FEARFUL Volkswagen workers were on strike in Germany yesterday as their union, IG Metall, sought to negotiate job guarantees and pay rises from an employer determined to cut costs.

Better paid than most of their counterparts at rival car firms, the VW workers have few cards in their hand, seeking to extract more from a company that is losing money on every Volkswagen car sold. The workforce hopes that its union can revive the old-style German labour settlement and strike a deal that will save jobs and provide a small pay rise. Unfortunately, those days are over. Bosses are looking eastwards for solutions in Poland, Hungary and Slovakia and German labour relations, once held up as a model of collaboration, are now a dialogue of the desperate.

What is the future for skilled metal workers in Lower Saxony? Not far away to the east, a woman whose personal experience might provide a clue to the future of work in Germany was yesterday getting off a plane in Berlin. The Queen is in the Federal Republic on a three-day state visit. She has some claim to German ancestry, via Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, but it is her job status, not her family’s historic link to Germany, that is relevant to German workers.

In common with a growing number of Europeans, the Queen has a job but her husband does not. The Duke of Edinburgh is of retirement age but he has spent most of his adult life a non-working spouse.

The Queen’s experience of the world of work is certainly peculiar to her status as monarch but it will ring true among a vast number of British families. Traditional male blue- collar employment is becoming scarce in Western Europe, the jobs shifted to lower-cost zones in Asia and the sites bulldozed to make way for the new jobs in offices, warehouses and retail parks — jobs that are predominantly “female” but also lower paid.

The shrinking of male employment is an old story in Britain but not in Germany. Higher levels of investment, better labour relations and better industrial managers enabled German manufacturers to remain competitive as British firms failed. The business of making things is still important in Germany and the service sector is relatively underdeveloped.

All that is set to change and Germany is on the verge of a transition, unpleasant because jobs will be lost, but also disturbing. The wind from the east will blow apart the dynamics of the traditional middle-class German family.

German women still play a smaller part in the workforce than do British women and the reasons are economic as well as cultural. According to OECD figures, the proportion of women in work in Germany in 2003 was 58 per cent compared with 66 per cent in Britain. However, the trends in both employment rates and employment participation rates (including those women seeking work) reveal the upheaval to come.

In 1990, some 55 per cent of German women of employable age were in work or seeking work, compared with 52 per cent in actual employment. By 2003, the German slump had taken its toll, driving men out of factories and into dole queues and forcing German women into work. The rate of employment among women in Germany in 2003 had risen from 52 per cent to 58 per cent but many more are now seeking work and the female German workforce is now 65 per cent of the population, still shy of Britain’ s 70 per cent but growing fast.

Some might think this was cause for celebration — emancipated German women acquiring economic independence. The real story is less about liberation and more about paying the bills. If a German woman’s domains were once said to be kinder, kuche and kirche, they can now add wage slavery to their list of “oppressors”.

The truth is that Germans are about to become poorer. A typical German middlemanager still assumes his salary will purchase a comfortable lifestyle — a car, a house and a foreign holiday every year. Enough revenue to maintain a family and a non-working wife.Most middle-class Britons long ago abandoned that 1950s vision of domestic bliss for the reality of huge mortgage payments, dual incomes, expensive childcare and the nagging anxiety about male redundancy.

The elderly woman that landed at an airport in Berlin last night has few financial worries but were she minded to do so she could tell a tale or two about the trouble that is the underemployed male.

carl.mortished@thetimes.co.uk

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