Sunday, November 12, 2017

We are born, we work, we die

The Federal Office of Statistics says that last year Germans worked 947 million unpaid hours of overtime compared to 772 million hours of paid overtime

"One billion unpaid — that's nothing other than wage theft perpetrated on employees by employers," said the German Trade Union Confederation (DGB)  chairman Reiner Hoffmann.

The German Council of Economic Experts called for working hours to be capped at 48 per week rather than at eight per day and to allow for more exceptions to the eleven-hour rest-period rule. They also rejected calls for working hours to be shortened.  The business-friendly Angela Merkel's CDU-CSU and the FDP favor loosening regulations to benefit employers. Employers associations have long argued for a revision of the Working Hours Law while unions across the board have always rejected it as an attempt to squeeze more labor out of workers. 

In a 2016 study carried out by the DGB, 46 percent of people asked said that digitalization had meant more work for them, compared with only nine who percent who said digitalization had made their lives easier.

The metalworkers union IG Metall, Germany's largest trade union, says it will ask the right for workers to scale back their hours to 28 per week when the latest round of collective bargaining with the industry begins on Wednesday.

A  study by a health insurance company found that work stress burdens almost half of German employees. Many suffer from headaches, insomnia or emotional exhaustion, some even from depression or burnouts. People work, work, work - until they get sick. And then they continue to work. 

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