The goal of a functioning society is improving things for it’s people. That means people working less, owning more, and generally having better lives.
Germany, and the world, needs to stop voting for people telling you that they want to make your life worse.
You know, not even a third of people voted for this guy.
He basically only became Bundeskanzler because 13,8, or over 1/8, of the votes didn’t get any say at all. Also in first try, the Bundestag rejected to inaugurate him.
Basically noone wants him. But thats who we got now.
And yet he’s in power. A system that promotes people who want nothing more than to enrich themselves and devastate their country and neighbors is not a functional system.
I only say this with the fear of Germany turning into the US over the next couple of decades. I would like this place to be my final home.
Also these guys: why nobody wants children anymore?
This is fake news. This is not a party decision yet, but a push from some individuals which created controversy inside of the union and broad outrage in the other parties.
CDU/CSU is so brain rot, encapsulating the boomer capitalist favouritism in a crystal form.
And still they win by large in elections.
Merz is personified ragebait.
As an American dealing with elderly parents and work. It’s not lifestyle. I burned myself out.
Dear Chancellor Merz,
Go fuck yourself.
Sincerely, everyone
Get your lazy 42 working hour ass up and get a second job till you’re 72. You lazy parasite.
Sincerely, Christoph Maria Merz
The legal maximum in Germany is 40 h, and a lot (the most?) sectors have union contracts with 35 - 37.5 h maximum work hours per week.
Just in case some reader doesn’t know about German working hours. I don’t know whether Merz knows, though.
When you reach a certain above rate (AT-außertariflich) pay level the contracts are a bit different. Your income is calculated by year and the contract states 40h work hours as standard and overtime already being passed for.
By law that (free) overtime is capped at 8h/week, so the work week is often in the 48h/week ball park. Any overtime above the 48 hours needs to be paid out added to PTO.
In reality many employers consider 60+ hours / week as reasonable work schedule and won’t pay the 20+ extra hours since -according to contract- these hours have already been paid for.
Sometimes these are even billable hours, so your company earn good money from your work while they are lowering your hourly wage quite significantly.
People usually don’t ask for pay or return of that stolen life time. I know of this happening in rare-paid jobs as well, but I don’t know how wide spread it is.
And now comes Fotzenfritz trying to squeeze another million or two out of the poorest for his billionaire friend that are committing tax fraud by hundreds of millions yearly (on top of using mind-boggling loop holes to legally avoid hundreds of millions in die taxes).
Anyone who believes this shit should be forced to watch this: Wer liegt hier wem auf der Tasche? until they understand who is stealing our tax money.
I’m technically one of these “lifestyle” part-timers, at 35 instead of 40 hours a week. This reduction has had a noticeable impact on my mental health, to the point where I’d dare say my productivity hasn’t changed one bit.
But let’s be real: I cannot imagine that even Blackrockfritze believes that economic growth is determined by having longer working hours. This is a deliberate attempt to create another group of “lazy people” to lay the blame for the utter incompetence of his government.
I work 30h a week and Merz can fuck off. I would be getting a similar amount of work done, not more, but have a lot less free time to do what I really want and is probably just as productive in many ways, but not in their too limited economic indicators. Sports, cleaning the house, meeting people, growing tomatoes, sleeping enough etc etc
During my Probezeit through Leasingfirma I used to work 35h weeks. This shit slaps! 6:30 in, 14:00 out! Can go for Termin, can get my other shit done. If needed, can look for another job and attend interviews or apartment checks.
Exactly. Truth is, most people have maybe 2-3 hours effective work hours a day.
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You are wrong. Plain and simple. Economic growth does not go hand in hand with more working hours. In fact productivity decreases with more working hours, potentially having even a negative impact.
There are enough studies that show that a 4 day working week increases productivity and mental health, leading to an overall better quality of life.
More working hours has the opposite effect.
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What do you mean „stop hoping“? We have not even tried to make it happen.
Forcing people to work more hours will not help.
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Think about it. What will longer working hours really do? They will create frustration, stress, more illness because of these two. It will lead to a reduction in productivity, reduction in worker motivation, overall reduced worker satisfaction.
How can you be so confident that this is a positive direction?
I’m confident that a larger volume of labor, assuming that investments in assets are made, will lead to economic growth, because that has been observed many times over in Economics research.
The development (working longer hours) is not positive. I would much rather prefer a productivity boom due to some general purpose technology. And that that raises economic growth.
But for me personally, going from working parttime to fulltime is not the worst thing ever either. I’ve done it before.
I hope you (and Emopunker who removed my comments, grrr) can see that the link between economic growth and the volume of labor is quite solid, and it should not engage people. There are only four levers to raise economic growth that are known in the literature (investments in assets, volume of labor, total factor productivity, education).
Under pressure to make changes to boost sluggish economic growth, the conservative has told voters their country’s prosperity will not be maintained “with a four-day week and work-life balance”. He recently effectively accused them of skiving by falsely calling in sick, criticising the relative ease with which sicknotes could be obtained from GPs over the phone.
Someone does not understand what productivity means and how it’s meaningfully improved.
If you (you being the proverbial CDU brain here) need people to marginally increase their working hours, in order to achieve higher economic output, you’re in deep trouble. The increased output is also marginal and a one time boost. If you want meaningfully higher economic output, with sustained growth, you have to use machines and automation to achieve more with the same work hours. In other words you gotta do productive capital investment. Unfortunately conservative brains can only think of the cheapest solution (for businesses) first, at the expense of workers quality and quantity of life.
following japanese new PM method, work til you drop dead.
Even that is just a one time boost. If the automation is done there is nothing to be done better. So to grow further people have to be fired or other sources of revenue have to be unlocked.
I still think, sustained growth is impossible in the long run.Exactly. There cannot be infinite growth on a finite planet.
And we have reached the planetary limits a while ago, as evidenced by the environmental collapse we are all witnessing.
I still think, sustained growth is impossible in the long run.
Oh yeah, for sure. All production consumes natural resources at some point in the chain, even services. And natural resources are finite. Even if we recycle everything, we’d still have a finite amount we have to work with beyond which we can’t expand. If the driving force behind the production expansion is primarily profit growth, then there’s no satisfying that. That’s an inherent problem with the capitalist system. If however the driving force is the need for making something that doesn’t exist - e.g. more tanks, more wind turbines, more scientific researchers, more musicians, then automation can help a lot. But even for purely profit-driven growth, automation would provide a lot more runway than making people work more hours. I know you’re not disagreeing, I’m just saying this for completeness. :D
I have to thank you for pointing out, that you wanted to say that automation would help more than let people work more. That is a fact that I lost sight of. :)
I love being told to work more by people that don’t work at all i mean private jets all over the world, private chauffeur to wherever they need, a nice retirement and all the while getting paid probably 10 times more than me that will most likely die of hunger in a cold shitty house with no power after working constantly for the next 30-40 years…
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This is your only warning. If you made an account just to ragebait people, I will yeet you off the site as quick as you got on here.
Hi Emopunker, I didn’t get on the site to do that. Could you please restore the comments of mine which you removed? They are not incendiary or mean - they reflect how the volume of labor is treated in econ. I’m a bit taken aback by how you could perceive such comments as a threat.
They certainly come across as if you are trying to push people’s buttons. They remain removed.
Okay, I guess my true colors will reveal themselves to you over time then. I understand that you want to avoid ragebaiting.
Then try to avoid causing fights here. We don’t want people to fight each other in the comments.
Okay, I’ll try
Fear mongering? Are you serious? Here’s a news flash there are a lot of retiree’s in Germany doing dumpster diving and collecting bottles to make ends meet and that bastard Merz was talking how he wants to have them pay taxes for that as well or having to go to the Tafel to survive the month and then Merz arrogantly said Germany is in a decline because the retiree’s are LAZY and they are the ones that mostly voted for him. If you want to convince yourself into believing that THEY are working “just as hard” as the rest of us and then worry about paying all the monthly expenses and feed our families is the same then you are the one that’s deluded.
Because the pension system will not be very good at all in 20-30 years. Sure, you can live a „normal pensioners life“ because all the normal ones will be poor at that point in time.
The CDU is doing their best to destroy it (and many other things)
Idk how to respond to this because I don’t want anybody to be so afraid of the future, but you also didn’t really mention what is harming or even destroying the pension system.
I asume you are not German, because it’s common knowledge that the pension system is vulnerable since it’s conception in the 1950, and that it will become unsustainible in it’s current form since the introduction of working contraception.
After WWII there was no capital to pay pensions whatsoever. To be able to pay pensions, the pension system was based upon a fictitional “generational contract” - people pay pensions to the older generation, and acquire the right to get pensions from the next generation. This “contract” only works if there is a next generation of about the same size as the previous. Since the introduction of working contraception, the system is broken.
This isn’t really anything special about germany btw, the very concept of retirement depends upon this - even when it’s entirely private retirement funds. The difference with those is mainly that instead of everyone not getting shit, a lot of people just don’t get to retire at all so the ones that were able to save up money can. Which is almost what we have now anyway, except all retirees at least get some small amount. Money in your account is only worth something as long as someone else is willing to work for that money, and that will always depend on the size of the workforce. It’s not a germany problem, it’s not even a capitalism problem (just the inequality created by it is).
Later retirement age is the one thing I’m not vehemently against, in part because it seems inevitable, in part also because medical science advancing makes it more feasible (and also increases the time people have after retirement).
Yes, but that is nothing that a later retirement age, a requirement for pensioners to draw on own personal wealth if it exists, and immigrant employees couldn’t alleviate.
Well, if you mean later retirement age to be higher than life expectancy by at least a decade, maybe
You need about 6 working people to financially support 1 pensioner. Can you see the problem in a society that is getting older, has less children and outsources jobs to either robots or overseas countries?
What is harming the pension system? It is unsustainable in its current form, everybody knows that, even the mainstream media is not denying it.
We have more and more people that get pensions, and less and less people paying for it. People live longer. People start working later.
and everybody knew it for the last 30 years.
I think that more education and longer health and life spans are a good thing.
The population aging is a bad thing. But the boomers decided to not have as many children as previous generations. And it is their perfect right to do that. Most likely pension systems will need to make use of some of the boomers’ accumulated wealth to finance their retirement.
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Sounds like some “work will set you free” type shit
No. Much different tone really. Weird association from you.
german roots, arbeit macht fried.
Leaking this proposal to the media on the day when Auschwitz was liberated is a bit on the nose.
Merz is famous for his sense of subtlety and decency.
Ah yes, the agenda of the Blackrock fanboy turbo capitalist minion.
Destroy social security nets to make people so desperate they will take any job at any conditions.
It‘s kind of insane yet not surprising how he or most of that anti civilization party sees how this will erode the domestic consumer market and hurt the economy long term. People will have less money to buy things. Less money will circulate and that will worsen things for everyone. The overly rich forgot they have the most to lose here.
wtf, why would you need a permission to work however long, wait a minute
the conservative has told voters their country’s prosperity will not be maintained “with a four-day week and work-life balance”. He recently effectively accused them of skiving
he was bitten by american ceo wasn’t he? 🙃
Merz was working for BlackRock for quite a while
“working”
Specifically he was on their board and afaik only for his contacts to other politicians and public officials.
Which were rather underwhelming according to done sources.
he was bitten by american ceo wasn’t he? 🙃
It’s a
globalpandemic.I think it’s less about permission and more about rights. In Germany, there is a right to work part-time. Basically, if you work for more than 6 months at a company and the position you are working in can be performed as a part-time position, then your employer must grant you a part-time position upon request. Suitable full-time job offers must also always be offered as part-time offers, although in reality this doesn’t happen as much I think.
There are more specifics, but that’s the gist of it.
In my opinion, the CDU/CSU is trying to create a new scapegoat for the languishing economy. Previously, it had been unemployed people on social welfare (“Bürgergeld”), but since their government introduced their own (arguably worse and def more expensive) legislation, they need a new group of people to target so that their voters don’t do the unthinkable and actually start blaming the government for not properly governing the country.
„If we whip them harder surely they will generate more profit for us masters!“
Kind reminder the Christ Democrats always hated human beings.
Not always.
Das kapitalistische Wirtschaftssystem ist den staatlichen und sozialen Lebensinteressen des deutschen Volkes nicht gerecht geworden.
Inhalt und Ziel dieser sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Neuordnung kann nicht mehr das kapitalistische Gewinn- und Machtstreben, sondern nur das Wohlergehen unseres Volkes sein.
CDU, 1947.
But yeah, that was some time ago.
Translation:
The capitalist economic system has not sufficed w.r.t. the state and social interests of the German people.
The content and the objective of this social and economic restructuring can no longer be the capitalistic seeking of power and profit, but the wellbeing of our people.
Not always but defenetly all parties in germany and global politics got wacky in the 80s and said " SCREW THE STATE TO SERVE PEOPLE! SCREW THE PEOPLE! IT SHOULD SERVE ME!"
Fun fact about Germany: There is no fun, get back to Work!
more like " you allotted your time for fun, its over now get to work"
