Women's Preferences or Delineated Policies?
the German Federation of Trade Unions encourages a continued reduction of the working week as
a means to achieve full employment (DGB, 2003). The reduction of the working week is seen
primarily as a means of reducing the very high levels of unemployment, but also as a means of
creating a better work-family balance.
Employers continue to resist the reduction in weekly working hours and have instead pressed for
longer working hours as a means to raise competitiveness levels (EIRO, 2003a). Due to employer
resistance, there have been relatively no changes to the collectively agreed workweek in the last
two years of collective bargaining and in 2003 the German unions in metal engineering lost a major
strike on the issue. Many developments - both towards longer and shorter working hours, - take
now place in the context of special company arrangements, using hardship and opening clauses in
sectoral agreements. Some of these, for instance at Volkswagen, Bayer and Deutsche Bahn
(railways) do address work-family balance issues, but it is impossible to say how general this trend is
(BFSFJ, 2003).
Summing up, we see that the development of part-time work in Germany shares some parallels with
the Netherlands, yet women’s preferences for “soft” labour markets appears to be much less widely
diffused and defended. The growth of the service sector, and with it part-time jobs, contributed
significantly to the development of part-time work in Germany, although the pace of service sector
growth was admittedly slower in Germany than in the Netherlands. Together with the development
of mini-jobs, this may have trapped part-time jobs in a pattern of marginalisation, rather differently
from developments in the Netherlands. Social and cultural attitudes regarding working mothers
reinforced women’s acceptance of part-time work as a coping solution in West Germany and the
labour market difficulties following reunification limited East German women’s labour market
options These developments were reinforced by job-creation schemes throughout the 1990s and
today, and current legislation strives to increase employees’ flexibility in working hours. While
employers’ organizations are hesitant to support these measures, some individual employers and
trade unions are slowly coming around to the government’s call for promoting work-family balance.
In the Netherlands, this change came earlier and, complemented by strong advocacy of women’s
groups in the unions and central agreements with employers, support for the ‘normalisation’
strategy was stronger. If this normalisation process is to continue, allowing part-time work to
develop into a ‘decent’ working form, the negative qualities of part-time work in Germany, such as
the promotion of short-hours mini-jobs must be addressed, as well as attempts to increase the
gender neutrality of current individual adjustments to working hours.
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AIAS - UvA