That highly depends on what line of business we are talking about. In some "new" jobs like Design or even Programming it may be true. But the meat of the German

That highly depends on what line of business we are talking about. In some "new" jobs like Design or even Programming it may be true. But the meat of the German Economy - the part that is highly influenced by unions - is far away from that. I would assume that, writing this on Hacker News, you are probably in the former line of work and don't see that it's very different for average folks.