To: smolejv@gmx.net who wrote (22319 ) 8/8/2002 3:42:57 AM From: Snowshoe Respond to Nah, does not work anymore in Germany. online.wsj.com Europe, though, continues to cut back. Today, the average German worker puts in about 1,400 hours a year, a 17% decrease from 1980, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Workers in Italy and France -- who with Germany make up 70% of the economy of the 12 countries that share the euro currency -- also are working far fewer hours than they did then. Americans, meanwhile, are working about the same average hours they did in 1980, about 1,800 a year. During Japan's decade-long economic slump, employees' historically high working hours also have dropped but are still roughly even with those of Americans. For the bigger companies, globalization affords an escape hatch from the restrictions at home. Even though Europe boasts high-skilled, well-trained and educated workers, companies say the shorter work hours make the higher costs even harder to justify. French car maker PSA Peugeot Citroen, for example, more than doubled the size of its work force outside France to 68,800 in the last decade, while its domestic work force shrunk by 4,000. In Germany, Volkswagen AG expanded its foreign work force by two-thirds while keeping its domestic work force at 20-year-old levels. The company now makes its trademark Golf in Slovakia, Brazil and South Africa, as well as in Germany, and all of its new Beetles in Mexico. About 52% of Italians between the ages of 20 and 34 live at home with parents, an arrangement that provides not only warm meals and free laundry service but the option not to work. That's a steady rise since the late 1980s. While some Italians tout the trend as a sign of the strength of family values, Mr. Recchi, the sociology professor, calls the growing dependence on family a "cultural dope."
