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 or 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 earns 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 rate-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 friends 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 due 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.
The goal of a functioning society is improving things for it’s people. That means people working less, owning more, and generally having better lives.
Germany, and the world, needs to stop voting for people telling you that they want to make your life worse.
You know, not even a third of people voted for this guy.
He basically only became Bundeskanzler because 13,8, or over 1/8, of the votes didn’t get any say at all. Also in first try, the Bundestag rejected to inaugurate him.
Basically noone wants him. But thats who we got now.
And yet he’s in power. A system that promotes people who want nothing more than to enrich themselves and devastate their country and neighbors is not a functional system.
I only say this with the fear of Germany turning into the US over the next couple of decades. I would like this place to be my final home.
Merz is personified ragebait.
Also these guys: why nobody wants children anymore?
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 hate every headline I read with his name in it. Disgusting.
CDU/CSU is so brain rot, encapsulating the boomer capitalist favouritism in a crystal form.
And still they win by large in elections.
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.
You can’t fix stupid.
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Under pressure to make changes to boost sluggish economic growth, 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 by falsely calling in sick, criticising the relative ease with which sicknotes could be obtained from GPs over the phone.
Someone does not understand what productivity means and how it’s meaningfully improved.
If you (you being the proverbial CDU brain here) need people to marginally increase their working hours, in order to achieve higher economic output, you’re in deep trouble. The increased output is also marginal and a one time boost. If you want meaningfully higher economic output, with sustained growth, you have to use machines and automation to achieve more with the same work hours. In other words you gotta do productive capital investment. Unfortunately conservative brains can only think of the cheapest solution (for businesses) first, at the expense of workers quality and quantity of life.
following japanese new PM method, work til you drop dead.
Even that is just a one time boost. If the automation is done there is nothing to be done better. So to grow further people have to be fired or other sources of revenue have to be unlocked.
I still think, sustained growth is impossible in the long run.Exactly. There cannot be infinite growth on a finite planet.
And we have reached the planetary limits a while ago, as evidenced by the environmental collapse we are all witnessing.
I still think, sustained growth is impossible in the long run.
Oh yeah, for sure. All production consumes natural resources at some point in the chain, even services. And natural resources are finite. Even if we recycle everything, we’d still have a finite amount we have to work with beyond which we can’t expand. If the driving force behind the production expansion is primarily profit growth, then there’s no satisfying that. That’s an inherent problem with the capitalist system. If however the driving force is the need for making something that doesn’t exist - e.g. more tanks, more wind turbines, more scientific researchers, more musicians, then automation can help a lot. But even for purely profit-driven growth, automation would provide a lot more runway than making people work more hours. I know you’re not disagreeing, I’m just saying this for completeness. :D
I have to thank you for pointing out, that you wanted to say that automation would help more than let people work more. That is a fact that I lost sight of. :)
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.
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.
Exactly. Truth is, most people have maybe 2-3 hours effective work hours a day.
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
Outsider but I remember people being unhappy with the Ampel coalition. I can’t imagine anyone is preferring this really though are they?
I haven’t seen any polling numbers lately though compared.
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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.
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What do you mean „stop hoping“? We have not even tried to make it happen.
Forcing people to work more hours will not help.
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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).
Sounds like some “work will set you free” type shit
german roots, arbeit macht fried.
No. Much different tone really. Weird association from you.
Leaking this proposal to the media on the day when Auschwitz was liberated is a bit on the nose.
Merz is famous for his sense of subtlety and decency.
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.
