2018 Collective Bargaining Round: Higher Wages and Entry into the 28 Hour Week?

In addition to its demand for a 6% increase in income, IG Metall intends to make working hours a central issue in the forthcoming collective bargaining round. It plans to demand that all individuals should have the right to scale back their working hours to as low as 28 hours for a period of up to two years and remain entitled to return to their previous working hours. For persons wishing to shorten their working hours in order to care for family members or children aged under 14, and for employees doing shift work "or other working hour models that may damage their health, this option should be combined with compensation from their employer. Does this proposal represent a step forward in the world of work? According to Hagen Lesch, Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft, Cologne, it is widely accepted that the current collective and legal regulations on working hours need to be revised. This means striking a new balance between companies' needs for higher work volumes and greater flexibility and employees' growing desire for greater self-determination. In other words, working hours in companies need to be harmonised with companies' economic interests as far as possible. However, since these interests vary from company to company, he argues that it would be best to settle them at a corporate level. Collective wage agreements could provide a framework for such regulations, but they must leave both parties sufficient scope for tailoring them to their needs. By contrast, Thomas Haipeter and Steffen Lehndorff, Institut Arbeit und Qualifikation (IAQ) at the University of Duisburg-Essen, would like to see greater flexibility without employers being given even more opportunities to lengthen working hours. Rainer Dulger, Gesamtmetall, highlights that although wage negotiations in the branch are in a healthy state, they certainly aren't in a boom phase. According to him, employees have benefitted strongly in past years, meaning that their claim of a 6% wage increase is too high. However, changes in regulations on working hours are urgently needed, whereby he sees this as a matter of a needs-based and cost-neutral expansion of working time volume. Alexander Spermann, University of Freiburg, believes that last century's Working Hours Act is out of sync with the digital world. If the use of smartphones is for business purposes and worldwide access to business servers is available 24-7 and corresponds to workers' wishes for flexible working hours and locations, the legislator also needs to give more thought to further developing the law on working hours. If greater flexibility in working hours in both directions at a wage negotiation level, as well as the anachronistic law on working hours are to be constructively debated over the year ahead, then this will mark the launch of overdue reform discussion about key labour market institutions. According to Thorsten Schulten, WSI and University of Tübingen, the demand for a 6% wage increase is by no means excessively high. For the unions, however, it is also a question of achieving a new compromise on flexibility that more strongly reflects the interests of individual workers. Roman Zitzelsberger, IG Metall Baden-Württemberg, presents IG Metall's position and highlights that, unlike in the collective negotiating rounds of recent decades, it is not a question of a new level of collective working hour reductions, but of giving workers greater scope to manage and adapt their working hours to their personal lives that was not previously secured by collective agreements.