Xinhua, Berlin :
The number of overtime hours worked by German employees has risen sharply during the past years, the newspaper Rheinische Post (RP) quoted official figures as reporting on Friday.
According to the German government’s official response to a Left party (Linke) parliamentary enquiry cited by RP, Germans accumulated a total of 2.127 billion euros (2.42 billion U.S. dollars) of overtime in 2017.
The figure marked the highest level in a decade and was derived by the German government on the basis of analyses by the Institute for Employment Research (IAB), the research institute of Germany’s Federal Employment Agency, as well as surveys conducted by the Ifo Institute for Economic Research (Ifo).
While the number of overtime hours worked rose by 11 percent between 2016 and 2017, the RP highlighted that only half of the total additional volume of labor was remunerated. Roughly 11 billion hours were delivered to German employers for free by their staff, a circumstance which was estimated by the Left party labor market expert Jessica Tatti to have resulted in savings to companies worth over 36 billion euros.
A survey by the Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (BAuA) suggests that most German employees felt like they had no choice other than to do overtime.
The number of overtime hours worked by German employees has risen sharply during the past years, the newspaper Rheinische Post (RP) quoted official figures as reporting on Friday.
According to the German government’s official response to a Left party (Linke) parliamentary enquiry cited by RP, Germans accumulated a total of 2.127 billion euros (2.42 billion U.S. dollars) of overtime in 2017.
The figure marked the highest level in a decade and was derived by the German government on the basis of analyses by the Institute for Employment Research (IAB), the research institute of Germany’s Federal Employment Agency, as well as surveys conducted by the Ifo Institute for Economic Research (Ifo).
While the number of overtime hours worked rose by 11 percent between 2016 and 2017, the RP highlighted that only half of the total additional volume of labor was remunerated. Roughly 11 billion hours were delivered to German employers for free by their staff, a circumstance which was estimated by the Left party labor market expert Jessica Tatti to have resulted in savings to companies worth over 36 billion euros.
A survey by the Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (BAuA) suggests that most German employees felt like they had no choice other than to do overtime.
