The Last Word: When competitiveness is beginning to slip, asking people to work harder can actually look suspiciously like moving backwards.
Germany has spent much of the past few decades as shorthand for industrial discipline: excellent engineering, productive factories and an economy built around making complicated things very well. So there is something jarring about the latest prescription for its automotive troubles. With Volkswagen restructuring and German manufacturers under pressure, politicians and industry voices are asking whether the 35-hour working week should become 40 hours, without additional pay.
Perhaps it would make German factories cheaper. Labour costs matter, particularly when competitors can manufacture elsewhere for considerably less. But Volkswagen’s difficulties are not primarily the consequence of employees leaving work too early on a Friday. The company has excess production capacity, weaker demand and competitors, particularly from China, that have changed both the economics and expectations of the car market. The wider numbers are hardly reassuring. German passenger-car production in the first eight months of this year was still 16 per cent below its 2019 level, according to the country’s automotive industry association.
Against that backdrop, the debate feels strangely familiar. When an established model begins to struggle, the first instinct is often to extract more from it: more hours, more output, more sales calls, another efficiency programme. The assumption is that the machine basically works; it simply needs to run harder.
Yet everything that has happened to Volkswagen should by now have raised a more uncomfortable possibility: perhaps making the existing machine work harder is no longer enough. Volkswagen itself appears to recognise the scale of the problem. Its newly approved Future Plan 2030 goes considerably further than trimming labour costs. It envisages roughly 50,000 additional job reductions across the group, acknowledges more than 500,000 vehicles of excess European capacity and proposes cutting its model line-up by as much as half.
Efficiency cannot substitute for relevance
These are not symptoms of a company that merely needs another five hours of labour each week. This is where productivity and reinvention are easily confused. Productivity asks how to do something better, faster or more cheaply. Reinvention asks whether that something is still the right thing to be doing in the first place. Both matter, but applying the first to a problem that requires the second can be surprisingly dangerous, because activity creates the comforting impression that something fundamental is being done.
The same trap exists well beyond manufacturing. When a business loses customers, it can increase sales targets. When margins shrink, it can cut another layer of costs. When an employee worries about becoming irrelevant, the response can be to work later, collect another qualification or send out twice as many applications. Sometimes those actions are sensible. But there comes a point when more effort directed at the same proposition merely postpones the harder question: does what I do remain valuable enough?
There is an irony here. Reinvention is usually presented as movement towards something new, while the more natural response under pressure is often to retreat towards what we know. We optimise yesterday because yesterday feels measurable. Asking people for five additional hours is tangible; reconsidering products, capabilities, markets and the assumptions on which an industrial model was built is considerably less comfortable.
None of this means Germany should abandon productivity, nor that a 35-hour week is somehow sacred. A country competing globally has every reason to examine costs, working practices and regulation. But efficiency cannot substitute for relevance, and working harder cannot rescue an offer that customers increasingly prefer to buy elsewhere.
That distinction applies to companies, economies and careers alike. Efficiency makes the existing machine run better. Reinvention asks whether you still need that machine. The danger is not hard work. It is hard work becoming an alternative to changing. Because you can work harder at the wrong thing for a very long time.
Photo: Dreamstime.