Crafts President Jörg Dittrich has called on the federal government to provide incentives for overtime. “We need more performance incentives – for companies and for employees,” said Dittrich to the editorial network Germany (RND). For many people, extra work is not worth it as long as taxes and duties are as high as they are now.
“We are currently talking a lot about what incentives we can set so that pensioners work longer – which is right. But I also wonder what incentives we are actually setting for the normally working part of the population,” said the President of the Central Association of German craftsmanship.
Dittrich made it clear that he expressly does not mean tax-free overtime. “With tax-free overtime, there is a risk that less full-time work will be done because some employees could ultimately get more out of it if they worked part-time and then received the additional, tax-exempt overtime and the bonuses that are sometimes available for this,” said he. He would find it more sensible to “look at the income tax curve or tax-free additional income options”.