Polityka zatrudnienia w RFN ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem koncepcji skracania czasu pracy

Unemployment constitutes one of the most important problems in highly developed capitalist countries today. And although these countries undertook numerous additional measures in the employment policy in the sixties, the slump in 1974 and 1975 along with the slow-down in the economic growth rate in the years following the crisis and the next crisis in the years 1981—1982 all caused that unemployment assumed proportions unprecedented since the fifties and a long-term character. Ineffectiveness of the state's economic policy and little optimistic long-term forecasts for economic growth led to revival and considerable strengthening of the working- -time shortening concept as a source of struggle with unemployment, which is the concept that first appeared and was applied in practice at the time of the great slump in 1929—1933. This article contains presentation of the above concept and of the discussion around it under way in West Germany. In its introduction, there are briefly presented also other measures employed by the West Gorman employment policy and undertaken in the late sixties, which produced rather meager effects. In the final part оГ the article, it is stated that a common reduction of working time is a measure able to alleviate the unemployment problem. As such it is a solution, which considering the present situation in the labour market of most highly developed countries, should be adopted in spite ol all reservations and doubts expressed with regard to it. Simultaneously, however, it seems quite obvious that it does not offer the slighest chance for permanent liquidation of this highly undesirable negative phenomenon.