FLASH: REALITY SMACKS EUROPE!!!
Europe Reluctantly Deciding It Has Less Time for Time Off
By MARK LANDLER
Published: July 7, 2004
Marcus Gloger for The New York Times
Michael Stahl is employed at Siemens in Bocholt, Germany, where work has undergone big changes.
Some Noses More to the Grindstone Than Others
Chart: Some Noses More to the Grindstone Than Others
FRANKFURT, July 6 — For Michael Stahl, a technician at a cordless telephone factory in the town of Bocholt, summer is usually a carefree season of long evenings in his garden and even longer vacations. His toughest choice is where to take his wife and three children on their annual camping trip: Italy and Croatia are on this year's itinerary.
Two weeks ago, however, Mr. Stahl got a rude jolt, when his union signed a contract with his employer, Siemens, to extend the workweek at the Bocholt plant to 40 hours from 35. Weekly pay remains the same. The new contract also scraps the annual bonuses every employee receives to help pay for vacations and Christmas expenses.
"I'll have to make do with less," Mr. Stahl said with a sigh. "Of course, the family will come off the worst."
After nearly 27 years at Siemens, Mr. Stahl, 42, feels he has no choice but to put in the extra time. Like millions of his fellow citizens, he is struggling to accept the stark new reality of life in a global economy: Germans are having to work longer hours.
And not just Germans. 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 the 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 finally reached its limit — a victim of chronic economic stagnation, deteriorating public finances and competition from low-wage countries in the enlarged European Union and in Asia. Most important, many Europeans now believe that shorter hours, once seen as a way of spreading work among more people, have done little to ease unemployment.
"We have created a leisure society, while the Americans have created a work society," said Klaus F. Zimmermann, the president of the German Institute for Economic Research in Berlin. "But our model does not work anymore. We are in the process of rethinking it."
From the 1970's until recently, Europe followed a philosophy of less is more when it came to labor, with the result that Europeans work an average of 10 percent fewer hours a year than Americans. Germans, with the lightest schedule, work about 18 percent fewer hours.
The job creation argument went hand in hand with the greater social premium that Europeans place on leisure. In the land of the four o'clock rush hour and the monthlong summer holiday, it does really seem, as the cliché goes, that Europeans work to live, while Americans live to work.
Siemens, however, upset that conventional wisdom by threatening to move production of cordless and cellular phones to Hungary, where salaries are a fraction of those in Germany. That would have cost about 2,000 jobs in a country that, with a jobless rate of 10.3 percent, can ill afford it.
"It's about lowering labor costs," said Peter Gottal, a spokesman for Siemens, which is based in Munich. "Where we are in a global competition, 35 hours are no longer feasible. We just need more hours."
Siemens and its union say that the contract is not a template for the rest of German industry, but it is being viewed that way. The company, one of Germany's largest employers, is negotiating wages at five other factories, and it may demand some of the same concessions, including different work hours, that it received at Bocholt.
A longer workweek also looms for assembly line workers at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Sindelfingen, in Southwestern Germany. There, the company wants to curtail breaks during the workday.
Mercedes has not threatened to abandon Germany. But auto workers shivered recently when Opel, which is owned by General Motors, announced that it would assemble a compact minivan at its plant in Gliwice, Poland, passing over its main factory outside Frankfurt, which had bid for the job.
"The firms are in a good position in these negotiations," said Eugen Spitznagel, a researcher at the Institute of Employment Research in Nuremberg. "The unions recognize that the economic climate is bad."
A small majority of the German public also think that a long workweek may help preserve their jobs, according to a recent survey conducted for the business magazine, WirtschaftsWoche.
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