Have the Germans become lazy at work?

8 months ago 22

A glance at current OECD labor figures can be startling. In 2022, the average American worked over 1,800 hours per year, while the average German worked only 1,340 hours. However, labor market researcher Enzo Weber from the Institute for Employment Research (IAB) in Nuremberg, Germany, dismisses suggestions of the once-industrious Germans now only wanting to enjoy their sweet lives.

"Germany has a very high female labor force participation rate compared to most other countries," Weber told DW, noting that the main difference to other countries was that about every second woman works part-time, which mathematically lowers the average annual working hours.

For example, if two men work ten hours each in one country, the average working timethere is ten hours - (10+10)/2 = 10. But if two men work ten hours each and a woman works four hours in another country, the average working time is eight hours (10+10+4)/3 = 8.

In the interview for DW, Weber also pointed out that the OECD figures "do not mean that less work is being done in Germany." Quite the contrary. "More work is being done because the alternative would be that these women are not included in the statistics at all," he said, adding that the OECD itself cautions that the data is only of limited use for international comparison.

Labor shifts and Gen Z

According to Weber, co-author of a recently published IAB labor study, the times when men worked full-time and women stayed at home are long gone in Germany. Currently, 77% of German women are employed, marking a significant increase in female workforce participation over the past thirty years, even though many work part-time.

A mother sitting at a table doing remote work while her child sits next to her drawing pictures

And from those women who work full-time, nearly half would like to reduce their working hours by about six hours per week, according to the IAB survey. Among full-time employed men, some 60% said they would like to work about 5.5 hours less.

The desire to work less, among both men and women in Germany, has existed for decades but appears to have reached new highs with so-called Gen Z – the generation born between 1995 and 2010 that's begun hitting the labor market in recent years.

Gen Z has earned the dubious reputation of wanting as much free time and high salaries as possible. Enzo Weber dismisses what he calls a stereotype, saying that a successful working career is as important to the majority of Generation Z as it was to previous generations, his findings have shown.

How to work less with fewer people?

But Gen Z's desires for lower and more flexible working hours have, meanwhile, become mainstream demands of Germany's traditionally strong labor unions. They've gained more traction due to a massive skilled labor shortage here and positive remote-work experiences made during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Gen Z and the workplace

As a result, current employees have more leverage and can push harder for changes at the workplace than workers did at the turn of the millennium when Germany was in the grip of mass unemployment.

But how does "working less" align with the increasing need for skilled workers and the desire to avoid loss of prosperity? It is expected that by 2035, solely due to demographic changes, there will be seven million fewer people in the German labor market.

One way to address the emerging situation is by boosting labor productivity. Enzo Weber believes that it doesn't make sense to squeeze maximum working hours out of people. Instead, he argues for improving the quality of work through training, investments in digitization— notably artificial intelligence (AI) - and the ecological restructuring of the economy.

Halting the slide in productivity growth

The IAB researcher also calls for a so-called proactive qualification policy that avoids waiting until someone has been left behind by structural change and then begins to intervene with emergency measures. Instead, people should be empowered to take initiative and play an active role in their careers.

At the moment, however, German productivity growth is meager at best. A study by the McKinsey Global Institute (MGI) shows that between 1997 and 2007, the German economy experienced productivity growth of 1.6% annually, but it halved to 0.8% between 2012 and 2019.

A nurse in a hospital moving a bed down a corridor

In that, Germany is no exception to other industrialized countries, where most of the new jobs also have been created in low-productivity sectors such as services. In addition, the low-wage sector, which is not known to be very productive, has virtually exploded everywhere in the past few decades.

At the same time, labor productivity has been growing elsewhere in the world. Driven mostly by progress in emerging economies, global productivity growth jumped sixfold between 1997 and 2022. The median GDP per capita surged from $7,000 (€6,500) to $41,000 over the period.

Nevertheless, IAB's Enzo Weber advocates for more flexibility in the German labor market. Employees should be free to choose how much they work at different stages of their lives. "We don't need a 5- or 4-day workweek; we need an X-day workweek and flexibility in work throughout our lifetimes," he said, and perhaps with new flexible work models, even retirees could be motivated to continue working.

This article was originally written in German.

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