Employer president wants reforms to pensions and working hours

Work - Employer president wants reforms to pensions and working hours

Employers' President Rainer Dulger has called for reforms to pensions and working hours. Dulger told the German Press Agency that working hours should be made more flexible. He also warned of a hole in the pension fund.

"When the baby boomers retire, around four million people will change their status from contributor to beneficiary. And you don't need to have studied to understand that if you go from more than 45 million people in employment to 40 million or even 39 million in just a few years, there will be a hole in the pension fund and not just in the pension fund. Then we have to talk about whether we can maintain the future pension level."

If this is to be maintained, a large part of the federal budget will flow even more into social welfare. "That worries me greatly. And we have to ask ourselves the question together: Can we imagine linking the retirement age to average life expectancy? We need to talk about this honestly. Incidentally, this has long been common practice in many other countries."

Dulger: Making working hours more flexible

"With our Working Hours Act, we are in a time of telex and dials," said the President of the Confederation of German Employers' Associations. "It is limited to daily working hours. However, we are now living in the digital age and have a modern and flexible European Working Hours Act." Employers would like the federal government to implement this law in Germany as well, with a contemporary focus on weekly working hours.

"This will create the right time frame for the actual flexibilization of work. An example: an employee who works in administration, who works on a computer, who can also work remotely, regardless of whether they do so from home or somewhere else. He works from nine in the morning until one or two, then collects his child from nursery and sits down at the computer again in the evening between 10 and 11 p.m. to answer a few emails. But then he's not allowed to continue working until around ten o'clock the next day because otherwise he won't comply with the statutory rest periods. That's madness and completely ignores the reality of life for many families."

Employers and employees need to negotiate what the respective working time model looks like. "What we need is a little more trust from the state."

Dulger rejects four-day week

In response to union demands for a four-day week, Dulger said: "A four-day week and then with full pay compensation is exactly the opposite of what we need at a time when there is a massive shortage of skilled workers. We all feel that we can no longer cope with the tasks." To now consider the solution of everyone working even less would lead to the wrong result. "Our competitors work longer than we do. What makes us think we can further reduce our working hours, which are already low worldwide? If we want to maintain our prosperity in this country, we would all have to work more, but certainly not less."

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Rainer Dulger, the President of the Confederation of German Employers' Associations, mentioned that Berlin should consider implementing the European Working Hours Act to make working hours more flexible in Germany, as many employees now work outside of traditional office hours due to digital technologies.
Speaking to the German Press Agency, Dulger voiced concerns about the retirement of the baby boomers in Germany, warning that a significant decrease in the workforce could lead to a hole in the pension fund, potentially requiring large portions of the federal budget to be allocated to social welfare.
Dulger disagreed with union demands for a four-day workweek with full pay compensation, stating that such a policy would not be effective in addressing the current labor shortage in Germany and could potentially harm the country's competitiveness in the global market.

Source: www.stern.de