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| The Copenhagen Waterfront |
The unions claim this would prevent many employees
developing stress, cut absences due to sickness, and help people balance
their work and family lives better, reports DR Nyheder.
“We know from a trial in Sweden that a 30-hour week
helped both employees and the institutions to cope better with the
pressure of work,” said Henriette Brockdorff, the head of BUPL, the
union representing pedagogues in Copenhagen.
As well as the pedagogues, the eight unions represent
health and social assistants, social workers, teachers, office
personnel, kitchen employees and cleaners.
Brockdorff agrees that the present 37-hour week is
already rather short by international standards, but contends that the
pressure on workers these days is extreme due to overly-high
productivity demands.
As well as a shorter working week, the unions also
want workers to be compensated salary-wise. That would mean an increase
in costs of around 20 percent, so the unions would like to see
Copenhagen Municipality setting aside 12 million kroner for the project.
However, the group chair for Socialdemokratiet at Copenhagen Municipality, Lars Weiss, rejects this idea.
“We have a ‘Danish model’ through which agreements
are made on salaries and employment conditions every second year, and
I’m not going to start negotiating on these matters in the run-up to a
local election.”
Weiss also said that calculations made by the
municipality’s finance department suggest that a 30-hour working week
would cost 3.6 billion kroner per annum.
“This would severely impact our service levels. We
would see higher numbers in school classes and kindergartens, and that
would put even more pressure on the employees.”
Note EU-Digest: Is this for real? Municipal workers having too much stress in Denmark and now want to work 30 hrs per week? As Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet: "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark".
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