SPD parliamentary manager Dirk Wiese has expressed confidence that the governing coalition will reach an agreement on reforming Germany's Working Hours Act (Arbeitszeitgesetz). Speaking to newspapers of the Funke Mediengruppe ahead of their Monday editions, Wiese said the planned reform does not amount to abolishing the law but rather introducing a weekly maximum working hours limit alongside mandatory digital time tracking, a measure he said would put an end to unpaid overtime.
"After the clear agreement in the coalition treaty, there is no plan to abolish the Working Hours Act, but rather to enable a weekly maximum working time with simultaneous mandatory digital time tracking, so that there are no more unpaid overtime hours," Wiese said. "On the basis of these clear agreements, we will now reach results together with our coalition partner."
Wiese added that in the course of discussions, he has noticed that many people are unaware of the degree of flexibility that already exists in everyday working life under current law.
Federal Labour Minister Bärbel Bas (SPD) has been asked, at the insistence of the Union, to put forward a formal proposal to reform the Working Hours Act. Under the current framework, the maximum daily working time is eight hours, which can be extended to ten hours in certain circumstances.
The planned reform could allow for a maximum of 13 hours per day, provided that a weekly cap of 40 hours is not exceeded. Bas intends to accompany the reform with a mandatory system for recording working hours. CDU parliamentary group leader Jens Spahn had called on the SPD over the weekend to implement the reform that the two parties had agreed upon.
The coalition partners are currently negotiating a series of major reform projects that they aim to finalise by early June. Preparatory talks ahead of a coalition committee meeting on 1 July are currently underway, with both Spahn and Wiese participating.
"The talks are proceeding in a very spirit of trust," Wiese said, adding that he would therefore not be commenting publicly on the specifics. "In conversations in my constituency, however, I notice the clear expectation among citizens that we as a coalition deliver joint results for our country," the SPD politician added.
Germany's doctors' union Marburger Bund has come out strongly against the reform, warning that the consequences for healthcare workers and their patients could be severe. The union argues that long shifts and sleep deprivation lead to measurable drops in attention, reaction time and error rates, and that in healthcare, worker health and patient safety are inseparable.
Under the proposed changes, the only remaining daily protection would be an eleven-hour rest period, leaving employers free to order up to 13 hours of work per day. Hospital doctors are already clocking an average of 55 hours a week, a quarter of whom work 60 hours or more.
The union also warns that many of the protections built into collective agreements, rest periods, compensatory time off, limits on long shifts, are legally grounded in the existing daily hour cap. Remove that cap, the Marburger Bund says, and those protections lose their foundation entirely.
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