Of the 38 advanced economies in the OECD, Germany ranks last in hours worked annually. Photo / Getty Images
The month-long email holiday auto-responses have been switched off.
The “holiday break - back in September” signs have come down from shop windows and restaurant doors.
And, after a summer spent colonising the beaches of southern Europe, Germans have returned to work.
Or maybe not.
Germany’s depopulated cities and towns may have come back to life with the return en masse to school and work, but the country is facing an economic - and existential - conundrum.
For all their pride in their industriousness, Germans simply aren’t working enough.
The data is more than a little shocking.
Of the 38 advanced economies in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Germany ranks dead last in hours worked annually.
It’s an identity crisis for a country that just a decade ago imposed strict austerity measures on southern European nations whose residents were widely portrayed in the German media as lazy and entitled.
According to OECD data, the average Greek worked 1898 hours last year, the average Portuguese 1716 and the average Italian 1709. In Germany, that figure was just 1331 hours.
It’s not merely a matter of work habits: Germany’s economy is also lagging well behind those of neighbouring countries.
Last week, unemployment in Germany topped three million people for the first time in 10 years, and the unemployment rate, while still below the European average, has risen steadily for years.
The German economy has contracted in each of the past two years and is now smaller than in 2019, according to Carsten Brzeski, chief economist at ING Germany. Spain’s and Greece’s economies each grew by more than 2% last year.
“Spain is growing faster,” said Steffen Kampeter, managing director of the Confederation of German Employers’ Associations and a former member of parliament.
“Greece is growing faster. Countries that we have perceived as low performers now show us that they are high performers, and we are the low performers in growth.”
Germans’ dwindling work has become a political issue, too.
“We must work more and, above all, more efficiently in this country,” Chancellor Friedrich Merz declared in his first address after taking office in May.
He also warned against experiments in a shorter work-week, adding, “With a four-day week and work-life balance, we won’t be able to maintain this country’s prosperity.”
It’s not just that Germans take extensive holidays - fulltime workers are legally entitled to 20 days annually, though most receive far more, plus a generous allotment of public holidays. They also take 19 sick days per year on average, according to data from the Techniker Krankenkasse, Germany’s largest health insurer.
That’s up from about 16 before the pandemic, a rise experts ascribe to a shift in culture, not health.
“I don’t think there are very good reasons why Germans would be that much unhealthier compared to other high-income countries,” said Jonas Jessen, a fellow at the Berlin Social Science Centre who studies the labour market.
The issue generated new controversy last month amid widespread German media reports about a teacher at a vocational college in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia who was found to be on sick leave since 2009 while receiving her full salary.
“This isn’t sustainable,” Michael Kretschmer, minister-president of the state of Saxony and an influential deputy chair of Merz’s Christian Democratic Union, said in an interview. “This must change.”
He added: “Part-time work must not become the norm for an economy”.
Kretschmer said that in Saxony, nursing and healthcare have been hit particularly hard by work reductions, and that every wage increase seems to result in fewer hours worked. “We must become the leading state in hours worked, not the last,” he said.
Of course, there are upsides to working less.
Many overworked Americans look with envy upon Germans and other Europeans who take consecutive weeks of summer leave and don’t reply to emails until their return.
“There are other parts of life besides work,” said Christopher Sitzmann, 27, a law student, as he shopped in a Decathlon sporting goods store in Berlin early on Friday afternoon.
“I like sports. That’s why I’m here, to buy swimming gear. I’m already done working.”
But German thinking about work-life balance has shifted too far in favour of life, Kampeter said. “There’s a misperception that you can have a good life without work,” he said.
Faeze Haddadi, 34, moved to Berlin four years ago from Iran, and she and her husband expected to encounter extreme industriousness.
“We had no idea how much people worked here and thought we might have to work harder and longer,” said Haddadi, who has struggled to find work in Germany. “But it seems people here feel no pressure to work.”
Experts say the principal reason for Germany’s shrinking work schedules isn’t laziness. It’s structural forces that make fulltime work hard for many Germans - especially women.
German women are much likelier to work part time.
According to the European Union’s data bureau, 48% of employed German women worked part time in 2023, versus just over 10% of German men. Among mothers, that figure was more than 65%.
The fulltime equivalent employment rate - a measure that counts part-time workers as partially employed - was 61% for German men last year but just 44% for German women in 2022, one of the widest gaps in the EU, according to the European Institute for Gender Equality, an EU agency based in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Many German schools and childcare centres finish the day in early to midafternoon, making it difficult for both parents to work fulltime. And cultural norms, Jessen said, have led women to pick up most of the slack.
The Cold War opened a divide between West and East Germany on maternal employment.
“In West Germany, mothers who were working were called ‘raven mothers,’ who were considered to be bad mothers,” Jessen said.
In the East, by contrast, the law essentially required both parents to work, and childcare was widely available from a young age. To this day, mothers in the former East are likelier to work fulltime.
Experts differ on what it would take to entice Germans to work more. There is broad agreement that better availability of childcare, with longer hours, would help.
Business leaders like Kampeter also want to see cuts to regulations and bureaucracy and increases in immigration.
Jessen, by contrast, urges simple technical fixes like a switch from joint tax filing for married couples to individual filing, which would allow many mothers to work more hours at a lower tax rate.
One study found that individual filing would increase the German labour supply by the equivalent of half a million fulltime jobs.
Jessen acknowledged that such a change would be difficult politically because it is perceived as “anti-family”.
Advocates for employers and employees find the Merz Government’s proposals underwhelming.
Germany’s three most recent governments all seemed “to believe that postponing solutions is a good political solution, and we disagree with that”, Kampeter said.
For now, the trend at many workplaces might be towards not more work, but less.
Last year, 45 German companies ran a six-month experiment in which they switched to a four-day work-week - allowing employees to work fewer hours for the same pay.
The results were largely positive, with higher hourly productivity and happier employees.
Most of the firms that participated said they would continue with a four-day week past the trial period.
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