petitioners.”
Merz’s coalition has set out various plans to encourage more work. Chief among them are tax-free overtime for full-time workers and an “active pension” under which the over-67s will be able to earn up to €2,000 a month without paying tax.
The “citizens’ money” unemployment benefit is also being overhauled to nudge jobseekers into actually looking for a job.
Von Rosen is sceptical that any of this will make much of a difference. “This isn’t something that can be forced or even incentivised through small reliefs or benefits,” he said.
“If it’s done this way, people will just stick around for a few extra hours a week but do the same amount of work. It’s a shift in ambition and hunger that’s needed to have a real impact.”
That throws the spotlight back onto the other half of the economic growth equation: productivity.
It is a notoriously tricky nut to crack, made especially difficult in Germany by the high burden of bureaucracy on all businesses — by one estimate it costs almost €150 billion a year in lost output — and a system that favours established companies over new entrants that are trying to scale up.
Von Rosen called on Merz to set up an Office for Entrepreneurship, dedicated to breaking down the formidable obstacles confronting start-ups and to fostering a culture of risk-taking.
“We’re still thinking backwards and looking to our manufacturing to save us, but we need to be looking forward to new technologies and industries,” he said. “We need new avenues for growth and innovation, and that’s what I’m not seeing from the new government.”
Additional reporting: Sabine Schu
