SOMETHING IS BREWING

For a long time now, employees in the German brewing industry have been pushing their employers for relief from their increasingly intense workload. Now, brewers in the north are pulling the ripcord: they have terminated their collective bargaining agreement with the NGG union and want to enforce the 35-hour week for themselves.

A stone's throw from the Flensburg Fjord, brewers tap into a groundwater stream from Scandinavia 200 metres below the surface and use it to brew Flens – the traditional North German beer that gives a friendly welcome to anyone who wants to drink it: Plop goes the swing top as it opens the way to liquid bread.

Christoph Matthiesen can still remember the days when he and his colleagues had to crawl into the aluminium tanks in the storage cellar to scrub them clean with acidic and alkaline cleaning agents. ‘Of course, we would then drink a beer to get rid of the smell in our noses and reward ourselves for the hard work,’ says the works council chairman of the northernmost brewery in the country. ‘After all, liquid bread also helped to compensate for the calorie loss.’

Stress on top of stress

Those days are long gone – brewers no longer need beer at work to compensate for calorie loss, nor do they need muscles, as the hard physical strain has almost disappeared. Instead, another strain has long since become part of everyday life, and even beer can't help with that: the stress of not making mistakes under pressure.

In Flensburg, too, screens and the processors behind them have long dictated the everyday work of brewers. Down here in the brewery cellar, instead of sitting in front of the old display boards, colleagues sit in front of a row of screens and control the fully automated production process day in, day out with a click of the mouse, sometimes all on their own: in the morning, at lunchtime, in the evening, at night – 24 hours a day in a three-shift system, five days a week. ‘Our colleagues always have to keep an eye on several processes at once. That's challenging because they're not allowed to make any mistakes,’ says Christoph during a tour of the brewery. ‘Decades of shift work make many people ill.’

Faster and faster, more and more effective

The constant pressure has increased steadily in recent years. The software controls the workflows with ever greater precision, the processes run faster and faster, more and more tasks are added, and the managers in the brewing companies control the utilisation of their various locations in the country with ever greater accuracy. Because even if North German lighthouses or Bavarian lederhosen give beer drinkers the illusion of regional identity and local production in advertising, the beer is brewed and bottled where it is cheapest for the large corporations with their many beer brands.

They don't have the competition between different locations in the country that they do here, just before Denmark. ‘Every Flens comes from Flensburg,’ says Christoph. The pop when opening a Flens in its special bottle makes it technically difficult to have the family-run Flensburg brewery Emil Petersen's production done at other brewery locations. ‘Our bottle and the pop are a central part of our brand,’ says Christoph. This goes so far that even the coastal lemonade, which they have launched on the market as cola or orange soda, is sold in the same swing-top bottle.

Strong increase in sales

With their lemonades and non-alcoholic beverages, breweries are successfully countering declining beer sales: they have been able to increase their sales significantly. However, most employers in the brewery industry are reluctant to ease the burden on their production employees. ‘The mood among colleagues is poor, mainly because of the lack of appreciation for the work they do,’ says Christoph.

Now 60 years old, he learned a trade in the mid-1980s and quickly realised that he would earn just as much as a journeyman in his first month as an apprentice in brewing as he would in his first apprenticeship. Since then, he has worked at the Flensburg brewery and, like his father and grandfather, has joined a trade union. Many brewers have remained loyal to their company throughout their lives and are just as loyal in their union membership in the NGG. As a result, they earn more than others in the food industry, are more confident in dealing with their employers – and the brewers of northern Germany now have the confidence to demand a 35-hour week – the effective 35-hour week.

35 hours: effective

To this end, the North German bargaining committees for brewers have decided to negotiate a new framework collective agreement with employers. This does not regulate pay, but rather holiday entitlement, bonuses and training, as well as working hours. On the face of it, nothing would change for brewers in terms of weekly working hours – they would continue to work in the shift systems customary in the various breweries. However, instead of a 37-hour working week – the current standard in Bremen, Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein – or a 39-hour working week as in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, they want to implement an effective 35-hour week. The difference between today's two or four extra hours worked would automatically be credited to the long-term working time account and saved up for what employees have been longing for for so many years: finally more consecutive holidays, a sabbatical or time to care for relatives.

So it's not about less work for the same money – it's about more relief for the same work. ‘Ultimately, it's about reducing stress a little so that we can work more calmly and retire in good health,’ says Christoph. ‘Because that's what our young colleagues are already asking themselves: how can I retire in good health?’