Working hours
A holiday less to finance billions in debt?
Economists think that one holiday less could give the state billions of additional income. But the idea does not affect approval everywhere.
Should a holiday in Germany be deleted to finance the planned billions in Germany? Economists’ proposal has been controversial for days. Now the employer -related institute of the German economy (IW/Cologne) is calculating that an additional working day could bring up to 8.6 billion euros more economic growth.
However, the effect would not be the same in all industries, as IW researcher Christoph Schröder explains: In some professions, capacities are not always fully utilized. In the construction industry, for example, it makes a big difference whether there is a holiday in summer or in winter, because cranes stand still with ice and snow.
“Deletion of a holiday as a symbol is just right”
Economists recently came up with the recent suggestions to abolish a holiday in order to finance the billion -dollar packages for defense, infrastructure and climate protection, which the Union and SPD have negotiated with the help of the Greens and which the Bundestag has now approved.
“I would find the deletion of a holiday as a symbol,” replied the boss of the “economy”, Monika Schnitzer, last week to the “Spiegel” to the question of whether Germany should follow the Danish example, in this way to manage higher defense spending.
At the beginning of March, the President of the Munich IFO Institute, Clemens Fuest, had pleaded for the deletion of a holiday to “increase people’s job offer”: “Instead, there are demands for more vacation days and shorter working hours. That would be the wrong way if you want to avoid inflation and grow,” said Fuest of the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”.
DGB: Recovery on public holidays promotes productivity
The German Trade Union Confederation (DGB) keeps the proposal to abolish a holiday to generate more income for the state, for absurd: “A painted holiday for the employees will not unleash the economy,” wrote DGB board member Anja Piel on platform X.
Holidays are “not a luxury, but an important part of our work culture; they contribute to the recovery of the employees and thus also to productivity,” argued Piel. Employees often did their share of economic growth beyond their regular working hours – this shows the high number of many unpaid overtime.
IW considers implementation to be difficult
According to IW researcher Schröder, it would be difficult to put the proposal into practice: the holiday regulations in the individual federal states are different. An additional challenge: Because of the federal structures of Germany, each federal state would have to decide individually through a deletion.
Nine holidays are uniformly regulated in all 16 federal states: New Year’s Day, Good Friday, Easter Monday, Himmelfahrt, Whit Monday, May 1st, Day of German Unity, First and Second Christmas Day.
Holidays are cheap for employees 2025
Because holidays and festive days fall less often on weekends in the current year, employees in Germany have to work a little less, as the Federal Statistical Office has calculated: In the nationwide cut, the calendar shows 248.1 working days – 0.7 days less than 2024 and the lowest value since 2019 (247.8 working days).
According to the statisticians, the lower annual working time has an impact on economic output: after a rule of thumb, a working day means less a decline in gross domestic product (GDP) by 0.1 percent.
dpa
Source: Stern
