Work More, Complain Less: Germany’s Conservatives Declare War on Free Time
Germany’s conservatives have found a new culprit for a sluggish economy, and it is not underinvestment, weak demand, or decades of political caution. It is free time. More precisely, it is the audacity of workers to choose part-time hours without first asking permission.
The business wing of the Christian Democratic Union now wants to abolish the legal right to part-time work, dismissively rebranding it as “lifestyle part-time work”, as if millions of people had collectively decided that economic stagnation would be a fun personal hobby. Under the proposal, working fewer hours would no longer be a right but a privilege, reserved for those who can prove they are sufficiently burdened by childcare, elder care, or approved forms of self-improvement.
The logic is brutally simple. Germany has a labour shortage, therefore people should work more. Any discussion of why skilled workers might not want full-time hours, or why full-time jobs are increasingly incompatible with modern life, is treated as a distraction. Structural problems are reframed as moral failings. If growth is weak, someone must be slacking.
Chancellor Friedrich Merz has already laid the rhetorical groundwork. Germans, he has suggested, cannot expect prosperity with ideas like work-life balance or a four-day week. He has publicly complained about sick leave, hinting that workers are gaming the system. The message is clear: if you are tired, overwhelmed, or simply unwilling to give more of your life to your employer, the problem is you.
What this proposal carefully avoids mentioning is who actually works part-time in Germany. Over three-quarters are women. Many are in health, education, and social services, sectors that have expanded as manufacturing has declined. These are not frivolous jobs taken up by people chasing “lifestyle” preferences. They are essential roles, often emotionally and physically demanding, and frequently structured in ways that make full-time work punishing or impossible.
Even within the CDU, the unease is visible. Critics have pointed out that part-time work is often a trap not because people prefer it, but because employers refuse flexibility, career progression stalls, and childcare and eldercare remain inadequate. Removing the right to part-time work does nothing to solve these issues. It simply forces people to choose between overwork and withdrawal from the labour market altogether.
Unions have been even blunter. The problem, they argue, is not a lack of willingness to work but a lack of conditions that make full-time employment sustainable. This is a familiar pattern across Europe: politicians lament labour shortages while resisting the investments that would actually mobilise the workforce they claim to need.
There is something revealing about the language of “permission” embedded in the CDU’s proposal. It reflects a worldview in which work is not a negotiated relationship but a moral obligation, monitored and enforced from above. Rights become conditional. Autonomy becomes suspect. And any attempt to balance paid labour with care, health, or personal life is treated as a threat to the national interest.
Germany’s economic challenges are real, but this approach offers a remarkably thin solution. Instead of improving childcare, integrating older workers, redesigning jobs, or raising wages in hard-to-staff sectors, the burden is shifted onto individuals. Work more, complain less, and do not ask too many questions.
If this motion becomes party policy, it will mark a quiet but significant shift: away from a social model that recognises workers as people with lives, and toward one that views them as underutilised assets. In that sense, the proposal says less about Germany’s work ethic than it does about the shrinking imagination of those who govern it.
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