More than 15,000 employees took part in walkouts across the country in a campaign for a 28-hour working week to allow workers to improve their work-life balance.
The IG Metall union, which represents around 3.9million workers, stepped up demands for better employment rights as workers at more than 80 companies across Germany – including those of the carmaker Porsche – walked out in protest.
The union wants every employee in the metal and electrical sector to have the option to reduce their working hours for a total period of two years, with the automatic right to return to full-time employment afterwards.
A union spokesman said: “We want employers to recognise that traditional gender roles in modern families are changing, and we want workers to have the chance to do work that is important to society.
“In the past, demands for more flexibility has come at the cost of workers. We want to flick a switch so that flexible working also benefits workers.”
Germany’s current working week amounts to an average of 35 hours per week.
Under IG Metall’s proposals, employees who choose a 28-hour week in order to take care of young children or ageing parents would get an additional allowance of €200 per month, while those who want to take a break from doing shift work with a high health risk would be compensated with €750 per year.
And the union has capitalised on the German economy being in robust health and unemployment at record lows after calling for a six per cent pay increase across the metalwork sector.
But employers’ associations have rejected the union’s proposals, complaining that it would be too costly. They predict up to a quarter of companies’ staff would switch to the 28-hour model, damaging the national labor market.
The director of Gesamtmetall, Oliver Zander, said to Die Welt newspaper: “We cannot meet the demands for compensatory wage increases.
“At a time when there is a shortage of skilled personnel it would be made to give an incentive to reduce urgently needed operating volume.”
A recent poll by the German Chamber of Commerce and Industry (DIHK) found more than half of all companies cited a shortage of skilled workers as the biggest risk facing their business.
The last major dispute in Germany’s metal-working sector came in the 1980s, when union demands for a 35-hour working week led to months of walkouts at factories across the country.
IG Metall launched an unsuccessful campaign of strikes in 2003 aiming to introduce a 35-hour working week in the states that formerly were part of East Germany.
Now a third round of collective bargaining is scheduled to begin in Germany on January 11, which could see IG Metall shift tactics from warning strikes to targeting individual factories with full-day stoppages if talks fail to end on a compromise.