274 RÜDIGER HACHTMANN
cally in the form of neoliberal paradigms. The classic Fordist model, with
its clearly fi xed boundaries between work and leisure, is clearly eroding
in its wake. The inclination to cut production costs—and therefore la-
bor costs—as much as possible is very much intrinsic to the exploitation
of capital. But it has been bolstered even more since the mid-1980s by
chronic mass unemployment and underemployment, as well as the end
of the Cold War, and it has been accompanied by an ever-accelerating
process of globalization.
In the last two decades of the twentieth century, many countries ac-
tively tried to dismantle the legal, economic, and bureaucratic barriers
faced by locating and relocating businesses. As a result, many interna-
tional companies have engaged in what has been termed regime hopping
since the 1990s, in which they play the diff erent site locations against
each other in order to obtain better deals.^81 Companies then choose the
sites with what they see as the best terms for them in relation to labor
laws, social standards, tax requirements, and political-administrative as-
pects. Simply threatening to move their locations has gained them an
upper hand in collective bargaining and internal confl icts, proving to be
the “joker that trumps the others in many situations.”^82 This competition
over business locations has brought about what Andreas Wirsching calls
a “new kind of vulnerability” for employees, which is poorly disguised
under the rather ambiguous heading of “fl exibility” and which feeds into
a downward spiral.
As working hours have become more fl exible, the trade unions have
become rather unwilling pacemakers. As part of their campaign to cut
down working hours on the whole, they—from a position of relative
strength—pushed companies to accept a limited form of fl extime, which
was contractually fi xed for the fi rst time at the end of June in 1984 in a
collective wage agreement in the metal industry for the North Baden/
North Württemberg district. Although this agreement set out a nominal
workweek of 38.5 hours, it has still been possible to institute special work-
time arrangements for entire company workforces or individual groups
of employees through internal company agreements. At the same time,
the permitted compensation period for off setting contract work hours
was extended on average by about two months. This has meant that em-
ployers can adjust working hours to production needs without having
to worry about paying overtime. Ten years later, these regulations were
extended beyond the metal industry and sanctioned by the legislature in
the German Working Hours Act (Arbeitszeitgesetz) that went into eff ect
on 1 July 1994. This law was expressly intended “to improve the general
conditions for fl exible working hours” (section 1). By this time, however,
the general constellation of society had changed fundamentally, not least