Garbage piling up on city streets? Single mothers tearing their hair out wondering what to do with their kids during the work day as childcare centers close? The walking wounded being turned away from university clinics? Such scenes are hardly foreign to Germans -- after all, labor disputes in France and Italy get regular coverage on the nightly news. This week, though, the images are a bit closer to home.

For the first time in 14 years, thousands of public sector workers across Germany have walked off the job and headed to the picket lines in a strike that on Tuesday is expected to involve some 40,000 workers. The country got a sniff  of what to expect last week as workers -- including garbage collectors, childcare workers and hospital staff -- represented by the service sector union Verdi went on strike in the southern German state of Baden Württemberg. On Monday, the strike went nationwide as it spread to eight of Germany's 16 states. Further expansion is already being planned. Public transportation workers, university employees and administrators are all preparing to join the strike.
In contrast to most labor disputes, however, Germany's public sector workers are not fighting for more money. Rather, they are resisting plans to require some state and city employees to work 40 hours a week instead of the current 38.5 hours. In other words, it’s a labor battle over a mere 18 minutes extra a day -- or two extra weeks of work a year without pay, depending on which side you're on, of course.

A quarter million jobs threatened?

Public sector workers will continue striking, Verdi chairman Frank Bsirske told the tabloid Bild Zeitung on Monday, "until the employers understand that they can't just issue orders to their employees as to how long they have to work." Bsirske has also said that an extension of the work week could cost as many as a quarter million jobs.

The "employers" in this case are German state and local officials who are interested in getting more work out of their employees without spending any more money. Indeed, the financial situation of most municipal governments in Germany is dire, as a sluggish economy and other factors have hit tax revenues. The governors of two states -- Günther Oettinger of Baden-Württemberg and Kurt Beck of Rhineland-Palatinate -- have indicated they might be willing to compensate workers for the extra 1.5 hours per week as a way to break the current negotiation deadlock. But leaders in other states have ruled out such a solution saying their budgets are already stretched to the breaking point.

Bsirske, for his part, has rejected the suggestion saying that the point is holding on to the 38.5 hour week and not higher salaries. "We are not going to allow our working hours to be bought with money," Bsirske said. The point of the strike, he claimed, was to prevent public sector workers from being laid off -- although a number of economists and politicians have called his estimate of 250,000 potential job losses exaggerated. Hartmut Möllring, Lower Saxony's finance minister and the representative of the German states in public sector labor disputes, said Bsirske's estimate was a "plain absurdity."

Trend toward longer working hours

The labor feud comes as the Germany and Europe are slowly turning its back on the dream of shorter work weeks. The 35-hour week had even been introduced in a number of sectors across the continent. But that is rapidly fading into history. In the early 1990s, the chemical industry cast aside the 37.5 hour work week in favor of longer working hours. Siemens managed to squeeze a 40 hour work week out of its workers in 2004 negotiations by threatening them with major job losses should the electronics firm be forced to move factories out of the country. Carmaker DaimlerChrysler bumped working hours up the same year. Indeed, whereas the average worker put in less than 36 hours a week in 2003, according to Germany's Federal Statistics Office, by 2005, it was 37.9 hours per week.

Even many Volkswagen workers, which have, until now enjoyed something of a special status among industry workers in Germany with their 28.8 hour week, are facing longer hours. The introduction of such a short week was, in the early 1990s, considered a possible model for the future. But it was also a way to avoid mass lay-offs. And now, with falling profits largely due -- according to the company leadership -- to high labor costs in Germany, they want workers to put in seven hours more a week -- without extra compensation.

The public sector workers aren't facing such drastic changes, but they're still angry. For a large number of Germans, though, the current strike will still come as something of a shock. According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Germany has always been well under the average in terms of work days lost to labor disputes. Indeed, in 2004, Germany only lost one work day per 1,000 workers -- above only Switzerland and Japan.

Put your garbage on the balcony

And Germans are most definitely not used to piles of garbage on their streets as residents of Baden-Württemberg, where trash hasn't been picked up for over a week, are now experiencing. Cities across Germany may soon have the same problem -- Hamburg's sanitation department has recommended, given the cold winter temperatures, that citizens store their garbage on their balconies until the strike is over. In Lower Saxony and other states, some parents are unable to go to work for lack of childcare options. Striking stage and lighting workers have meant a number of theater productions and operas have had to be cancelled in Bavaria and mail delivery in Bonn has been severely limited due to picketing postal workers. A number of university clinics have even cancelled non-urgent operations due to striking personnel.