It was Chancellor Helmut Kohl (CDU) who gave the Germans a proper lecture almost 30 years ago. A successful industrial nation, he argued in the Bundestag in 1993, "cannot be organized as a collective amusement park." According to Kohl's message, the declining competitiveness of German companies on the world market is not least due to high labour costs and excessively long holiday entitlements of German employees. The opposition and trade unions were outraged.

Dietrich Creutzburg

Business correspondent in Berlin.

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Such outbursts are not to be expected from Olaf Scholz. At most, it can be stated that on May 1, Labor Day in 2023, he did not put himself at the head of a movement for the introduction of more free time. But that didn't change the fact that since then everyone has been talking about the four-day week in and around political Berlin. And about how happy employees would be if it finally came.

The Woco Group, a traditional automotive supplier from Hesse, has just introduced it: Since April, 450 of the 600 employees at the headquarters in Bad Soden-Salmünster have been required to have a normal working week no longer lasting five days, but only four. Three days of free time instead of two. However, it remains to be seen how well this example fits in with those political ideas that are charged with the promises of a happier "work-life balance" of people.

Cost reduction as the first imperative

First of all, the biggest advantage for Woco employees is that they are spared redundancies. To do this, they practice wage waivers, according to the pattern: 20 percent less work for 10 percent less pay. After all, cost reduction was the first commandment. The company, which employs 4600 people worldwide, manufactures, among other things, products for noise and vibration reduction in combustion engines – cylinder head covers, engine covers, air flow guides for turbochargers. Now e-mobility is taking its toll. Woco needed room for investment, and the development of new business areas with components for electric cars is underway.

"For us, it was a question of whether we would have to cut jobs and make redundancies for operational reasons, or whether another way could be found," says HR manager Jan Stollenwerk, outlining the initial situation. So, with the idea of the four-day week in mind, he engaged in intensive dialogues with the employee representatives. Finally, the workforce voted on staff reductions that affect individuals, or four-day weeks with partial wage waivers for all. The latter was awarded the contract. He is proud that all those involved "recognized the advantages of the model and supported this socially acceptable decision," says Stollenwerk.

But how much does this have to do with the ideas that are currently making political careers? The Left Party has wanted the four-day week for a long time, albeit with undiminished full-time wages. Now the SPD chairman Saskia Esken has made a strong plea for this, justifying it with the needs of families. IG Metall, the largest industrial union, also talks a lot about it, sometimes with a view to the upheavals in the steel industry, sometimes as a recipe for "an attractive industrial working world that combines life and work well". And in the Anglo-Saxon world, there is even the "4 Day Week Global" initiative. She prides herself on knowing that people perform better when they work less.

The macroeconomic reality has changed

The example of Woco, however, shows above all the diversity of reality, which now coincides with a debate about a seemingly newfangled recipe. But where companies are under pressure and there is a threat of staff cuts, this has already become a tradition. The four-day week for 100,000 VW employees is legendary: Volkswagen introduced it in 1994 – shortly after Kohl's speech – in response to a severe sales crisis; with a 10 percent loss of wages and the approval of IG Metall. After all, it stayed that way for a good ten years.