“One extra hour of work per week would bring us enormous economic growth and is really not too much to ask,” Söder
Additionally, he called for the abolition of sick notes by telephone, already demanded by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, and a gradual restriction in the ability to retire at 63
Funny thing there: we have been automating an insane amount of work and processes since the 1950s. Email Messages arrive within seconds instead of weeks by snail mail. Computers optimize rail and road fright for optimal performance to ship more things faster or cheaper. Things can be measured, counted and sorted by computers much faster and accurately than humans ever could. A 1000 euro computer and one secretary can do the billing department for millions of orders. How did workers profit from the previous productivity advances? I did not see working hours go down or pay go up by an proportional amount?
8 hours a day, 5 days a week is mostly a 20th century thing. Working hours did absolutely go down from 12-16 hours a day to 8 and working days from 6 to 5.
The interesting thing is that at any point, a majority believed that shorter hours would stifle productivity. But at the end of the 19th century and in the early 20th, some industrialists started actually testing it. In the US the 40 hour week was famously popularized by Henry Ford after comparing productivity to the previous 6 days a week, but this also was about 100 years after others had started theorizing about it.
In Germany the 8 hour work day was introduced in 1918, but at the time that still meant 6 working days. The 40 hour work week only started becoming the norm in the 60ies and 70ies. And in 2001 Germans gained the right to work part time in almost any job even if originally hired for full time.
If you go farther back in time it does look different though because before the industrial revolution, most people would have worked in agriculture, i.e. they were peasants. Their work days would have been long during the harvest period and otherwise quite short. Some seasons were less work in general, and there were more religious holidays. But this isn’t entirely fair because automation didn’t just automate our jobs, but also our personal chores. For example washing your clothes was a lot more manual work before we automated it.
That’s because you do not own the things which increase productivity so much.
Instead they are provided by the company you work for. At the end of the day all you can sell is your attention to do a job, which hasn’t increased since the start of industrialization.