Working only four days a week, earning the same amount and being more focused and motivated: Many companies have now recognized that this idea is well received by employees. The opportunity is now increasingly being found in job advertisements.
A study from Great Britain recently showed that fewer working days are already a reality for at least some British companies and the concept works surprisingly well for them. Now the topic is also being addressed in German industry.
With full pay
The chief negotiator for IG Metall in the north-west German steel industry, Knut Giesler, wants to go into the next wage round with the demand for the introduction of the four-day week with full wage compensation. “We want to achieve real relief for the employees without them earning less as a result,” Giesler told the “Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung”. According to him, such a step would be a great advance for the quality of life and the health of the employees.
The demand basically had an impact beyond the steel industry, explained trade union boss Jörg Hofmann in Frankfurt. However, with the exception of the automotive industry, there are no longer any major collective bargaining rounds by IG Metall this year.
Employers reject the plan
The 35-hour week has been in force in the metal industry for decades. From the employer’s point of view, shortening this even further is out of the question. “The demand comes completely at the wrong time,” said Gerhard Erdmann from the executive board of the steel employers’ association on Wednesday. Companies are already struggling with high energy cost increases as a result of the Russian attack on Ukraine. Added to this would be the costs of transforming the industry.
In an industry with three-shift operation, further work intensification is hardly possible. For companies, a four-day week simply means additional costs that cannot be shouldered, since more staff are needed to compensate for the additional days off. The employers’ association Gesamtmetall, which speaks for the entire metal and electrical industry, initially did not comment on the subject.
While the employers reject the project, the feedback from the steel workforce so far has been extremely positive, said IG Metall negotiator Giesler. According to him, the four-day week would make the steel industry more attractive to young people, who would be urgently needed in the coming years in the conversion of the coal-based heavy industry to green steel. At the same time, the four-day week is also a way of preventing the job losses that are to be expected as part of the green transformation of the steel industry.
However, Giesler also concedes that the concept is much easier to implement in administration and in two-shift operation than in three-shift operation.
Pilot project in the UK
How a four-day week works in practice in other sectors was recently researched in Great Britain with a large-scale pilot project involving several thousand employees. After a six-month test phase, more than four out of five of the companies involved were firmly convinced of it.
56 out of 61 employers then announced that they wanted to keep the four-day week, according to researchers from Boston and Cambridge who accompanied the project scientifically. 18 companies have even confirmed that the concept has been introduced permanently.
However, the results are based on the evaluation of companies that volunteered to take part. There was no random selection. Companies from the financial sector, IT and construction, as well as gastronomy and health care took part in the British project. Among them were some with shift work.
“Before the project began, many doubted whether we would see an increase in productivity to offset the reduction in working hours – but that’s exactly what we found,” said Brendan Burchell, a social scientist at the University of Cambridge. According to the analysis, the sales of the companies involved increased by 1.4 percent on average during the test phase in the second half of last year.
Sick days decreased by around two-thirds (65 percent) during the test period. Around four out of ten employees stated that they felt less stressed than before the project began.
