Before Viola Simic had a son in 2015, she considered going part-time to spend more time with her child. In the end she decided that the risk of jeopardising her career was too great.

An IT manager who also sits on Mercedes Benz’s workers’ council, Simic knew too many colleagues who had taken a foot off the gas in the early stages of motherhood only to find out later that the door to full-time employment had shut behind them.

Thanks to a deal struck by Germany’s metalworkers’ union earlier this month, employees who want to take some time out to look after their children or ailing parents may not face the same dilemma in the future.

From January 2019, workers represented by IG Metall can expect not only a 4.3% pay rise, but also the option to reduce their working week to 28 hours for a total of two years – and claim the right to full-time employment afterwards.

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On Tuesday the union called on Germany’s new government to enshrine the right to return to full-time employment in law, citing Federal Statistical Office figures which state that 1.44 million employees in the country are currently working part-time against their will.

“It’s always nice to have a bit of extra cash in your pocket, but for me the core win the union managed to gain was the new work-time model,” said Simic, who is now planning to take the 28-hour option when her son starts primary school. “At last we are seeing that employers are taking into account the priorities of a new generation of worker.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Viola Simic, who plans to take the 28-hour working week option when her son starts primary school. Photograph: Supplied

The idea that flexible working is not just an inconvenience imposed on employers but a right that unions should demand for their workers is beginning to spread to other sectors of the German economy.

In the coming weeks, workers at the German postal service Deutsche Post will decide whether to accept a deal, brokered by the services union Ver.di, that allows them to choose between either an accumulative 5.1% rise in wages or an additional 102 hours of holiday over the next two years.

“The argument that there is less work around and we need to rethink how to spread it around has been around for a good 10 years,” said Ver.di’s spokesperson, Günter Isemeyer. “But IG Metall’s achievements on the 28-hour working week have certainly made our employees think about it more.”



Before the latest round of negotiations between the services union and Deutsche Post, Ver.di for the first time commissioned a wide-ranging survey of 37,000 employees to discover their priorities in negotiations, rather than relying on representatives.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Deutche Post workers will be able to choose either an accumulative 5.1% rise in wages or an additional 102 hours holiday over the next two years. Photograph: Wolfgang Rattay/Reuters

Almost 80% of the workers consulted identified “free time” as an important part of their union’s negotiations. Ver.di, Germany’s second-largest union, with about 2 million members, last year won employees at Deutsche Bank’s call centres the right to reduce their working hours if they worked on Saturdays.

Workers represented by the railway and transport union EVG already have the opportunity to choose between wage increases and more holidays. In 2018, more than half of employees at Deutsche Bahn will stay on vacation for six more days than in 2017. Last July, 56% of employees at the rail company voted in favour of boosting their holiday allowance; only 41% chose to increase their wage by 2.72%.

To some economists, the results of recent negotiations make Germany a trailblazer in how to face the challenges of the 21st century workplace. To avert the threat of mass unemployment in the face of human workers being replaced by robots and algorithms, they argue, employers need to reduce working hours and spread them more evenly among the population.



Others warn that workers’ new flexibility is undermining the competitive advantages of the Europe’s biggest economy, and threatens to exacerbate German industry’s shortage of qualified workers. While the 28-hour working week deal has caused little outcry among employers’ associations, Holger Schäfer of the Cologne Institute for Economic Research warns against enshrining the right to return to full-time employment in national law.

“If you create more flexibility for employees, then you need to also give companies more instruments to react to a more fluid and unpredictable situation,” Schäfer said, suggesting there was room to loosen constraints around working hours.

German unions’ new strategic priorities are also finding some critics on the left of the political spectrum. Heiner Flassbeck, an economist and former state secretary at the German finance ministry, likens IG Metall’s flexible-working deal to a “smokescreen”.

“I don’t have any ideological objections to reducing working hours – my problem is that it doesn’t work,” Flassbeck said. “A booming economy like Germany’s should make compensatory wage adjustments. And there’s no evidence that you can increase wages while simultaneously reducing working hours.”

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