Dear Chancellor Merz,
Go fuck yourself.
Sincerely, everyone
Get your lazy 42 working hour ass up and get a second job till you’re 72. You lazy parasite.
Sincerely, Christoph Maria Merz
The legal maximum in Germany is 40 h, and a lot (the most?) sectors have union contracts with 35 - 37.5 h maximum work hours per week.
Just in case some reader doesn’t know about German working hours. I don’t know whether Merz knows, though.
When you reach a certain above rate (AT-außertariflich) pay level the contracts are a bit different. Your income is calculated by year and the contract states 40h work hours as standard and overtime already being passed for.
By law that (free) overtime is capped at 8h/week, so the work week is often in the 48h/week ball park. Any overtime above the 48 hours needs to be paid out added to PTO.
In reality many employers consider 60+ hours / week as reasonable work schedule and won’t pay the 20+ extra hours since -according to contract- these hours have already been paid for.
Sometimes these are even billable hours, so your company earn good money from your work while they are lowering your hourly wage quite significantly.
People usually don’t ask for pay or return of that stolen life time. I know of this happening in rare-paid jobs as well, but I don’t know how wide spread it is.
And now comes Fotzenfritz trying to squeeze another million or two out of the poorest for his billionaire friend that are committing tax fraud by hundreds of millions yearly (on top of using mind-boggling loop holes to legally avoid hundreds of millions in die taxes).
Anyone who believes this shit should be forced to watch this: Wer liegt hier wem auf der Tasche? until they understand who is stealing our tax money.
wtf, why would you need a permission to work however long, wait a minute
the conservative has told voters their country’s prosperity will not be maintained “with a four-day week and work-life balance”. He recently effectively accused them of skiving
he was bitten by american ceo wasn’t he? 🙃
I think it’s less about permission and more about rights. In Germany, there is a right to work part-time. Basically, if you work for more than 6 months at a company and the position you are working in can be performed as a part-time position, then your employer must grant you a part-time position upon request. Suitable full-time job offers must also always be offered as part-time offers, although in reality this doesn’t happen as much I think.
There are more specifics, but that’s the gist of it.
In my opinion, the CDU/CSU is trying to create a new scapegoat for the languishing economy. Previously, it had been unemployed people on social welfare (“Bürgergeld”), but since their government introduced their own (arguably worse and def more expensive) legislation, they need a new group of people to target so that their voters don’t do the unthinkable and actually start blaming the government for not properly governing the country.
Merz was working for BlackRock for quite a while
Specifically he was on their board and afaik only for his contacts to other politicians and public officials.
Which were rather underwhelming according to done sources.
“working”
he was bitten by american ceo wasn’t he? 🙃
It’s a
globalpandemic.
This is fake news. This is not a party decision yet, but a push from some individuals which created controversy inside of the union and broad outrage in the other parties.
It’s always the fault of the workers and not the leeches at the top taking every gain for themselves.
Ah yes, the agenda of the Blackrock fanboy turbo capitalist minion.
Destroy social security nets to make people so desperate they will take any job at any conditions.
It‘s kind of insane yet not surprising how he or most of that anti civilization party sees how this will erode the domestic consumer market and hurt the economy long term. People will have less money to buy things. Less money will circulate and that will worsen things for everyone. The overly rich forgot they have the most to lose here.
He has 22% approval in current polls I wonder how it is so high.
Seniors
Retirees.
I guess mostly bitter people who don’t want other people to live comfortable
Sorry guys, but if you have to answer retorical questions at least do it right. The right answer is: rich people
Merz is personified ragebait.
He does not even für one second consider utilising technology for efficiency and growth. There is so much potential in not sending people to work. Yes, even AI can automate processes very well if done right. At some point countries will send machines to war and Merz will still send meat to the grinder.
Makes me want to grab and shake this old man in hopes there is still some problem solving capacity left in his >70 year old brain.
Because technology is already utilised to constantly increase productivity and growth. Then that growth/productivity flows directly into the pocket of the sub 1%, barely taxed at all. But that’s not something they would ever talk about.
What they want to talk about instead is how workes with their stagnating wages, who also have to finance everything as wages is basically the only thing taxed properly, need to do more to keep the system they intentionally broke to enrich themselves alive.
You’re correct. It’s kind of obvious and really depressing. All this efficiency gained through technology has never been used directly for quality of life of the people.
Someone should really write a book about it, ideally in German
This won’t happen. It’s a deeply unpopular policy and the German Institute for Economics just told them in a friendly town to kill the idea before they choke on it. It was just a dumb suggestion with little bearing in reality
As an American dealing with elderly parents and work. It’s not lifestyle. I burned myself out.
I think working time is the wrong place for politicians to regulate.
Sure, there’s a huge imbalance. Some people work a lot and some very little.
The key is that the the people who do work more than mandatory minimum hours, are also the people who enjoy working. Self employed or not, doesn’t matter. If people like working, they’ll work more. It’s really that simple.
Politicians ought to focus on regulation of how enjoyable work is. Then the working time would increase by itself, if that’s the ultimate goal for whatever reason.
I don’t think it is though. Productivity ought to be the end goal.
What else would they regulate? Excessive wealth?
I’m glad that the German chancellor keeps voicing an uncomfortable truth.
You can’t fix stupid.
I’m technically one of these “lifestyle” part-timers, at 35 instead of 40 hours a week. This reduction has had a noticeable impact on my mental health, to the point where I’d dare say my productivity hasn’t changed one bit.
But let’s be real: I cannot imagine that even Blackrockfritze believes that economic growth is determined by having longer working hours. This is a deliberate attempt to create another group of “lazy people” to lay the blame for the utter incompetence of his government.
Exactly. Truth is, most people have maybe 2-3 hours effective work hours a day.
Actually, economic growth potential has four causes, and the most important one in Germany is (public+private) investment in assets. The second most important cause is the overall volume of labor. So actually yes, economic growth has a lot to do with longer working hours. More investment in assets and education would otherwise lead to inflation, rather than real growth (real = creating welfare).
You are wrong. Plain and simple. Economic growth does not go hand in hand with more working hours. In fact productivity decreases with more working hours, potentially having even a negative impact.
There are enough studies that show that a 4 day working week increases productivity and mental health, leading to an overall better quality of life.
More working hours has the opposite effect.
I don’t know how you can so confidently make mistaken statements. Economic growth and productivity growth are not the same thing.
Productivity growth can compensate for fewer hours worked in an economy. However, productivity growth has been decreasing for decades. At this point, we have to stop hoping for a mircale productivity boom.
In many ways, our growth and future wealth will rely on hard work (similarly to previous generations).
What do you mean „stop hoping“? We have not even tried to make it happen.
Forcing people to work more hours will not help.
Well, many investments in general-purpose technologies were thought to create that productivity growth boom. AI (LLMs) is the most recent example. The productivity gains are not as large as for prior general-purpose technologies, like combustion engine vehicles or antibiotics. It’s nice that you are so optimistic that humanity just needs to try harder to raise productivity. And you’re right, past trends may not continue!
Well, if people work more hours due to public policy changes, that will lead to economic growth, given the currently high investments in assets. A key way to do this is to remove parttime entitlements and to reduce taxes on salaries.
Think about it. What will longer working hours really do? They will create frustration, stress, more illness because of these two. It will lead to a reduction in productivity, reduction in worker motivation, overall reduced worker satisfaction.
How can you be so confident that this is a positive direction?
I’m confident that a larger volume of labor, assuming that investments in assets are made, will lead to economic growth, because that has been observed many times over in Economics research.
The development (working longer hours) is not positive. I would much rather prefer a productivity boom due to some general purpose technology. And that that raises economic growth.
But for me personally, going from working parttime to fulltime is not the worst thing ever either. I’ve done it before.
I hope you (and Emopunker who removed my comments, grrr) can see that the link between economic growth and the volume of labor is quite solid, and it should not engage people. There are only four levers to raise economic growth that are known in the literature (investments in assets, volume of labor, total factor productivity, education).
During my Probezeit through Leasingfirma I used to work 35h weeks. This shit slaps! 6:30 in, 14:00 out! Can go for Termin, can get my other shit done. If needed, can look for another job and attend interviews or apartment checks.
I work 30h a week and Merz can fuck off. I would be getting a similar amount of work done, not more, but have a lot less free time to do what I really want and is probably just as productive in many ways, but not in their too limited economic indicators. Sports, cleaning the house, meeting people, growing tomatoes, sleeping enough etc etc
I love being told to work more by people that don’t work at all i mean private jets all over the world, private chauffeur to wherever they need, a nice retirement and all the while getting paid probably 10 times more than me that will most likely die of hunger in a cold shitty house with no power after working constantly for the next 30-40 years…
You think Merz and other officials don’t work long hours? That’s just deluded.
Plus, you may not trust the pensions system, but it will function well enough to give you a normal pensioner’s life. Why fearmonger like this?
Fear mongering? Are you serious? Here’s a news flash there are a lot of retiree’s in Germany doing dumpster diving and collecting bottles to make ends meet and that bastard Merz was talking how he wants to have them pay taxes for that as well or having to go to the Tafel to survive the month and then Merz arrogantly said Germany is in a decline because the retiree’s are LAZY and they are the ones that mostly voted for him. If you want to convince yourself into believing that THEY are working “just as hard” as the rest of us and then worry about paying all the monthly expenses and feed our families is the same then you are the one that’s deluded.
This is your only warning. If you made an account just to ragebait people, I will yeet you off the site as quick as you got on here.
Hi Emopunker, I didn’t get on the site to do that. Could you please restore the comments of mine which you removed? They are not incendiary or mean - they reflect how the volume of labor is treated in econ. I’m a bit taken aback by how you could perceive such comments as a threat.
They certainly come across as if you are trying to push people’s buttons. They remain removed.
Okay, I guess my true colors will reveal themselves to you over time then. I understand that you want to avoid ragebaiting.
Then try to avoid causing fights here. We don’t want people to fight each other in the comments.
Okay, I’ll try
Because the pension system will not be very good at all in 20-30 years. Sure, you can live a „normal pensioners life“ because all the normal ones will be poor at that point in time.
The CDU is doing their best to destroy it (and many other things)
Idk how to respond to this because I don’t want anybody to be so afraid of the future, but you also didn’t really mention what is harming or even destroying the pension system.
What is harming the pension system? It is unsustainable in its current form, everybody knows that, even the mainstream media is not denying it.
We have more and more people that get pensions, and less and less people paying for it. People live longer. People start working later.
I think that more education and longer health and life spans are a good thing.
The population aging is a bad thing. But the boomers decided to not have as many children as previous generations. And it is their perfect right to do that. Most likely pension systems will need to make use of some of the boomers’ accumulated wealth to finance their retirement.
and everybody knew it for the last 30 years.
You need about 6 working people to financially support 1 pensioner. Can you see the problem in a society that is getting older, has less children and outsources jobs to either robots or overseas countries?
I asume you are not German, because it’s common knowledge that the pension system is vulnerable since it’s conception in the 1950, and that it will become unsustainible in it’s current form since the introduction of working contraception.
After WWII there was no capital to pay pensions whatsoever. To be able to pay pensions, the pension system was based upon a fictitional “generational contract” - people pay pensions to the older generation, and acquire the right to get pensions from the next generation. This “contract” only works if there is a next generation of about the same size as the previous. Since the introduction of working contraception, the system is broken.
Yes, but that is nothing that a later retirement age, a requirement for pensioners to draw on own personal wealth if it exists, and immigrant employees couldn’t alleviate.
A later retirement age does only partially alleviate this problem, because the older people get, the less fit they are and the more they are not able to work because of health issues. You’ll have to pay less pensions, but more disability benefits. Regarding a requirement to draw on own personal wealth - great idea, that’s what the Riester program tried to implement, and it didn’t work out. It’s just not possible to build sufficient wealth as a working class citizen. The only working solution is immigration, and immigration is the main factor that German society hasn’t collapsed already. But tell this to the AfD morons.
