Fahimi said that the increasing concentration of working hours must also be accompanied by longer recovery periods. “But you can’t give a general answer to that.”
SPD boss Esken told the newspapers of the editorial network Germany (Saturday editions): “I can well imagine that we will achieve good results with a four-day week.” There are studies “according to which people work more effectively in a week reduced to four working days because they have higher job satisfaction,” she argued.
Esken explained that parents in particular need different, more flexible and shorter working hours in order to be able to organize their family obligations and needs better. “Certainly you need wage compensation,” she added. Many people are already unable to live on their wages.
FDP General Secretary Bijan Djir-Sarai, on the other hand, said that in times of a shortage of skilled workers, a push for a four-day week would be “strange”. “Reducing working hours would do massive damage to Germany as a business location and jeopardize our country’s competitiveness,” criticized Djir-Sarai.
The labor market policy spokesman for the FDP parliamentary group, Pascal Kober, also considers Esken’s proposal to be “hard to understand” given the massive need for skilled workers in many sectors. The assumption that work would generally be more productive with a four-day week is not correct because many activities, especially in the care sector, with the police or medical care, require the employees to be present, Kober told the Berlin “Tagesspiegel” (Sunday edition) .
“Where a four-day week can be agreed upon, employees and employers can arrange this themselves without having to resort to political advice,” added Kober.
The deputy chairman of the Union faction in the Bundestag, Hermann Gröhe (CDU), also warned that a four-day week would damage Germany’s economy. “Reducing working hours and making work more expensive in times of a shortage of skilled workers would do a disservice to competitiveness,” he told the Tagesspiegel. “On the path of economic reason, the SPD leader has once again shown herself to be a wrong-way driver.”
