Workers in Europe to spend more hours on the job

by Michael Schreiber

For decades, employers in the United States have demanded that workers put in longer and longer hours. The 40-hour week, which the labor movement won in hard struggle, has now quietly disappeared in many U.S. industries. Recently, a similar process has begun to take place in Western Europe, where employees work an average of 10 percent fewer hours a year than Americans.

Capitalists there are pushing to abolish the 35-hour week, which has become standard in several countries, including France and Germany. Germany instituted the 35-hour week in 1984 after a bitter seven-week strike led by the IG Metall union.

On June 24, 2004, however, IG Metall negotiators chose to give up the 35-hour week at two telephone factories owned by Siemens corporation. Management easily won its demands to extend the workweek to 40 hours, with no raise in pay, after threatening to move 2000 jobs to Hungary.

Although union leaders stressed that the Siemens give-backs were “unique” under the circumstances, they had already set the stage last February when they signed a deal for southern German metalworkers that allowed a 40-hour week with no overtime pay during “boom” periods.

Moreover, German employers and the big business media have stated gleefully that they view the settlement at Siemens as a model for obtaining concessions in other industries. The Siemens example can “help create a new collective bargaining culture,” said Dieter Hundt, president of the German Employers Association (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, July 2, 2004).

Daimler-Chrysler was not far behind Siemens in making demands on its workers. Citing the pressure of declining auto sales and profits, Daimler threatened to cut 6000 jobs at one plant and move production to Hungary and South Africa if workers did not agree to give up their right to a five-minute break each hour. The head of the Mercedes car division termed the five-minute break a “disease.”

In response, on July 15, tens of thousands of Mercedes workers walked off the job throughout Germany. But the strike was short lived, and Daimler won its demand.

The major media has been generally sympathetic to the capitalists’ point of view. Reporter Mark Landler writes in the July 9, 2004, New York Times:

“The French, who in 2000 trimmed their workweek to 35 hours in hopes of generating more jobs, are now talking about lengthening it again, worried that the shorter hours are hurting their economy. In Britain, more than a fifth of the labor force, according to a 2002 study, works longer than the European Union’s mandated limit of 48 hours a week.

“Europe’s long siesta, it seems, has reached its limit—a victim of chronic economic stagnation, deteriorating public finances, and competition from low-wage countries in the enlarged European Union and Asia.”

Even the EU’s limit of 48 hours is under attack. According to Walter Cerfida, secretary of the Confederation of European Labor Unions, “There is an assault on the working week by governments and industrial employers.

There is pressure to make the EU’s legally established 48-hour week ceiling more flexible, and perhaps to revise it upwards” (Christian Science Monitor, July 30, 2004).

The International Monetary Fund, in its 2004 annual report on the economy of France, was outspoken in its demands that the French government abolish the 35-hour week—as well as taking major steps to dismantle its social welfare policies and lower the minimum wage (recently raised to $9.40 an hour).

The French government recently exempted small businesses from having to implement the 35-hour week. And Finance Minister Nicolas Sarkozy wants to alter the law further to make 35 hours optional for workers. “At the beginning of every year,” he explains, “the worker will decide how much he or she wants to work.” Sarkozy says nothing, of course, about paying higher overtime wages for over 35 hours; thus, at straight-time rates, the plan would amount to a drop in wages.

President Jacques Chirac has likewise declared that he views the 35-hour week as “a brake on economic development,” though he announced on Bastille Day (July 14) that the 35-hour law would remain intact for now. Chirac and company fear sparking a renewed strike wave by the trade unions, as well as handing a bone to their Socialist Party rivals.

Last month, however, workers at a Robert Bosch plant near Lyon voted to approve company demands to increase the workweek to 36 hours, while cutting bonuses and freezing wages for the next three years. The workers gave in after Bosch, a German-owned tool and car-parts maker, had threatened lay-offs and to transfer one production line to the Czech Republic—where wages are much lower than in France.

France is not alone in experiencing a joint campaign by the government and the bosses to get the workers to knuckle down. The same conditions apply to all the advanced capitalist countries, as profit rates decline and economic competition among them rises to a boil.

Each country’s capitalist class is compelled to constantly raise the level of “efficiency” in production in order to out-perform their rivals. This means either up-dating their machinery or getting their workers to worker longer, harder, and faster.

Although Western European countries can compete with U.S. productivity on a per-hour basis, their workers’ overall output lags behind the United States by 10 to 20 percent since workers in this country work longer hours. Thus, European capitalists understand the need to get their workers to spend more time on the job.

Employers in the wealthier Western European countries use the threat of moving production to Eastern Europe and Asia as a battering ram to gain concessions such as a longer workweek from their workers. But the threat is a real one—particularly in regard to the countries of the former Soviet bloc that have recently joined the European Union.

Wages average 80 percent lower in Eastern Europe than in Germany, in part because the cost of living remains lower in the East, although wages have not kept up with the rise in prices as capitalism has been introduced.

The average factory wage in Romania, for example, is 150 euros a month, versus 3500 euros in Germany—a temptation for the capitalists to discount the risks and to move at least part of their operations to the East.

For the meantime, the bosses in Germany—as in France and other Western European countries—generally agree on the need to squeeze their own workers tighter by measures that include lengthening the workweek. Volkswagen, for example, is instituting an age-related work schedule, in which employees over age 38 work 40 hours a week, while younger ones work 42 hours.

Many economists point out that the 35-hour week is already a myth. “In reality, more than 40 hours are worked each week by employees in eastern Germany [the area of the former German Democratic Republic],” Karl Brenke of the DIW German Institute of Economic Research told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (July 2, 2004).

The article continued, “But it is not just workers in the east who work longer hours.” According the industry-financed think tank, IW Cologne, “only one-fifth of western German employees have a 35-hour workweek, with a third of workers clocking up 38 hours.”

The article above first appeared in the August 2004 issue of Socialist Action newspaper.