Reduced Working Hours
The list of companies with reduced working hours is a long one. It includes many really big and famous enterprises. Many of these enterprises write nice black ink – yet they have introduced reduced working hours.
It is all legal and in accordance with the regulations of the Federal Labour Agency BMAS – Bundesministerium für Arbeit und Soziales.
My personal understanding of reduced working hours, however is that it should be the
“Ultima ratio for saving a company!”
This concept is probably violated if enterprises that make profits declare reduced working hours for some of their employees. The suspicion that systems with a maximum of optimization make use of all advantages they can see might easily arise. Because in every company there are times during which some job or other can justifiably be put on reduced working hours. After all, you do not always need 100 % of the work of every single employee at all times. What a nice way of economizing on salary costs.
In my book, reduced working hours as a means to optimizing salary costs is abusive. A well-meant payment by the unemployment insurance originally meant to save companies is misused in order to optimize costs and thus final results.
As always, the worse is yet to come. The licence for reduced working hours will probably again be made subject to complicated regulation mechanisms, or else the rates will be reduced.
And today the upright ones are the stupid ones already.
RMD
(Translated by EG)