It's not about vacation time, Angela

Chancellor Angela Merkel knows that Germans don't like to be the ones to pay the lion's share when it comes to bailing out countries such as Greece, Ireland and Portugal. The German contribution, the largest of all members of the EU, is taking its toll at the polls.

Earlier this month, in an attempt to avoid a series of defeats in her party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), Merkel raised an iron fist, relying on a populist rhetoric and stereotypes at a party meeting. "In countries like Greece, Spain and Portugal, people shouldn't retire before we do in Germany. We must all make the same effort; that's important," Merkel said. "We can't have a single currency if some people have a lot of vacation and others very little."

Angela Merkel: "We must all make the same effort; that's important"

"Germans don't want to pay for the budgetary mistakes of other countries"

Merkel is right, in part. A single monetary area such as the euro zone can't afford major imbalances if it doesn't want to feel serious pressure from the market, which is precisely what is happening now. But the chancellor was way off the mark in both the tone and target of her complaint. The characteristics - and numbers - of the job market in the troubled economies she cited do not back up her argument; quite the contrary. "The decisive factor isn't the number of bank holidays or vacation days," says the professor of labor law from ESADE, Joan Coscubiela, "but the total volume of hours worked."

In that case, the numbers reveal the chancellor's huge mistake. In the workplace accords signed in 2009, the last year for which data are available, Spaniards agreed to work an average of 1,720 hours a year; the Germans, 1,655 hours. The comparison is even more erroneous if you include another country she mentioned. According to data from the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (Eurofound), the Greeks work 1,816 hours a year.

"The chancellor has been making statements like this all the time lately, playing with a set of stereotypes that buys votes in inland Germany," says Antón Costas, a professor of economics at the University of Barcelona. The German economist Jürgen B. Donges also thinks that Merkel's message was intended for her own country: "I think that the chancellor's statements were aimed at German society, not at Spain or other southern countries." But the director of the Institute for Economic Policy of Cologne goes even further: "In Germany, there is a certain malaise about how routine the rescue plans that Ecofin and the European Council are carrying out to face the sovereign debt crisis have become. Many citizens are afraid that sooner or later, they will have to pay for the budgetary infractions committed in other countries and people who have been living beyond their means."

At first glance, labor law can be misleading. It even confirms the stereotype that inspired Merkel's words. Danish, French and German legislation allow 48-hour work weeks, versus the 40-hour week in Spain and Portugal. Something similar occurs with vacation time: the Netherlands and Germany establish a minimum of 20 work days off; Spain, 22. Bank holidays, which usually end up rolling into long weekends, further support the cliché. And in Spain, workers are entitled to 14 bank holidays; Cyprus is the only country in the European Union that has as many. To top it off, next on the list is Portugal.

But collective bargaining agreements change the situation described in legal texts. Laws only reflect workers' minimum rights. Thus, in agreements between employers and employees, Dutch, German and French workers gain more ground than people in Southern European countries: the 20 vacation days that Germans get becomes an average of 30; and the 48-hour French work week shrinks to 35.6. In the end, then, workers in the countries in the middle of Europe are the ones who work the fewest number of hours a year, almost always below the EU average.

Merkel also relied on stereotypes when talking about retirement age. Once again, the statistics contradict the German chancellor. The average retirement age in Portugal (62.6 years) and Spain (62.3) is later than in Germany (62.2). What's more, in this case the current law doesn't leave room for any kind of confusion. In the countries with troubled economies, the current retirement age is 65, as in most of the European Union. And the pension reforms passed in Spain and Germany will eventually raise the retirement age to 67.

"All over Europe, the job market is a state of mind more than a reality," complains Marcos Peña, president of the Economic and Social Council and former secretary-general of employment in the Spanish government. "Why is there this ignorance and disdain when people talk about the job market, and not when they talk about financial markets?"

For his part, Donges admits that in Spain, people work more hours. Yet he immediately points out one of the Achilles' heels of the Spanish job market: "Productivity is much higher in my country [referring to Germany] than in Spain. That is the quid of the matter." Jordi Fabregat, a law professor at ESADE business school, agrees: "Productivity is the decisive factor. In the years leading up to the crisis, Spain did not progress well in this slippery area. Its productivity increased by just over one percent, while the central countries in the Union easily topped two percent."

"There is an inverse relationship between hours worked and productivity," says Florentino Felgueroso, a researcher at the Foundation for the Study of Applied Economics. He has a point. It's precisely in countries such as France and those of Scandinavia, where productivity is increasing the most, that people work the fewest number of hours. "It makes sense," says José Carlos Díez, head economist at Intermoney. "The countries with the lowest productivity have to work more to make up for it."

Yet there is room for nuance. "In Spain, there are some very productive sectors. The problem is not that we work less or worse," says Costas, from the University of Barcelona. To support this argument, he points to the steady growth in Spanish exports, which have become the driving force of a struggling economy. "But there are definitely some things that we could do better, such as streamlining working hours, improving management in the business sphere, making more of a connection between objectives and hours worked," Costas concludes.

Marcos Peña is another who does not believe that a major legal reform would achieve harmonization of the European job market. "There is a tendency to propose big reforms out of total ignorance. We're convinced that regulation is the source of every pathology. So much frivolity is really disturbing." In his view, the harmonization of the European job market will come more through actions and collective bargaining on a European level than through changes in legislation. One example of what Peña is talking about can be seen at the General Motors factories in Europe. It assembles its Opel Corsa at the plant in Figueruelas (Spain) and Einsenach (Germany). At the former, the collective bargaining agreement stipulates 223 working days a year, not counting days of vacation and bank holidays; in the latter, 220. There isn't much of a difference in the number of hours worked per week, either: 38.5 and 38, respectively.