TRANSFORMATIONS IN WORK 275
because the trade unions and the workers’ councils had fallen into a sus-
tained position of weakness. As a result, the average working hours per
week, along with Sunday, evening, and night shifts, have been on the
rise. In Germany, for example, the number of employees who had to work
longer than their usual daily number of hours, usually in the evenings,
increased from 26.8 percent in 1995 to 43.8 percent in 2009; likewise,
the percentage of (regular and sporadic) night-shift workers went from
13.1 percent to 15.2 percent over the same period.^83
For a long time, part-time work, which was also very much associ-
ated with “fl exibility,” had been quite attractive for women in particular
because it allowed them to combine paid work with motherhood. But
there was also another trend that factored into the two-fold increase
in the number of part-time employees to fi ve million (2011) in the fi rst
twenty years after the Wende: since the turn of the century, the pressure
on precariously employed and long-term unemployed people to accept
“fl exible” part-time work had grown because they could not fi nd jobs
off ering other terms. Moreover, “fl extime” has become more popular—
especially since the turn of the millennium—despite the fact that it was
a mostly foreign concept in Germany before then. This model rested on
concepts largely appropriated from places like the United States, such as
KAPOVAZ (capacity-oriented variable working time) or FREQUOVAZ, the
latter of which couples working time to digitally tracked customer fre-
quency in retail shops and shopping centers. In addition, “fl exibility” is
also tied to the ever-increasing trend toward contacting employees when
they are off work.
Globalization and regime hopping, by fostering the omnipresence of
“temporary workers,” have also undermined the employee rights that
had been hard fought for in earlier generations and protected by col-
lective bargaining agreements or labor laws. The number of temporary
employees has grown signifi cantly since 1975 (see table 5.5). After the
so-called “Hartz IV” legal regulations on second-stage unemployment
benefi ts (Arbeitslosengeld II) took eff ect in 2002, the number of tempo-
rary workers peaked (at least for the time being) at 927,103 in August
- The number of employees with limited-term contracts also jumped
from 1.8 million in 1991 to 2.8 million in 2011, while the number of peo-
ple with “mini-jobs” quadrupled between 1991 and 2011 from 652,000
to 2.7 million.^84 In a nutshell, what used to be “atypical employment”
is on the way to becoming the new norm. Whether these changes are
interpreted in national terms and pejoratively deemed to be an “Amer-
icanization of the politics and culture of work” or a “downsizing of the
German model”^85 is really a matter of taste and not important in the end.
What is important about all this is that the competition between those