alt Hacker News German chancellor Friedrich Merz ...
lashed out at German workers to
“simply do a little more,”
A friend of mine, an engineer who works in the German car industry, recently told me that nowadays he has a lot of free time. Because the company he works for has so few orders that the company is granted "Kurzarbeitergeld" - the government pays 60% of the salary if the employees work less.
That blew my mind. If I had fewer orders, I would work more to increase the quality of my product and my efficiency. Working less as a reaction to losing market share seems completely counterproductive to me.
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It makes sense for production line workers. Less so for R&D, but I've seen it affect R&D as well.
By the way, it's not 60% of the salary that the state pays - it's 60% of the difference in salary due to reduced hours.
> If I had fewer orders, I would work more to increase the quality of my product and my efficiency. Working less as a reaction to losing market share seems completely counterproductive to me.
That may work if you are a sole proprietor or small business person, but that's not how shareholder owned corporations work.
A sole proprietor is willing to work more if business drops (effectively lowering their compensation rate) because they are the beneficiary of any future gains that may (or may not) result from their short term sacrifice. If they want their employees to do the same they have to give them the same deal.
A large corporation can't easily make its employees work much longer for the same pay (except in the very short term), nor can it easily get shareholders to be OK with increasing spending on labor. This usually ends with massive layoffs when it can't sustain itself anymore.
That's one reason that smaller companies can be more nimble.
Kurzarbeit is only available for a limited time and has the target to avoid layoffs resulting in much higher costs in unemployment payments.
The problem is they don't get rid of their ICE cars any more - most of the world is transitioning to EVs and China - their previously biggest importer - has strict EV quotas and no one wants to buy German EVs that are too expensive and less capable than Chinese made EVs.
Germany was ahead in EVs and solar - both industries have been cuto off by conservative/free-market ICE lobbysts and these 2 huge global markets are now dominated by China instead.
That is true for RnD not for Factory workers. Germany has quite strong workers rights, so mass layoffs are not a possible solution to safe money if facing lacking orders.
Essentially companies get some of the money back they and their employees paid as taxes.
Depends on your position I guess. If you are a worker at a conveyor belt, it doesn't make sense to work more to produce more cars nobody needs. I think originally this policy was designed to save jobs during temporary downturns, not to save industries going downhill
Depends on where you work in the industry, there's a huge level of division of work. Upstream departments should work more on new products and marketing etc. But a little more downstream, there isn't much todo if not enough cars are ordered.
The intention of Kurzarbeitergeld is to prevent large layoffs. I honestly can't tell if that makes sense in the long run, but it seems reasonable for a political party trying to make it to the next term.
> If I had fewer orders, I would work more to increase the quality of my product
Really? Because most of the time what you see is huge layoffs and gutting the company's assets.
So let me get this straight: you have exactly one data point, and the second data point using is a German chancellor widely regarded as one of the worst by many measures. Right?
This is FUD. They said the same about the Greeks in 2008, it is complete BS. In any given org, passed a certain size you'll find ppl who slack a lot and people who work for three. Unfortunately that seems to the nature of large orgs, nothing special about Germans...
ps. I'm having a DejaVu. This is the exact same narrative Greek politicians used against the Greek population to justify them become poor overnight.
When my eldest daughter was in high school (~2010, Argentina) there was a provincial policy where if every single student had a result below a certain score in a test, the scores had to be re assessed against the maximum result.
The resulting situation here was that she was constantly bullied into underperforming. Both cases are actually similar in that each individual has a personal incentive to underperform - the difference is that in your friend's case the policy is granted at the company level so no single employee can defect and break it for the rest, while in my daughter's case one high scorer could invalidate the reassessment for everyone, which is exactly what made defection punishable and the bullying emerge naturally.