It'd be pretty rare to say "cu-de-ferro" unless you were really trying to be contemptuous. Normally, people say "CDF", which AFAIK originally stood for "cabeça-de-ferro" (iron head). It's a pejorative slang for someone who gets high marks in school.
I've heard that "cu-de-ferro" is a homophobic misinterpretation of CDF ("cu" is a slang for anus, and "cu-de-ferro" is supposed to imply you had sex with the teacher to get said high mark). Never heard of it being used in the ass-in-seat sense.
Or a bit better rolling off the tongue “Seat-Meat”.
[Edit] Although to add, in English "Seat-Meat" is more a pejorative whereas in German it's a compliment saying you have _the_ Meat which can endure the implied demands and staying power it takes to handle that seat.
If you wanted to be literal it would be sit flesh, perhaps sitting muscles, like working memory and in the broadest sense it might mean composure, patience, dedication in a restricted sense, or in a literally broad sense it means the buttox. Probably not a fat ass gotten from sitting around and neglecting exercise but eating like a weight lifter, although that was my first association in context ... compare "Arsch in der Hose haben" - "to be a hard/bad-ass", referring to courage, abillity and composure more generally, not too different from the massive balls meme.
English has a slightly more general word. It is "grit". The ability to work continuously and without being distracted.
Perseverance of effort. Ability to execute on a long term goal efficiently.
Great headline, terrible article. It mostly talks about German words and almost nothing of German work ethics. The only interesting bit is around the end where it quickly skirts over the fact that you need to make employees realize they are unproductive before you can work on their behavior.
All the other stuff is just meh. I mean, the language analysis isn’t even very good, or in depth, with terrible half-assed English translations.
As the article suggests, if you search Google for German language pages with "Sitzfleisch" and "Merkel" you will get pages of links from the last few years using the term. It could be an example of "newspaper German" like people sometimes make fun of the Frankfurter Allgemeine for.
My family uses Sitzfleisch too, to describe a person who is always the last one to leave a party. Efficiency, productivity and work ethic are the last things on my mind if I hear someone being described as having "Sitzfleisch".
I never use it but know the word and usually when I hear it it's more negative, e.g. when you have guests who won't leave you might say that they have Sitzfleisch.
Interesting. I think I only ever heard the term in context with politicians that that were elected "too many times" by someone's standard. There, it certainly isn't meant positively -- the funny thing is that this goes rather well with the phrase mentioning Angela Merkel at the beginning of the article. There are more and more voices now that would prefer someone new taking her post.
It's the opposite, the headline is just misleading. Sitzfleisch is no concept of work ethic and has no relation with productivity. It's just a casual word to describe different types of mental endurance.
As a German I spent an abroad term in Canada, so here as a grain of salt the difference between German and the work ethic across the pond.
9am: I arrive in the lab at around, sit at my desk and set up my stuff. Unfortunately there was is one around to start the day with a coffee break.
10am: Canadian lab mates arrive, sit at their desks and go on facebook.
noon: After spending three hours reading papers, fitting curves to data, etc. I get hungry. I go to lunch with a Dutch person I met in the building a couple of weeks ago.
1.30pm: Back at my desks. Through the towers of take away junk on my lab mates desks, I can see they made some progress on facebook.
3pm: I try to convince some of my labmates to go for the coffee place within the building to have a short communal coffee break. Of course everyone is too busy and cannot socialize, except for the post-doc from india (who does not facebook)
3:45pm: Back at the desk, wrapping up the results of my day, my lab mates are still "working". Next morning, they will tell me they stayed till 8pm in the lab and how increadibly busy they are.
Granted, in between visiting facebook and skipping communal lunch- and coffee breaks, they got some work done and I don't claim I delivered more results in terms of research and learning "output".
Yet I think it summarizes my and the experience of other Germans quite well. In Germany there is much more focus on not working long-hours but spending the hours you work productively. A German workday of an office worker is limited to max. 10h per day by law and my employer follows that rule religiously. Many colleagues contractually have 35 h work weeks and working 40 h requires a permit from the worker's council. If you are sick, you stay at home on sick leave, you join your colleagues again when you are better. American colleagues working here for a year or so as part of their assignment quite often start out to send an email that they are sick and will work from home. If you are sick, why do you work? Your job now is to get better. Quite often, breaks for lunch or coffee are started and ended together. Only few people come into the office with half-liter coffee mugs to consume on their desks.
Obviously there are exceptions to the rule, and office cultures of individual companies may differ. My current company's culture is very German if you arrive before 8am, you might be welcomed with handshakes by your colleagues.
I would say, foreigners always do more than locals. They feel, they have prove something, maybe less social contacts too. I observe the same behavior like your Canadian lab mates with my young German colleagues. All day long sitting in mobile Facebook or drinking coffee for 30 minutes every 2 hours. Germans aren’t majority among department’s top performing people.
Edit: it’s IG Metall company and you can’t fire people easily. So low performers accumulate over the time. Talents come and go.
This is an incredibly offensive statement against unions and I want to see some proof from you for this. All large corporations in Germany have unions and Germany is still one of the world's economic powerhouses.
In Germany firing a teacher or cop isn't hard because unions but because they're state employees which makes it hard to fire them at all (though it does happen).
>union members are less likely to lose their jobs than non-members. In particular, using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel we can show that roughly 50% of the observed raw differential in individual dismissal rates can be explained by the estimated average partial effect of union membership.
If you read the whole thing you’ll also see that it’s significantly more expensive to fire a union member.
It’s much harder and more expensive to fire union members. The natural result of this is that bad or underperforming employees are more likely to remain in the workforce. Like unions or don’t, but this is one of the costs they impose on the workforce.
In part the lower firing rate can be explained by other means, unions do try to work with companies when they're in a financial crisis (for example instead of firing people, they'd reduce working hours). That's sort of the point of a union really; give workers better leverage to work with the company to ensure they'll keep their jobs and have fair wages and compensations+benefits.
Of course, you'll get freeloaders but I'd argue that this is a price worth paying for because the workers benefit a lot and the company can benefit a lot too.
Plus, this isn't the point either, teachers and cops aren't hard to fire because of unions. They are civil servants, they can't negotiate their wages via unions or even strike. They also lack a number of other rights. However, they are also incredibly hard to fire if they didn't commit serious crimes or felonies, otherwise they hold their job for life.
So teachers and cops in germany have little to nothing to do with unions when it comes to being hard to fire.
>In part the lower firing rate can be explained by other means, unions do try to work with companies when they're in a financial crisis
The study was of dismissal rates, not redundancies. So none of the 50% reduction found in dismissals can be explained by redundancies.
Your speculation about cops and teachers is also irrelevant, as the data very convincingly shows that it’s much harder and more expensive to fire union members.
>The study was of dismissal rates, not redundancies. So none of the 50% reduction found in dismissals can be explained by redundancies.
The paper you linked specifically points out that unions reduce employee turnover, as mentioned because unions do try to work with companies, and as mentioned, try to keep workers employed. This fully explains a lower turnover rate. The paper however doesn't really go deep into that territory so I'm afraid you can't simply say that the explanation is invalid.
Specifically the paper mentions "Our data does not allow us to explicitly test for the channel by which individual trade union membership alters dismissal probabilities." So again, saying the paper finds that redundancy can't explain the reduction is simply incorrect.
>Your speculation about cops and teachers is also irrelevant,
It's not speculation, it's german employment and civil servant law, but thanks anyway. I'm merely raising the point that using teachers and cops are bad examples considering they don't have unions here.
>The paper you linked specifically points out that unions reduce employee turnover, as mentioned because unions do try to work with companies, and as mentioned, try to keep workers employed.
It actually sites union representation in labor court as a key factor:
>German employment protection legislation gives workers the entitlement to contest a dismissal at a labour court. Trade unions generally support their members in such legal conflicts. According to a recent survey, 12% of all union members have been represented by their union in court and almost 50% have obtained legal advice from union staff at least once during their membership. Furthermore, in 2008 for example, the German Trade Union Federation (DGB) represented union members in more than 70,000 proceedings in labour courts, of which about 26,000 were directly related to dismissal conflicts.21 In addition, we know that the probability of obtaining a severance payment will be higher if a labour court is involved
>This fully explains a lower turnover rate.
Again, the paper is not about turnover rate or redundancy as you keep saying, it’s about dismissals:
>The differences in the dismissal rates are striking: the raw dismissal rate of non-members amounts to about 3.6% and is almost three times as high as that of union members in sample I. It is still more than twice the dismissal rate of non-members in sample II, which covers the longer time span.
>saying the paper finds that redundancy can't explain the reduction is simply incorrect.
It seems you didn’t read the paper:
>A key advantage of the SOEP data is that information on the type of job termination is available. Since 1985, respondents have been asked to classify their job termination from a list of items, such as "fired by the employer", "quit on one's own", "time-limited work contract", "apprenticeship had been completed", "entering pre-retirement programme" or "other reasons". The items "fired by the employer" and "quit on one's own" are included in every wave of the SOEP. Some of the other reasons have been included irregularly and additional types of job separations, such as "plant closed", have been added later on. This last item has been sporadically included in questionnaires since 1991. Furthermore, multiple answers were allowed only until 1998. Since we are concerned with whether union membership is associated with a reduced risk of being individually dismissed, we focus on "fired by the employer" as the self-reported reason for a job termination.
The fact is plain as day, union membership makes it harder and more costly to fire bad employees. You can think it’s worth it if you like, but there’s no way to deny it. It’s also worth noting that this cost isn’t taken by the employer, but by the employee. As they all have collective contracts, the wages fleeced by low productivity employees are simply made up by higher productivity employees.
Police and teacher unions are known the world over for making it hard to fire bad employees. Whether or not this is true in Germany specifically is immaterial because the discussion is about unions, not Germany. You wanted evidence specifically relating to Germany, so I gave you a study proving it’s at least twice as hard to fire union members rather than non unions members, and that it’s also more expensive. You didn’t read any of the evidence and tried to dispute it. Now you’ve given up on that you’re trying to bring the discussion back to the unionization status of teacher in Germany.
"In Germany firing a teacher or cop isn't hard because unions but because they're state employees which makes it hard to fire them at all (though it does happen)."
So no, I haven't given up on anything, no.
I haven't asked for evidence either and I did at least read over the more interesting parts.
> the unionization status of teacher in Germany.
Teachers and cops.
>making it hard to fire bad employees
Well, as far as the paper seems to indicate they make it harder to fire any employee, which naturally also means you have it harder to fire bad employees, though this is a consequence rather than unions specifically making it hard to fire bad employees, at least as far as I can tell from the paper and some thinking.
> It’s also worth noting that this cost isn’t taken by the employer, but by the employee. As they all have collective contracts, the wages fleeced by low productivity employees are simply made up by higher productivity employees.
That's based on the assumption that the total sum of wages is fixed, which is clearly not the case. Higher collective negotiating power means that employees on the whole may get a larger share of the proceeds, leaving less to the employer/owners/investors. Of course unionisation may affect productivity as well, either up or down, so revenue will be affected, too.
There’s no benefit to employers in firing good employees. Firing them is expensive and full of liability and hiring replacements is also very expensive. If you accept that employers are self interested, then they’ll want to keep good employees and get rid of bad ones. Making it hard and costly to fire bad employees doesn’t benefit anybody except bad and unproductive employees.
When you mention cost the underlying assumption is that being able to easily fire employees makes the workforce more efficient. What if it doesn't? What if perceived job stability increases performance? What if decisions to fire someone are often poorly thought out, and forcing employees to consider alternatives first is actually a good thing?
The ability to fire unproductive or toxic employees will undoubtedly improve the productivity of the company. Companies will nearly always attempt to improve poor performance before dismissing employees because it simply costs less. What you're suggesting is that they are forced to retain them, at their own cost, and at the cost of the good employees. Workplaces that retain bad employees not only have to pay for their lack of productivity, but they must also pay in the form of churning out good employees. People know when their colleagues aren't being productive, and they really can't stand carrying them. There are few things that push people out the door faster than bad team mates. Being forced to retain them is the dead sea effect on steroids.
Police officers are state officials/servants (not employees) and can't be let go. New teachers often don't get appointed to that status any more, they're regular employees. They do have a union though (officials/servants are legally unable to unionize and can't go on strikes).
Interesting that teachers are no longer officials, I think I missed that development. Quite sad though then again some teachers are quite ... different in my experience so it might improve things a bit too.
Actually, the trend has reversed: Teachers now get hired as officials again because there are not enough teachers and states are competing for them. Especially the East German states hire teachers as officials since salaries are not as competitive there.
The special status of "Beamter" is officially granted after a fixed time of service. However schools have avoided this by hiring teachers on temporary contracts, usually initially as substitute teachers. The contracts are then renewed as needed so some teachers ended up working for years but never reaching the threshold because they never had a permanent contract.
There's actually an even "better" twist on that done by some private school carriers (Schulträger); they simply hire teachers only for the teaching period (excluding school holidays) and re-hire before holidays end.
Sometimes statements of facts may seem incredibly offensive. Others should be able to mention those in a related discussion, even if offensive, because otherwise the discussion is biased.
I use the word "fact" above because I think it is obvious that if firing is hard, low performers accumulate. I'm happy to elaborate if you wish.
So where do low performers come from and where do they go to when you fire them? What is their flow through the economy? A fired low performer will still look for, and likely find, another job. The assumption there might be that they will learn and try harder, but whether that is the actual effect is much less obvious than you might think.
It's also not obvious at all that churn is good for overall productivity of an economy. Can you show that making firing harder or easier causally affects average productivity (or the productivity distribution) in a specific direction?
> I use the word "fact" above because I think it is obvious that
Then it's not a fact. That you think "if A then B" is obvious just means you take it for granted and betrays your bias.
EDIT: Making it easy to fire people doesn't mean "low performers" won't "accumulate". Case in point: the infamous Microsoft strategy of always firing the bottom 10%, which led to a toxic culture that in turn resulted in talent leaving. Or the apparent necessity for "anti-poaching" agreements between major tech companies.
Oh my, someone is doing a little Milchmädchenrechnung here it seems.
Of course your "fact" isn't completely wrong in the sense that low performers cannot easily be fired if firing is difficult. You ignore, however, all kinds of other effects:
Even high-performers value working at a company, where one is safe from being fired. So you accumulate not only low-performers, but all kinds of performers.
Organizations have a high rate of confusion when they try to separate high-performers from low-performers. I once stumbled in a situation where during a reorg I could observe team leads pull their prefered employees from the pool. This were two team leads, and in the same department so everyone knew each other quite well. It was revealing. For one, some of the colleagues I consider most competent (and performing) were actively ruled out by some team leads. Others, that I felt were not contributing much were fought over. Of course, the two team leads had differing opinions on a couple of employees, which made assignment easy.
Since you mention firing. I rarely see firing happen due to on-average lower performance. I have seen people being layed off (to polish the budget) but it never seemed to be the case that the people layed-off were really low performers. Only a handful of people I have seen being actively pushed out of a company for performance reasons, and usually this was by offering them a compensation package.
Highly overpaid people, that can’t be fired and whose performance cannot be evaluated are not really interested in doing this boring thing called work. You know, that IG Metall’s “Leistungszulage” cannot be cut? Please look here on page 3:
https://www.igmetall-schaeffler.de/uploads/media/LBU_Flyer__...
“Quervergleiche sind nicht zulässig“ <- it’s a hatchery for low performers!!!
I swear, everybody on HN thinks they are a "high performer". In reality, most of us aren't. Unions mostly only cover the lower hierarchies (like IG Metall does) while managers (even middle management) have to negotiate their salary by themselves.
So, if you are a "high performer", you will easily get a management job and get all the money you are able to negotiate.
Many high performers in technical positions will stop being high performers when promoted to a management position. (I know that I would.) See also the Peter Principle.
That is not exactly how it works in my IG Metall-run company. Although the range of jobs bound to unionized salary level, if you are außertariflich (i.e. above the union-negotiated salary level) you have a similar system with steps. Of course at one point in the hierarchy people probably earn heaps of money, but middle management and even senior management still is in a similar system.
For anyone not speaking German: this means performance reviews can't be based on the performance of other employees in that company.
This also cuts both ways: when challenging a performance review you can't argue that your performance was average compared to other employees, you'd have to compare it to the industry average.
> "Leistungszulage" cannot be cut
The union contract guarantees "equal wages for equal work" and defines wages and a range of bonuses (the "Leistungszulage"). The idea is that two people working for different companies doing the same kind of work get the same wage if they're both average performers (compared to the industry as a whole). Additionally it formally defines the criteria by which performance is evaluated and how the resulting scores correspond to increases/decreases in the "Leistungszulage".
The "Leistungszulage" according to that document is set at 14% for average performers. Higher performers get more, low performers get less. This means in practice that +14% is the baseline for a variable part of the regular wage that can be higher or lower depending on the performance.
So unless lnsru's complaint is that 114% of whatever the nominal wage is is "highly overpaid", the argument is entirely moot. To an average worker, that 14% for average performance is not an extra, it's their expected baseline. So anything on top is a reward any anything less a punishment, just as with any other bonus not negotiated by a union.
If anything, this makes it easier for the company to cut low performers' pay (as long as they can prove the low performance if challenged) compared to non-union contracts with no pre-defined variable bonus where the only option would be changing the contract (which is non-trivial, especially when the employee has no reason to make it easy).
I've seen just as many low performers come and go. It seems surprising at first, but there is a form of logic to it: the recruitment process is their only chance of feeling valuable (and who knows, maybe they will even stop being low performers in a different context).
Might not happen as much in companies at the top end of the employer attractiveness pecking order.
When you look at broad measures of national productivity, German labor is very competitive with other nations (including Americans who on average spend hundreds of hours more at the office then Germans do in a given year).
As a German, I'm often sick enough that I don't want to infect other people, but not sick enough to feel particularly bad. Like if I have a runny nose and maybe a sore throat I can still work fairly productively. Since I have the option to work from home basically as effectively as from the office, I'll rather stay home and not spread my illness.
I'm not German but I work in Germany. I work in an two floor office with >50 people; we're 4 people in our room, working more or less on the same projects, as a team, and we all have small children. When one of us is sick, they stay at home until they're not contagious any more. You're not only thinking about the people you're working with, but also on the impact of their health on their family members. This is both because of "common sense" and of a "practical sense": you don't want to infect other people and see them get sick (common sense) and you don't want to have your team mates missing, which sometimes makes your job harder.
I believe this is also related to the culture and the way the employee is protected by the law when sick. In Germany, you're not going to get fired because you were sick for, say, a week. Although I don't know all the details and subtleties of the American Health/Work System, I can say I haven't heard that many great things about it. Which, in my eyes, would confirm/explain why in the GP's example, their American colleagues work even when sick.
Just because you don't feel "particularly bad" doesn't mean that you should be working. When I feel a little sick and go to my doctor to get written off sick for 2 or 3 days, she always insists on giving me a whole week off because infections typically go on for longer than you feel them, and you should rest to give the immune system time to clean out the gutters.
I think you have a very good point, and one the term 'Sitzfleisch' kinda misses. The point is to be actually productive, not just to be seen working long hours - the 'ass in seat' mentality. The former actually actually achieves something, the latter mostly wastes your time, but is a low-effort way to stay in a job where management has a hard time measuring actual progress. It's a pathological way to game a system that can only reward perceived effort.
Can't comment on abroad as I've never been there, but I have to agree on the "in Germany" part - it's more common to buckle down and have maybe one small chatty coffee break and really do work for the rest of the day, but leave on time. People spending hours on social media and then doing more hours is kinda rare. (Said the hypocrite commenting on HN from work...)
I found this very interesting and I think most Americans understand this concept in theory, but just don’t do it in practice.
Also, and not necessarily related to the above, it’s not always cultural. Many people are night-owls and simply cannot sit down and be productive in cognitive tasks in the morning. However, as the working world assumes that only early-birds are worth anything, everyone has to work a morning schedule. This can lead to some of what you describe, where people are in their seats and not doing much, simply because they have to be there, and don’t really get rolling until later in the day.
Of course Facebook is just a huge time suck and can be addictive, so there’s that too.
Experienced the same thing in Austria: I'm from the most western part, which mostly has alemannic and rhaeto-romance influence and the work ethic is "german". You have Sitzfleisch, I go to work/university at 7am and after maybe 5-10mins of relaxing, I get start working/studying. I take a break at midday and a short one in the afternoon and leave around 5.30/6pm
People at the very eastern end of Austria, like Vienna, are far less "German". Their work ethic is much more relaxed, and like user wirrbel pointed out, they stay late to work, simply because they start later and get less work done in the same amount of time.
Related, the book "Dreams of Earth and Sky"
by Freeman Dyson:
"Why did [Oppenheimer] not succeed in scientific research as brilliantly as he succeeded in soldiering and administration? I believe the main reason why he failed was a lack of Sitzfleisch. Sitzfleisch is a German word with no equivalent in English. The literal translation is “Sitflesh.”
"Before employees can work on increasing their productivity, they need to realise that they are underproductive"
This is seriously flawed (and over-generalizing). This basically assumes that the cause of underproductivity lies with the employee. Where are the arguments which are supporting this??
If an employee is unproductive because they are unmotivated, they do have the self-empowerment to say “this project isn’t motivating for me, let’s reassign me/plan for a more motivating project next/go over what the stakeholders need from this”. If they are lacking the skills required to succeed at the project, they can go for training/get more experience from completing a similar, smaller project. And if they are apathetic and feel like they can avoid redundancy by putting in the minimal effort, they can look for a new job.
Sometimes the cause is external, like poor & changing requirements or wishful planning, or a bad personal relationship with coworkers, but even then the employee can feed that back to management. If they choose not to act on this feedback, see the ‘apathy’ option above.
82 comments
[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 97.9 ms ] threadDisappointingly this article skirts around the obvious English translation: “ass-in-seat.”
I've heard that "cu-de-ferro" is a homophobic misinterpretation of CDF ("cu" is a slang for anus, and "cu-de-ferro" is supposed to imply you had sex with the teacher to get said high mark). Never heard of it being used in the ass-in-seat sense.
[Edit] Although to add, in English "Seat-Meat" is more a pejorative whereas in German it's a compliment saying you have _the_ Meat which can endure the implied demands and staying power it takes to handle that seat.
Edit: Ah, yes, that's what's missing. The implication of muscle in your rear for getting the job done.
Great story bbc, very tabloid vulgar after all.
But I'm thinking maybe the idea is along the lines of "put your glutes into it" or "do you have the glutes for that?"
All the other stuff is just meh. I mean, the language analysis isn’t even very good, or in depth, with terrible half-assed English translations.
Basically, don’t waste you time reading this.
I have this Word in my active vocabulary and I'm quite surprised there are germans who don't even know it.
9am: I arrive in the lab at around, sit at my desk and set up my stuff. Unfortunately there was is one around to start the day with a coffee break. 10am: Canadian lab mates arrive, sit at their desks and go on facebook. noon: After spending three hours reading papers, fitting curves to data, etc. I get hungry. I go to lunch with a Dutch person I met in the building a couple of weeks ago. 1.30pm: Back at my desks. Through the towers of take away junk on my lab mates desks, I can see they made some progress on facebook. 3pm: I try to convince some of my labmates to go for the coffee place within the building to have a short communal coffee break. Of course everyone is too busy and cannot socialize, except for the post-doc from india (who does not facebook) 3:45pm: Back at the desk, wrapping up the results of my day, my lab mates are still "working". Next morning, they will tell me they stayed till 8pm in the lab and how increadibly busy they are.
Granted, in between visiting facebook and skipping communal lunch- and coffee breaks, they got some work done and I don't claim I delivered more results in terms of research and learning "output".
Yet I think it summarizes my and the experience of other Germans quite well. In Germany there is much more focus on not working long-hours but spending the hours you work productively. A German workday of an office worker is limited to max. 10h per day by law and my employer follows that rule religiously. Many colleagues contractually have 35 h work weeks and working 40 h requires a permit from the worker's council. If you are sick, you stay at home on sick leave, you join your colleagues again when you are better. American colleagues working here for a year or so as part of their assignment quite often start out to send an email that they are sick and will work from home. If you are sick, why do you work? Your job now is to get better. Quite often, breaks for lunch or coffee are started and ended together. Only few people come into the office with half-liter coffee mugs to consume on their desks.
Obviously there are exceptions to the rule, and office cultures of individual companies may differ. My current company's culture is very German if you arrive before 8am, you might be welcomed with handshakes by your colleagues.
Edit: it’s IG Metall company and you can’t fire people easily. So low performers accumulate over the time. Talents come and go.
This is an incredibly offensive statement against unions and I want to see some proof from you for this. All large corporations in Germany have unions and Germany is still one of the world's economic powerhouses.
>union members are less likely to lose their jobs than non-members. In particular, using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel we can show that roughly 50% of the observed raw differential in individual dismissal rates can be explained by the estimated average partial effect of union membership.
If you read the whole thing you’ll also see that it’s significantly more expensive to fire a union member.
It’s much harder and more expensive to fire union members. The natural result of this is that bad or underperforming employees are more likely to remain in the workforce. Like unions or don’t, but this is one of the costs they impose on the workforce.
Of course, you'll get freeloaders but I'd argue that this is a price worth paying for because the workers benefit a lot and the company can benefit a lot too.
Plus, this isn't the point either, teachers and cops aren't hard to fire because of unions. They are civil servants, they can't negotiate their wages via unions or even strike. They also lack a number of other rights. However, they are also incredibly hard to fire if they didn't commit serious crimes or felonies, otherwise they hold their job for life.
So teachers and cops in germany have little to nothing to do with unions when it comes to being hard to fire.
The study was of dismissal rates, not redundancies. So none of the 50% reduction found in dismissals can be explained by redundancies.
Your speculation about cops and teachers is also irrelevant, as the data very convincingly shows that it’s much harder and more expensive to fire union members.
The paper you linked specifically points out that unions reduce employee turnover, as mentioned because unions do try to work with companies, and as mentioned, try to keep workers employed. This fully explains a lower turnover rate. The paper however doesn't really go deep into that territory so I'm afraid you can't simply say that the explanation is invalid.
Specifically the paper mentions "Our data does not allow us to explicitly test for the channel by which individual trade union membership alters dismissal probabilities." So again, saying the paper finds that redundancy can't explain the reduction is simply incorrect.
>Your speculation about cops and teachers is also irrelevant,
It's not speculation, it's german employment and civil servant law, but thanks anyway. I'm merely raising the point that using teachers and cops are bad examples considering they don't have unions here.
It actually sites union representation in labor court as a key factor:
>German employment protection legislation gives workers the entitlement to contest a dismissal at a labour court. Trade unions generally support their members in such legal conflicts. According to a recent survey, 12% of all union members have been represented by their union in court and almost 50% have obtained legal advice from union staff at least once during their membership. Furthermore, in 2008 for example, the German Trade Union Federation (DGB) represented union members in more than 70,000 proceedings in labour courts, of which about 26,000 were directly related to dismissal conflicts.21 In addition, we know that the probability of obtaining a severance payment will be higher if a labour court is involved
>This fully explains a lower turnover rate.
Again, the paper is not about turnover rate or redundancy as you keep saying, it’s about dismissals:
>The differences in the dismissal rates are striking: the raw dismissal rate of non-members amounts to about 3.6% and is almost three times as high as that of union members in sample I. It is still more than twice the dismissal rate of non-members in sample II, which covers the longer time span.
>saying the paper finds that redundancy can't explain the reduction is simply incorrect.
It seems you didn’t read the paper:
>A key advantage of the SOEP data is that information on the type of job termination is available. Since 1985, respondents have been asked to classify their job termination from a list of items, such as "fired by the employer", "quit on one's own", "time-limited work contract", "apprenticeship had been completed", "entering pre-retirement programme" or "other reasons". The items "fired by the employer" and "quit on one's own" are included in every wave of the SOEP. Some of the other reasons have been included irregularly and additional types of job separations, such as "plant closed", have been added later on. This last item has been sporadically included in questionnaires since 1991. Furthermore, multiple answers were allowed only until 1998. Since we are concerned with whether union membership is associated with a reduced risk of being individually dismissed, we focus on "fired by the employer" as the self-reported reason for a job termination.
The fact is plain as day, union membership makes it harder and more costly to fire bad employees. You can think it’s worth it if you like, but there’s no way to deny it. It’s also worth noting that this cost isn’t taken by the employer, but by the employee. As they all have collective contracts, the wages fleeced by low productivity employees are simply made up by higher productivity employees.
Teachers and cops in germany aren't harder to fire because of unions, therefore bringing them up as examples is not correct.
I agree unions make it harder to fire but it ultimately doesn't matter in the discussion.
"In Germany firing a teacher or cop isn't hard because unions but because they're state employees which makes it hard to fire them at all (though it does happen)."
So no, I haven't given up on anything, no.
I haven't asked for evidence either and I did at least read over the more interesting parts.
> the unionization status of teacher in Germany.
Teachers and cops.
>making it hard to fire bad employees
Well, as far as the paper seems to indicate they make it harder to fire any employee, which naturally also means you have it harder to fire bad employees, though this is a consequence rather than unions specifically making it hard to fire bad employees, at least as far as I can tell from the paper and some thinking.
That's based on the assumption that the total sum of wages is fixed, which is clearly not the case. Higher collective negotiating power means that employees on the whole may get a larger share of the proceeds, leaving less to the employer/owners/investors. Of course unionisation may affect productivity as well, either up or down, so revenue will be affected, too.
I use the word "fact" above because I think it is obvious that if firing is hard, low performers accumulate. I'm happy to elaborate if you wish.
It's also not obvious at all that churn is good for overall productivity of an economy. Can you show that making firing harder or easier causally affects average productivity (or the productivity distribution) in a specific direction?
Then it's not a fact. That you think "if A then B" is obvious just means you take it for granted and betrays your bias.
EDIT: Making it easy to fire people doesn't mean "low performers" won't "accumulate". Case in point: the infamous Microsoft strategy of always firing the bottom 10%, which led to a toxic culture that in turn resulted in talent leaving. Or the apparent necessity for "anti-poaching" agreements between major tech companies.
Of course your "fact" isn't completely wrong in the sense that low performers cannot easily be fired if firing is difficult. You ignore, however, all kinds of other effects:
Even high-performers value working at a company, where one is safe from being fired. So you accumulate not only low-performers, but all kinds of performers.
Organizations have a high rate of confusion when they try to separate high-performers from low-performers. I once stumbled in a situation where during a reorg I could observe team leads pull their prefered employees from the pool. This were two team leads, and in the same department so everyone knew each other quite well. It was revealing. For one, some of the colleagues I consider most competent (and performing) were actively ruled out by some team leads. Others, that I felt were not contributing much were fought over. Of course, the two team leads had differing opinions on a couple of employees, which made assignment easy.
Since you mention firing. I rarely see firing happen due to on-average lower performance. I have seen people being layed off (to polish the budget) but it never seemed to be the case that the people layed-off were really low performers. Only a handful of people I have seen being actively pushed out of a company for performance reasons, and usually this was by offering them a compensation package.
“Quervergleiche sind nicht zulässig“ <- it’s a hatchery for low performers!!!
So, if you are a "high performer", you will easily get a management job and get all the money you are able to negotiate.
For anyone not speaking German: this means performance reviews can't be based on the performance of other employees in that company.
This also cuts both ways: when challenging a performance review you can't argue that your performance was average compared to other employees, you'd have to compare it to the industry average.
> "Leistungszulage" cannot be cut
The union contract guarantees "equal wages for equal work" and defines wages and a range of bonuses (the "Leistungszulage"). The idea is that two people working for different companies doing the same kind of work get the same wage if they're both average performers (compared to the industry as a whole). Additionally it formally defines the criteria by which performance is evaluated and how the resulting scores correspond to increases/decreases in the "Leistungszulage".
The "Leistungszulage" according to that document is set at 14% for average performers. Higher performers get more, low performers get less. This means in practice that +14% is the baseline for a variable part of the regular wage that can be higher or lower depending on the performance.
So unless lnsru's complaint is that 114% of whatever the nominal wage is is "highly overpaid", the argument is entirely moot. To an average worker, that 14% for average performance is not an extra, it's their expected baseline. So anything on top is a reward any anything less a punishment, just as with any other bonus not negotiated by a union.
If anything, this makes it easier for the company to cut low performers' pay (as long as they can prove the low performance if challenged) compared to non-union contracts with no pre-defined variable bonus where the only option would be changing the contract (which is non-trivial, especially when the employee has no reason to make it easy).
I've seen just as many low performers come and go. It seems surprising at first, but there is a form of logic to it: the recruitment process is their only chance of feeling valuable (and who knows, maybe they will even stop being low performers in a different context).
Might not happen as much in companies at the top end of the employer attractiveness pecking order.
I believe this is also related to the culture and the way the employee is protected by the law when sick. In Germany, you're not going to get fired because you were sick for, say, a week. Although I don't know all the details and subtleties of the American Health/Work System, I can say I haven't heard that many great things about it. Which, in my eyes, would confirm/explain why in the GP's example, their American colleagues work even when sick.
Also, and not necessarily related to the above, it’s not always cultural. Many people are night-owls and simply cannot sit down and be productive in cognitive tasks in the morning. However, as the working world assumes that only early-birds are worth anything, everyone has to work a morning schedule. This can lead to some of what you describe, where people are in their seats and not doing much, simply because they have to be there, and don’t really get rolling until later in the day.
Of course Facebook is just a huge time suck and can be addictive, so there’s that too.
- It's common Chess vocabulary. Sometimes you need to work for hours to be able to win a technical position. Sitzfleisch is what it takes to do this.
- The same word (with the same meaning) exists in Dutch: zitvlees.
People at the very eastern end of Austria, like Vienna, are far less "German". Their work ethic is much more relaxed, and like user wirrbel pointed out, they stay late to work, simply because they start later and get less work done in the same amount of time.
Working from 7:30am to 5pm. Cannot understand the German work ethic and the often seen German workaholics.
You work to live, you do not live to work!
I do hear about it a lot specially when talking about my home country and ironically during coffee breaks.
"Why did [Oppenheimer] not succeed in scientific research as brilliantly as he succeeded in soldiering and administration? I believe the main reason why he failed was a lack of Sitzfleisch. Sitzfleisch is a German word with no equivalent in English. The literal translation is “Sitflesh.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/AcademicPhilosophy/comments/1k5ihx/...
https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=5nZoBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA256&lp...
This is seriously flawed (and over-generalizing). This basically assumes that the cause of underproductivity lies with the employee. Where are the arguments which are supporting this??
Sometimes the cause is external, like poor & changing requirements or wishful planning, or a bad personal relationship with coworkers, but even then the employee can feed that back to management. If they choose not to act on this feedback, see the ‘apathy’ option above.
Source is self-management on solo projects.