6 ms·

The legal cap is 48hrs/week, max 10hrs/d. Parental leave is 12-14 months and you get around 67% of your average net income. When you look at vacation you have t

by knowhy 6y ago

The legal cap is 48hrs/week, max 10hrs/d. Parental leave is 12-14 months and you get around 67% of your average net income. When you look at vacation you have to take public holidays into account and that differs a lot between the states within Germany. Germany has 5 public holidays (which don't fall on a Saturday or Sunday), the USA for example has 9 public holidays this year. The benefits are largely the result of workers unions. Most benefits were given to prevent a rise of communism. The result were high work standards. But those high standards only apply to some industries which are in decline and some of them have almost disappeared (steel for example). Germany is almost certainly not the worst place to be a worker. The problem is that Germany is a gerontocracy. Only the elderly part of the workforce fully benefits from them. 30 days paid leave with 38-39hrs/week were normal a few decades ago. Nowadays one should not expect to get more than the bare minimum. In a lot of industries workarounds have become the norm. For example workers in slaughterhouses are hired as contractors so work standards don't need to be applied. The main issue I have is that the German economy and the idea of the social welfare state is on shaky feet. The baby boomer will retire within the next decade but the German welfare state is based on a pyramid scheme which will collapse soon. So Germany is a bad place to be worker in that sense that you need to take a gigantic bet on the continuation of a system which is designated to fail on the long run.

wsc981 6y ago
I believe the same is pretty much true for The Netherlands, which might not be a surprise. The pensions in The Netherlands might actually be better arranged for now, but it's likely at some point that the EU will (indirectly) try to gain control over Dutch pension funds (e.g. by forcing these funds to allocate a certain percentage of spending to buy Italian bonds).
bernulli 6y ago
I agree with all of this, and certainly with your correction of my sloppy wrong comments (wrong numbers). Further, what you sketch out in the second part is exactly my biggest squabble with Germany. Let's see how a society that lives off of exporting machines fares in the future after fighting innovation and entrepreneurship for two generations now. That said, I still don't see even in the slightest how these are "the worst working conditions on earth".
- dognotdog 6y ago
  > correction of my sloppy wrong comments (wrong numbers). It was not completely wrong. Being an employee gives you those benefits (eg you can stretch parental leave to 2yrs with part time work, the minimum vacation is 24 days instead of 30, but there's unlimited sick leave), and it is incomparable to the ridiculous PTO/PSL system in the US. However, companies by and large only do this due to external pressure (govt, unions, competition), not any kind of inherent cultural benevolence. In tech/engineering, this typically means that instead of direct hiring, hiring through agencies where people are regularly rotated out of projects to not have to become permanent employees, and without the regular benefits of the host company. Freelance tech work is actually becoming rare because German law has Duck Typing for determining employment status, so if you're de facto salaried, and the govt finds out, both the employer and employee suddenly owe all the relevant employment taxes, even years back, and because this has been abused and has been cracked down on, nowadays getting freelance work is difficult. Of course, that somehow didn't stop companies from trying to pull the same scam with "gig economy" BS on the lowest paid workers the past few years.
- hogFeast 6y ago
  You are missing out one relevant point: currency. It is easy to win at exporting if you pay employees in a functionally worthless currency. Germany's trade surplus is 10% of GDP, this is roughly where China was at peak. Germany can win at exporting because: consumers are conservative and will accept large corporations milking them, and other countries in Europe are willing to let Germany export deflation to them. It is one of the most unsustainable economic models (and the source of significant global financial instability...China's trade surplus peaked in 2008, not a coincidence) and that is before you consider the need going forward for high levels of innovation, business creation, etc. I didn't say on earth: I managed that section, I said in the developed world. If you provide a counter-example then I will accept you are correct.

by knowhy 6y ago

wsc981 6y ago

I believe the same is pretty much true for The Netherlands, which might not be a surprise. The pensions in The Netherlands might actually be better arranged for now, but it's likely at some point that the EU will (indirectly) try to gain control over Dutch pension funds (e.g. by forcing these funds to allocate a certain percentage of spending to buy Italian bonds).

bernulli 6y ago

I agree with all of this, and certainly with your correction of my sloppy wrong comments (wrong numbers). Further, what you sketch out in the second part is exactly my biggest squabble with Germany. Let's see how a society that lives off of exporting machines fares in the future after fighting innovation and entrepreneurship for two generations now. That said, I still don't see even in the slightest how these are "the worst working conditions on earth".

dognotdog 6y ago
> correction of my sloppy wrong comments (wrong numbers). It was not completely wrong. Being an employee gives you those benefits (eg you can stretch parental leave to 2yrs with part time work, the minimum vacation is 24 days instead of 30, but there's unlimited sick leave), and it is incomparable to the ridiculous PTO/PSL system in the US. However, companies by and large only do this due to external pressure (govt, unions, competition), not any kind of inherent cultural benevolence. In tech/engineering, this typically means that instead of direct hiring, hiring through agencies where people are regularly rotated out of projects to not have to become permanent employees, and without the regular benefits of the host company. Freelance tech work is actually becoming rare because German law has Duck Typing for determining employment status, so if you're de facto salaried, and the govt finds out, both the employer and employee suddenly owe all the relevant employment taxes, even years back, and because this has been abused and has been cracked down on, nowadays getting freelance work is difficult. Of course, that somehow didn't stop companies from trying to pull the same scam with "gig economy" BS on the lowest paid workers the past few years.
hogFeast 6y ago
You are missing out one relevant point: currency. It is easy to win at exporting if you pay employees in a functionally worthless currency. Germany's trade surplus is 10% of GDP, this is roughly where China was at peak. Germany can win at exporting because: consumers are conservative and will accept large corporations milking them, and other countries in Europe are willing to let Germany export deflation to them. It is one of the most unsustainable economic models (and the source of significant global financial instability...China's trade surplus peaked in 2008, not a coincidence) and that is before you consider the need going forward for high levels of innovation, business creation, etc. I didn't say on earth: I managed that section, I said in the developed world. If you provide a counter-example then I will accept you are correct.