Quotes of the Day

At 8:30 a.m. last Monday — a time when most Germans were still digesting the news that their national elections the previous day had ended in stalemate — a group of about 50 car mechanics clutching banners staged a 2-hr. protest on the grounds of an Iveco truck plant in Hamburg. Their gripe: local auto dealers were trying to force them to work an additional 2 hr., 30 min. per month. The work stoppage received almost no attention locally, let alone nationally. Yet it speaks volumes about the shifting nature of attitudes toward work in Germany, and throughout Europe.

Until quite recently, the notion that any German company would try to make its work force stay longer on the job would have run into a storm of protest. Germany, after all, was one of the first European nations to move to a 35-hour week two decades ago. But in this case, the Hamburg mechanics didn't put down their tools to protest longer hours. Indeed, they are even offering to increase the length of their workweek under certain circumstances. What raised their ire was the idea of doing so for no extra money. "Being flexible about working hours is not the problem," says Friedhelm Ahrens, an official of the IG Metall metalworkers' union in Hamburg, which organized the protest. "We're just not ready to work without pay."

The Hamburg demo is just one sign that European attitudes about work are shifting. With companies from Siemens to Volkswagen threatening to cut thousands of jobs unless Germans are more productive, unions are agreeing to far more flexible labor practices. One, the huge construction union IG Bau, even agreed this summer to shift back to a 40-hour week without any pay increase.

Regardless of who ends up as Germany's next Chancellor, a much harder-nosed attitude to labor markets is taking hold. Employers, politicians and chunks of the electorate are realizing that high unemployment rates, stagnant growth and serious public deficits are no longer sustainable. The new mantra: If you don't work, you need to start; if you do, you can expect to work harder and longer for no more pay and far less security.

Other hallowed traditions apart from the shorter workweek are also under attack across the Continent. Lifelong job security, a staple of the postwar era, is rapidly making way for short-term contracts with far less generous benefits than full-timers enjoy. Between 12-15% of workers in France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands are currently employed on short-term contracts, according to data compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in Paris. That's more than double the proportion in Britain, where it's easier to dismiss staffers. In France, which has traditionally coddled its workers more than most, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin last month put in place a new two-year contract that makes it cheap and easy for firms to fire employees within that period.

State-subsidized early retirement — a policy promoted aggressively by several European governments in the 1990s as a way to reduce unemployment — has been discredited as expensive and ineffective. And in countries from Denmark to Ireland, Europe's unemployed, especially unemployed youngsters, are hearing a stark new message: if you don't take a job or accept training, you'll end up like Peter Jensen.

The son of a single mother, Jensen grew up in the Danish town of Elsinore. When he left school at the age of 17, he had no intention of doing much of anything. "I had no plans, no ambitions," Jensen says. But the Danish government no longer allows people like him to coast. His social caseworker enrolled Jensen in job-training placement schemes and courses. Every time he dropped out of one, he was put in another. If he didn't show up, he didn't get his benefits. One spell Jensen remembers vividly: he had to turn up every morning at an Elsinore job center to be given a series of mundane assignments that ranged from sweeping leaves to washing the gates of public institutions. "It was almost as if one day I had to move a pile of boxes from one place to another and the next day move them back again," Jensen says. "I often felt humiliated."

It was a tough lesson — but it worked. For the past 20 months Jensen, now 24, has been in a full-time job at an anti-rust treatment shop. He found the job himself, and the state subsidized his new employer for the first six months. He hopes it will be a permanent position, but even if it isn't, something fundamental has changed: Jensen swears he'll never be unemployed again. "It's like emerging into the sunlight from a slough," he says.

This tough-love treatment of Denmark's unemployed youngsters — a policy that labor-market expert Per Kongshoj Madsen calls the "the Sicilian option" because you can't refuse offers you are made — is now increasingly the norm in Europe, endorsed even by governments that are traditionally friendly to labor. In Germany, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder introduced a big reform of unemployment benefits that slashes payments to young people who don't shape up. And even the French government is now talking about following suit. "People on benefits don't have sufficient incentive to take up a job," Villepin said last month.

Inevitably, such moves are politically controversial and often deeply unpopular. Many West Europeans regard the shift as an outrageous attack on hard-won social advances gained over the past half-century. In France, traditionalists denounce the "Anglo-Saxon" model — a key point among those who voted against the European constitution in May's referendum. In the German elections, the Left Party — a union of east German ex-communists and former Social Democrats disillusioned with Schröder's policies — polled almost 9% by promising a more social and painless solution to the nation's work crisis. One in four voters in the depressed eastern part of Germany, where the 18% unemployment rate is almost double that of western Germany, cast their ballot for the Left Party.

And if Schröder's Social Democratic Party does end up governing in a "grand coalition" with the Christian Democratic Union of Angela Merkel and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union — still one of the likeliest outcomes of the vote — some analysts say the big parties will have learned their lesson and won't push for even more radical measures. "Labor markets are the area that will suffer the most from a grand coalition," says Barbara Böttcher, a German economy expert at Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt. Yet it's another sign of the times that, even in Germany, all the mainstream parties put further labor reform in their election programs.

Driving such shifting attitudes is a stark reality: over the past two decades, Europe's overall growth rate has slowed so sharply that even in good periods only relatively few new jobs are created. Charts showing unemployment in the European Union look like an unending staircase. With the exception of two brief periods, there's a step up for every period of weak growth as more people lose their jobs, but only a flattening off — rather than a step down — for each period of recovery before the next step up. And now there's a new specter knocking at Europe's door: globalization.

Western Europe suddenly seems ill equipped to face up to the challenges of a fast-changing world. It can't begin to compete with Eastern Europe on labor costs, let alone with China or India, and others are catching up and overtaking its once-vaunted high level of productivity. The realization is sinking in that, if high living standards are to be maintained, something significant has to change. Thierry Breton, France's Finance Minister, summed up the new mood in the French Parliament in June: "To finance our model, we need to work more. We have to work more to create growth. We have to work more throughout our lives."

On most of the planet, that sort of statement would be a truism. Theoreticians from Sigmund Freud to Hannah Arendt have spoken of Homo faber, defining mankind in terms of its ability to work and create. The sociologist Max Weber famously saw in capitalism the vestiges of Protestant salvation, and in much of the world — the U.S., most of Asia — the notion that work is an ennobling path to a rewarding life still prevails. But not, tellingly, in Western Europe. The social settlement after World War II provided a generous safety net for those who didn't work. And so the persistence of double-digit unemployment in some of Europe's biggest economies during good economic times as well as bad is evidence not just of people who can't get jobs, or of people who don't want them — though clearly there are plenty in both categories — but also of people who have never felt that they needed to work.

Mariangela Benzi, for example, who lives in Rome, spent 10 years getting her degree in classical languages. Her thesis, a translation of a 9th century Byzantine Greek manuscript, was published, and won a prize. Now 34, she's attended a variety of training courses but has no full-time work. Ask her why she doesn't wait tables to earn some money, and she says, "Apart from the fact that the work is alienating, a person who has studied reaches a certain level of qualification. Working as a waitress in a bar would be to renounce the possibility of a career. Since I have a family behind me and a roof over my head, I try not to waste my degrees."

As the song goes, nice work if you can get it. And it's always possible — just possible — that Western Europe's attitude toward work has something to teach the rest of the world. After all, American employees speak increasingly of work-related stress and burnout. The U.S. epidemic of heart disease might be related to overwork. European labor unions have been vital in enacting legislation protecting health and safety, and securing decent livings for their members. And if West Europeans work fewer hours than their counterparts elsewhere — and they do — it's partly because they're more efficient.

But regardless of whether the European way of work is wonderful, one thing is plain: it's changing — and stoking fears as it does so. Unemployment used to be something that affected steelworkers and coal miners; now it's hurting bankers and people who mine data. It may not be Dickensian misery, but conditions at work are not as cushy as they once were. In Spain, architect Fabián Fernández de Alarcón, who runs a group called Professionals for Ethics, says that although it's illegal, some women who come back from maternity leave and ask to reduce their hours are dismissed within weeks. "I know of one woman working in a law firm whose boss asked her to sacrifice her honeymoon. She agreed, but then when she got pregnant some time later, she was fired," he says. "It is almost an act of heroism to ask for shorter hours." In the Italian city of Naples, Marco Santoro, 24, who is training for a job in tourism, worries about the effect this new precariousness will have on his life: "It's difficult to think of having a house, a family."

In the new climate — the growing realization that something must be done about unemployment — even the celebrated divide between Anglo-Saxon attitudes and those in Continental Europe is breaking down. Some economists argue that high minimum wages simply make it less attractive to hire unskilled workers, but governments in both places are trying to ensure that people who do work aren't exploited. This year, for example, Britain and France are increasing their statutory minimum wages to around $9 per hour, about 80% higher than in the U.S. And just as Continental Europe moves away from its shorter workweek, the calls are growing louder in Britain for a cut in the number of hours spent on the job. "Long hours are not a sign of economic success, but badly organized workplaces with tired, inefficient staff," contends Brendan Barber, general secretary of Britain's Trades Union Congress, which estimates that 3.6 million Britons work more than 48 hours per week. Even members of Blair's Labour Party think that proportion is too high, and voted in the European Parliament this spring to bring Britain into line with its E.U. partners.

WANTED: A NEW MAX WEBER
What happened to europe's work ethic? A good place to start is Heidelberg. The prosperous German town along the Neckar river is where Max Weber, the pioneer of modern sociology, wrote his famous 1905 treatise The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Today, a century later, Heidelberg continues to thrive. Home to Germany's oldest university, it's also one of the leading locations for biotechnology in Europe, boasting some 60 start-up firms and a slew of venture capitalists. A nationwide study by consultants Prognos last year put Heidelberg in sixth place on the list of German cities with the brightest future, and it's one of the very few places in birth-dearth Germany where the population — now 148,000 — is actually growing.

But take a closer look, and even in Heidelberg, work isn't what it used to be. Unemployment in the city is close to 9%. At a bar that calls itself the Hard Rock Café in a cobblestoned street in the downtown area, "happy hour" has been renamed "Hartz IV hour" — after Germany's new labor legislation that cuts the amount of unemployment benefit and puts a strict time limit on it. Employees at one of the town's biggest firms, the printing machinery company Heidelberg Druckmaschinen, have been working far more hours than usual over the past year, the price of a deal with management that enabled them to keep their jobs at all. When the firm hit a troubled spell in 2002-03, they reduced their hours to avoid layoffs. Now that orders have picked up again, they are working extra time without extra pay. "Everyone's frightened. People prefer to work longer hours than lose their jobs," says Manfred Hoppe, a local official for IG Metall.

It's the memory of good times past that hurts. Sitting in his sun-drenched office near Heidelberg's university library, sociology professor Wolfgang Schluchter — one of Max Weber's successors — recalls how he grew up at a time when economic growth was automatic and people had jobs for life. "The postwar era was a short and exceptional period and it won't come back, but many institutions were built on this basis of continuous growth," says Schluchter, 67. "Today life is far more complicated. If you have a job, you can't be sure you'll still have it in three years." His own son, a biologist, was out of work for a few months recently. "It's very hard to formulate a work ethic for today," Schluchter says. "It's very hard to communicate to the majority of the population that more work means less unemployment."

MISSPENT MONEY, MISMATCHED SKILLS
Older workers in particular find themselves being pulled this way and that. As a computer specialist, Patrick Mayo has the sort of skills you might expect to be in demand. But there's a problem: he's 50, and in France today that makes him virtually unemployable. French firms have every incentive not to hire older workers, the lingering legacy of a policy popular in the 1980s to get the over-50s out of the work force by subsidizing their early retirement. Belgium, Germany and some other countries also introduced active early-retirement policies. They didn't work. Firms took the subsidies, slashing the number of older workers on their payrolls — but didn't hire anybody to replace them. Partly as a result, only 37% of people between the ages of 55 and 64 remain in the work force in France, compared with around 60% in the U.S., Denmark or Japan. At the same time, as of July 2005 France's youth unemployment is over 22%, one of the highest in the developed world. Mayo, for one, is so angry that earlier this year he went on a five-week protest hike through France. "At 50 you're still active, full of initiative, capable of doing something," he says. "At the beginning it was personal. I became a messenger because of all the people I met. This is a national catastrophe."

Yet for every 50-year-old Frenchman who wants to work but can't, there's an 18-year-old who could but won't. A study by France's Unedic unemployment insurance agency earlier this year found that 45% of businesses surveyed were looking to fill vacancies — but complained about difficulties in finding enough or suitable candidates. One in five small and medium-sized companies and one in three large firms affiliated with the Paris Chamber of Commerce and Industry report that they are unable to fill available posts. "The biggest problem isn't that the French are lazy, it's that they're rational," says Jean-Luc Biacabe, an economist at the Paris Chamber of Commerce and Industry. "Many unemployed people are good at figuring out when swapping public assistance to work low-paying jobs isn't in their interest. This option of being able to refuse work must change."

At least one German entrepreneur has come up with a solution to the problem: last October, Fabian Löw, a student from Münster, set up a website called www.job dumping.de that allows job seekers to post their skills — ranging from pet grooming to accounting — and the minimum amount they will work for. (There's no statutory minimum wage in Germany.) Would-be employers then place their bids. Alternatively, employers can also post jobs that need doing, along with how much they are prepared to pay — and candidates compete for work. Since going live, the site has brokered some 1,800 deals and has more than 10,000 registered users. But it's also sparked a storm, with politicians and trade unionists denouncing the idea. Dirk Niebel, general secretary of the supposedly free-market Free Democrats, slammed the website as a "slave market."

Löw, 32, believes he is doing nothing more than applying a healthy dose of realism to Europe's sclerotic labor market. "We start where the politicians stop telling people the truth," he says. And for Europeans, the awkward truth is this: the labor-market policies and ideas about work that grew up after World War II no longer cut it. A sort of eBay for jobs may not put Europe back to work, but ideas like this are surely preferable to — literally — doing nothing.

• PETER GUMBEL / Paris
• How governments are tackling high unemployment and outdated attitudes toward work