One of the effects of the Social Chapter of the Maastricht Treaty is to extend to the rest of the countries in the European Community the crippling costs imposed on German industry by the country’s employment laws, which is why the British government was adamant that it would not sign up for it, and now some of those measures have come under fire from a top German industrialist. Karlheinz Kaske, who retired from Siemens AG yesterday, told the Handelsblatt financial daily that Germans need to work more flexible hours and keep industrial machinery running longer to stay competitive. Kaske, management board chairman since January 1981, said German industry could only compensate for declining competitiveness by keeping machinery running longer hours. We are sawing off the limb we are sitting on, Kaske said, noting that over the last 15 years global markets have become integrated through microelectronics, enabling low-wage countries to install modern machinery to produce quality goods, and suggested that not many people seemed to understand the import of this this development: equipment is fully depreciated over three years and a next generation of machinery can be installed. Kaske said that highly qualified people like engineers, who cost the country millions of marks to educate, should also work flexible hours. Based on salary alone, he said, product engineers cost the same in Germany as in they do US, but as a result of different – shorter – working hours and the cost of social benefits, the average cost of an engineer in the US is only about half as much as in Germany.
