Dear Chancellor Merz,
Go fuck yourself.
Sincerely, everyone
Get your lazy 42 working hour ass up and get a second job till you’re 72. You lazy parasite.
Sincerely, Christoph Maria Merz
The legal maximum in Germany is 40 h, and a lot (the most?) sectors have union contracts with 35 - 37.5 h maximum work hours per week.
Just in case some reader doesn’t know about German working hours. I don’t know whether Merz knows, though.
When you reach a certain above rate (AT-außertariflich) pay level the contracts are a bit different. Your income is calculated by year and the contract states 40h work hours as standard and overtime already being passed for.
By law that (free) overtime is capped at 8h/week, so the work week is often in the 48h/week ball park. Any overtime above the 48 hours needs to be paid out added to PTO.
In reality many employers consider 60+ hours / week as reasonable work schedule and won’t pay the 20+ extra hours since -according to contract- these hours have already been paid for.
Sometimes these are even billable hours, so your company earn good money from your work while they are lowering your hourly wage quite significantly.
People usually don’t ask for pay or return of that stolen life time. I know of this happening in rare-paid jobs as well, but I don’t know how wide spread it is.
And now comes Fotzenfritz trying to squeeze another million or two out of the poorest for his billionaire friend that are committing tax fraud by hundreds of millions yearly (on top of using mind-boggling loop holes to legally avoid hundreds of millions in die taxes).
Anyone who believes this shit should be forced to watch this: Wer liegt hier wem auf der Tasche? until they understand who is stealing our tax money.
Merz is personified ragebait.
In principle not incorrect, Europe has rough times ahead and a lot to do to catch up in defense and digital infrastructure, among others.
That said, it should be carefully investigated what leads to actual productivity increase. Just more hours may or may not do that. And compensation should increase accordingly.
I’m glad that the German chancellor keeps voicing an uncomfortable truth.
Also these guys: why nobody wants children anymore?
„If we whip them harder surely they will generate more profit for us masters!“
Kind reminder the Christ Democrats always hated human beings.
Not always but defenetly all parties in germany and global politics got wacky in the 80s and said " SCREW THE STATE TO SERVE PEOPLE! SCREW THE PEOPLE! IT SHOULD SERVE ME!"
Not always.
Das kapitalistische Wirtschaftssystem ist den staatlichen und sozialen Lebensinteressen des deutschen Volkes nicht gerecht geworden.
Inhalt und Ziel dieser sozialen und wirtschaftlichen Neuordnung kann nicht mehr das kapitalistische Gewinn- und Machtstreben, sondern nur das Wohlergehen unseres Volkes sein.
CDU, 1947.
But yeah, that was some time ago.
Translation:
The capitalist economic system has not sufficed w.r.t. the state and social interests of the German people.
The content and the objective of this social and economic restructuring can no longer be the capitalistic seeking of power and profit, but the wellbeing of our people.
I love being told to work more by people that don’t work at all i mean private jets all over the world, private chauffeur to wherever they need, a nice retirement and all the while getting paid probably 10 times more than me that will most likely die of hunger in a cold shitty house with no power after working constantly for the next 30-40 years…
You think Merz and other officials don’t work long hours? That’s just deluded.
Plus, you may not trust the pensions system, but it will function well enough to give you a normal pensioner’s life. Why fearmonger like this?
This is your only warning. If you made an account just to ragebait people, I will yeet you off the site as quick as you got on here.
Hi Emopunker, I didn’t get on the site to do that. Could you please restore the comments of mine which you removed? They are not incendiary or mean - they reflect how the volume of labor is treated in econ. I’m a bit taken aback by how you could perceive such comments as a threat.
They certainly come across as if you are trying to push people’s buttons. They remain removed.
Okay, I guess my true colors will reveal themselves to you over time then. I understand that you want to avoid ragebaiting.
Then try to avoid causing fights here. We don’t want people to fight each other in the comments.
Okay, I’ll try
Fear mongering? Are you serious? Here’s a news flash there are a lot of retiree’s in Germany doing dumpster diving and collecting bottles to make ends meet and that bastard Merz was talking how he wants to have them pay taxes for that as well or having to go to the Tafel to survive the month and then Merz arrogantly said Germany is in a decline because the retiree’s are LAZY and they are the ones that mostly voted for him. If you want to convince yourself into believing that THEY are working “just as hard” as the rest of us and then worry about paying all the monthly expenses and feed our families is the same then you are the one that’s deluded.
Because the pension system will not be very good at all in 20-30 years. Sure, you can live a „normal pensioners life“ because all the normal ones will be poor at that point in time.
The CDU is doing their best to destroy it (and many other things)
Idk how to respond to this because I don’t want anybody to be so afraid of the future, but you also didn’t really mention what is harming or even destroying the pension system.
I asume you are not German, because it’s common knowledge that the pension system is vulnerable since it’s conception in the 1950, and that it will become unsustainible in it’s current form since the introduction of working contraception.
After WWII there was no capital to pay pensions whatsoever. To be able to pay pensions, the pension system was based upon a fictitional “generational contract” - people pay pensions to the older generation, and acquire the right to get pensions from the next generation. This “contract” only works if there is a next generation of about the same size as the previous. Since the introduction of working contraception, the system is broken.
Yes, but that is nothing that a later retirement age, a requirement for pensioners to draw on own personal wealth if it exists, and immigrant employees couldn’t alleviate.
A later retirement age does only partially alleviate this problem, because the older people get, the less fit they are and the more they are not able to work because of health issues. You’ll have to pay less pensions, but more disability benefits. Regarding a requirement to draw on own personal wealth - great idea, that’s what the Riester program tried to implement, and it didn’t work out. It’s just not possible to build sufficient wealth as a working class citizen. The only working solution is immigration, and immigration is the main factor that German society hasn’t collapsed already. But tell this to the AfD morons.
What is harming the pension system? It is unsustainable in its current form, everybody knows that, even the mainstream media is not denying it.
We have more and more people that get pensions, and less and less people paying for it. People live longer. People start working later.
I think that more education and longer health and life spans are a good thing.
The population aging is a bad thing. But the boomers decided to not have as many children as previous generations. And it is their perfect right to do that. Most likely pension systems will need to make use of some of the boomers’ accumulated wealth to finance their retirement.
and everybody knew it for the last 30 years.
You need about 6 working people to financially support 1 pensioner. Can you see the problem in a society that is getting older, has less children and outsources jobs to either robots or overseas countries?
I think working time is the wrong place for politicians to regulate.
Sure, there’s a huge imbalance. Some people work a lot and some very little.
The key is that the the people who do work more than mandatory minimum hours, are also the people who enjoy working. Self employed or not, doesn’t matter. If people like working, they’ll work more. It’s really that simple.
Politicians ought to focus on regulation of how enjoyable work is. Then the working time would increase by itself, if that’s the ultimate goal for whatever reason.
I don’t think it is though. Productivity ought to be the end goal.
What else would they regulate? Excessive wealth?
CDU/CSU is so brain rot, encapsulating the boomer capitalist favouritism in a crystal form.
And still they win by large in elections.
I hate every headline I read with his name in it. Disgusting.
You can’t fix stupid.
The goal of a functioning society is improving things for it’s people. That means people working less, owning more, and generally having better lives.
Germany, and the world, needs to stop voting for people telling you that they want to make your life worse.
You know, not even a third of people voted for this guy.
He basically only became Bundeskanzler because 13,8, or over 1/8, of the votes didn’t get any say at all. Also in first try, the Bundestag rejected to inaugurate him.
Basically noone wants him. But thats who we got now.
And yet he’s in power. A system that promotes people who want nothing more than to enrich themselves and devastate their country and neighbors is not a functional system.
I only say this with the fear of Germany turning into the US over the next couple of decades. I would like this place to be my final home.
Under pressure to make changes to boost sluggish economic growth, the conservative has told voters their country’s prosperity will not be maintained “with a four-day week and work-life balance”. He recently effectively accused them of skiving by falsely calling in sick, criticising the relative ease with which sicknotes could be obtained from GPs over the phone.
Someone does not understand what productivity means and how it’s meaningfully improved.
Even that is just a one time boost. If the automation is done there is nothing to be done better. So to grow further people have to be fired or other sources of revenue have to be unlocked.
I still think, sustained growth is impossible in the long run.I still think, sustained growth is impossible in the long run.
Oh yeah, for sure. All production consumes natural resources at some point in the chain, even services. And natural resources are finite. Even if we recycle everything, we’d still have a finite amount we have to work with beyond which we can’t expand. If the driving force behind the production expansion is primarily profit growth, then there’s no satisfying that. That’s an inherent problem with the capitalist system. If however the driving force is the need for making something that doesn’t exist - e.g. more tanks, more wind turbines, more scientific researchers, more musicians, then automation can help a lot. But even for purely profit-driven growth, automation would provide a lot more runway than making people work more hours. I know you’re not disagreeing, I’m just saying this for completeness. :D
I have to thank you for pointing out, that you wanted to say that automation would help more than let people work more. That is a fact that I lost sight of. :)
Exactly. There cannot be infinite growth on a finite planet.
And we have reached the planetary limits a while ago, as evidenced by the environmental collapse we are all witnessing.
following japanese new PM method, work til you drop dead.
Fun fact about Germany: There is no fun, get back to Work!
As an American dealing with elderly parents and work. It’s not lifestyle. I burned myself out.
