Labour Minister Bärbel Bas of the Social Democrats has circulated a draft revision to Germany's Working Time Act, according to media reports. Magazine Politico published the proposal on Thursday, revealing that Bas intends to tie permission for shifting from daily to weekly working hours to collective bargaining agreements. The draft also includes stricter rules for documenting work time.
The Labour Ministry told AFP it would not comment on "internal working drafts." Sources within the ministry indicated the draft is still undergoing "internal coordination" and has not yet moved to interdepartmental consultation.
Politico cited excerpts from the draft document it received: "Collective bargaining parties and, under certain conditions, workplace parties have the option to agree on weekly working hours instead of daily ones." The explanatory note clarifies that businesses could transition from a maximum daily working time to a maximum weekly limit if their collective agreements permit this.
The Labour Ministry's draft ties work-time flexibility to a condition: "special regulations ensure that employee health is not endangered." Focus magazine also reported this provision.
Bas additionally plans to tighten obligations for work-time tracking. "The employer must record electronically the beginning, end and duration of daily working time on the day the work is performed," the draft stipulates. Models based on trust-based working arrangements would remain permitted.
The SPD and Union parties committed in their coalition agreement to making working time more flexible, shifting from a daily to a weekly cap. However, unions have mobilised against this for weeks, particularly emphasizing that the current eight-hour daily maximum protects employee health.
Employer president Rainer Dulger called the draft a "presumption." He claims it "reeks of distrust" toward employers and their employees. The president of the Federation of German Employers' Associations (BDA) criticized the proposal for failing to meet standards for flexible, digital working arrangements "in any respect."
The draft ties the "marginal" adjustment of maximum working hours to collective agreement provisions, while the coalition agreement explicitly rejected such a requirement, Dulger noted. Additionally, he said, it contains a "highly bureaucratic" work-time recording rule that does not guarantee the contractual protection of trust-based working arrangements.
The draft contradicts the coalition agreement "blatantly," Dulger stated, demanding it be "withdrawn and completely reworked."
Within the CDU/CSU parliamentary group, there has been strong criticism of considerations within the SPD-led Federal Ministry of Labor regarding the design of the Working Time Act. The flexibilization agreed upon by the coalition, with a transition from daily to weekly working hours, must apply to all employees, "regardless of whether they are covered by a collective bargaining agreement or not," the CDU/CSU parliamentary group's social policy spokesperson, Marc Biadacz (CDU), told the AFP news agency on Thursday.
Biadacz also rejected the considerations by Bas's ministry, regarding stricter regulations for recording working hours. "Recording working hours must be implemented without bureaucracy," he stated. "Furthermore, options for trust-based working hours must continue to exist in all companies."
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