The struggle to defend the 35-hour week in Germany

There was a militant mood at the May Day rallies 21 years ago as the print workers and engineering workers in Germany prepared for an offensive struggle to achieve a reduction of the workweek without loss of pay. This struggle, which lasted for two months in May and June 1984, was the first major step forward towards the introduction of the 35-hour week. This was finally realised in the engineering and steel sector as well as in the printing and packages industries by the early 1990s. This struggle inspired workers throughout Europe at the time and became a model for workers in other countries.

In these industries, workers not only achieved a reduction of the workweek but also won a number of other concessions such as supplementary payments for shift work and other things that made an increasingly harder working day a bit more tolerable.

This was no easy task but a hard-fought battle. On more than one occasion in 1984 there were cases of violence against union pickets and severe injuries in the cities of Stuttgart and Offenbach. Older workers at the major German bourgeois newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, remember how their employers hired expensive helicopters to establish an airlift for scabs and how they tried to hit those helicopters by throwing rolls of toilet paper and other objects from the factory yard.

On May Day 2005, 21 years later, a new round of defensive battles to defend the 35-hour week started in the German printing industry. It is not an exaggeration to say that the printing and packages industries are more or less the last real bastions of the 35-hour week in Germany.

German employers feel much stronger now and feel they can attack the 35-hour week and teach the workers in the print shops and packaging factories a lesson. Their position and ability to attack the workers has been strengthened by high unemployment (5 million officially) as well as by government legislation at all levels that forces civil servants to work up to 42 hours per week again. The bosses are encouraged by the fact that the leadership of most unions have given up any serious struggle to defend the reduction of the workweek and have swallowed the bourgeois logic of making “sacrifices” and “social peace” in order to get the economy going again. They have seen that in other sectors union leaders have given away concessions and gains without even calling for a token one-minute strike.

In the auto industry, the backbone of Germany’s industry, the bosses have managed to split the workers from different workplaces and companies and with the help of local and national union leaders have managed to secure local deals, the result of which has been an enormous setback for jobs, working conditions and income. Yet in the paper and packages industries, the workers concerned know that they have a lot to loose and have displayed enormous militancy in the last few weeks. They know that if the bosses were allowed to succeed, individual print workers would lose up to 9,000 Euro a year. As the workers are aware of what is at stake, they are prepared to defend what they have now. Many workers and trade unionists were surprised by the fact that in many cases workers joined the union in the middle of the strike. Even most of those who would not join the union actively supported the strike. This shows that if a fighting, militant lead were given, the workers would be prepared to fight back.

Yet this is still not a general trend in the German trade union movement. When just one year ago, the trade union federation DGB managed to mobilise half a million workers for three big rallies against the neo-liberal and anti-working-class policies of the Schröder government, some bourgeois papers reported that “the unions are back on the stage”. Yet the union leaders hastened to pull the emergency brake and derail the movement before it could take off. They argued that in order to prevent the right-wing political parties, that is the Christian Democrats and Liberals, from taking power in 2006, it would be necessary to close ranks with the Schröder government and bury any criticism and differences. Yet the ruling class is cynically using the services of Schröder’s SPD-Green coalition government to discredit these parties in the eyes of the workers and use this discontent and dissatisfaction to usher in a reactionary government that will speed up the attacks against the workers and the welfare state.

This is a transitional period in Germany and the beginning of a new and turbulent stage as people are beginning to feel that all the gains of the last 50-60 years are at stake now. A new critical public debate on capitalism was opened up when SPD chairman Franz Müntefering voiced criticisms of certain aspects of financial capital and thus managed to polarise society. Opinion polls show that a majority of Germans increasingly feel uneasy about the power of big business yet they do not feel that SPD leaders like Müntefering are really serious in their criticisms of capitalism. The working class wants to see these leaders follow through with their promises and offer genuine concrete solutions rather than offer empty phrases about “morals” and “values”. The only alternative to the “reforms” of the SPD-Green coalition and to a possible right-wing government in September is for the SPD to break with capitalism and to adopt a genuine socialist programme. This is the only way to defend the gains of the past and the only way to solve the problems facing the German working class.