Labor is scarce everywhere. Is a four-day week a good idea?
Image: Frank Röth
Care, schools, crafts, industry: Germany is groaning due to a lack of staff. And yet the idea of a four-day week is currently booming like it hasn’t been for a long time. What is the phenomenon all about?
It was Chancellor Helmut Kohl (CDU) who read the Germans the riot act almost 30 years ago. A successful industrial nation, he said in the Bundestag in 1993, “cannot be organized as a collective amusement park”. According to Kohl’s message, the declining competitiveness of German companies on the world market has to do not least with high labor costs and excessive holiday entitlements of German employees. The opposition and unions were outraged.
Such outbursts are not to be expected from Olaf Scholz. All that can be ascertained is that he did not spearhead a movement to introduce more free time as of May 1st, Labor Day 2023. But that didn’t change the fact that since then everyone in and around political Berlin has been talking about the four-day week. And about how happy employees would be if she finally came.