Longer working hours have sparked a heated debate in several northern European countries where busi-nesses seek to remain competitive and unions claim jobs are being held hostage.
In France and the Netherlands, the subject has been a political issue for the past few months.
Late last month, Dutch Economy Minister Laurens Jan Brinkhorst raised a storm of protest by claiming a 40-hour work week -- two hours more than is the case now -- should again be the norm to underpin economic growth.
His French counterpart Nicolas Sarkozy holds a similar view, stressing that business should be allowed to increase the number of hours worked to take full advantage of currently favorable economic conditions.
Sarkozy also points to the cost of cutting social charges for companies as part of the deal by which France adopted a 35-hour work week, but faces strong opposition from unions which claim that making people work longer would boost unemployment.
In other countries, the debate was begun by companies that pressed staff to work more hours for the same pay.
Faced with growing competition from Asia and new EU members in eastern Europe, western European groups used the situation to their advantage, amid cries that jobs were being treated like hostages.
In Belgium, the troubled steel group Marichal Ketin has said it will expect staff to work 40 hours per week, instead of 36, for no extra pay.
"Belgian companies must overcome a salary handicap of between eight and 10 percent compared to their neighbors," themselves pressed by lower costs in eastern Europe, said Pieter Timmermans, director general of the Belgian business federation FEB.
Swedish bosses hold a similar position. Sten Jakobson, chairman of ABB Sweden, a unit of the Swiss-Swedish engineering group, and Leif Oestling, head of the heavy truck maker Scania, were the first to argue for more time on the job, despite opposition by unions and the country's Social Democrat government.
"In the new EU countries, people often work between 45 to 50 hours per week. Work is a luxury there, here it is a right," Oestling said recently.
Heads of the Dutch electronics giant Philips and the leading Dutch bank ABN Amro have now picked up from Brinkhorst the battle for a 40-hour week.
In Germany, staff at two sites run by the country's biggest industrial group, Siemens, agreed to work 40 hours a week, five more than previously, for no extra pay.
The group pledged in exchange not to relocate 2,000 jobs to Hungary.
In France, several firms have followed the lead of German tool and auto parts maker Bosch, which convinced workers at a plant near Lyon to work longer in order to prevent a new assembly line being built elsewhere.
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