Longer working hours: no health risks for office workers!

Longer working hours: no health risks for office workers!

A current study by the German Economy (IW) in Cologne's employer (IW) has shown that longer daily working hours in office workers do not pose an increased risk of health. These results are in particular relevant in the context of the planned reform of the Working Hours Act by the German government, which would like to enable a weekly maximum working hours instead of a daily maximum period. Currently, the working time of work may not usually exceed eight hours, which could possibly be changed soon. The study was published in the "Welt am Sonntag" and refers to a comprehensive work time survey by the Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Occupational Medicine (Baua) from 2021, which included over 8,600 office workers.

The survey shows that employees who work more than ten hours a day do not report significantly more often of exhaustion or other stress symptoms than their colleagues with shorter working days. According to the IW study, longer working hours have no negative influence on the self-assessed state of health or the number of disease-related failure days. In addition, these working hours do not negatively influence satisfaction with work and show no systematic abnormalities in working life, according to the results of the analysis.

Contradiction from unions

Despite these positive assessments of the IW study, there are considerable concerns on the part of the unions. These take the view that working hours of more than eight hours endanger health and criticize the departure from the traditional eight-hour day. An analysis of the Hugo Sinzheimer Institute for Labor Law (HSI) comes to the conclusion that longer working hours are harmful to health. The unions accuse the government of endangering the rights of employees with its planned reform.

The authors of the IW study emphasize that their results apply especially to office sacrifices that offer more flexibility in the design of working hours compared to other activities. However, they indicate that not every employment is suitable for longer working hours, since security and health aspects have to be taken into account. These different perspectives on the increase in work raise important questions about the future of work organization in Germany.

The discussion of longer working hours shows how complex the relationship between work and health is and will certainly continue to focus in the coming weeks. It remains to be seen whether the planned reform will actually lead to an improvement in working conditions for office workers.

Further details on the results of the study and the planned reforms can be found in the articles of Krone , Tagesspiegel and Rnd .