An Italian manufacturer told me recently that people in Romania take employment without hesitation. Yes, they would even be happy just to find a job. In Italy however, people are more reserved towards job offers, because the time they have allotted themselves to work is assessed rather scantily. The importance of recreational time gets in the way of Romanian conduct.

No, the people are not afraid of having to work; they just do not have enough time for it. It is my opinion that this is a much bigger problem than the high level of labor costs. Germans have demonstrated to their neighbors how this works: Trade unions and companies have made a quiet yet, in its long-term effects, fatal deal: The trade unions received a commitment in all wage negotiations, year for year, for more leisure time for their members than the businesses could actually take responsibility for. In return, the trade unions criticized the migration of production only very cautiously.

With the abundance of leisure time, people have built private new worlds, where work in the conventional meaning of the word is only of subordinate relevance.

Industry assessed the paradigm shift as a sign of reluctance to work. Because many things are reflected in numbers as increase in labor costs, they drew their conclusions; with a relocation of production abroad, to the countries of the Second and Third World.

A displaced, stagnant or regressive production of consumer goods leads, in a country or an economic region, in the end, to less consumption; the result is increased or unmanageable unemployment. And this is exactly where Germans arrived first. The problem started in Germany and took its course. Now it seems to have gripped Italy, a country which owes its economic rise of the past decades to the production of consumer goods. But even countries such as France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal and Ireland rapidly lose production to China, Vietnam, Romania, the Ukraine and other countries with people to whom work still matters.

What can we do to avoid that a region such as Western Europe floats in a huge range of products and leisure time, but suffers from a lack of purchasing power because of a lack of income?

We have to put work back on the map.

We must make it plain that only work gives meaning to recreational time. And that excessive leisure time leads to idleness; makes ill.

A few tenths of a point less in labor costs are not going to bring the deciding turnaround.

Societies of advanced industrial countries have to position themselves anew if they want to stay the First World and, if they want to live up to their liability of improvement of the living conditions of people in the Second and Third Worlds.

And in our business strategies, the working person, the employee with all his/her skills, capabilities and knowledge, has to take up an announced position which is going to reveal his/her value. The invalidation of job performance has to come to an end. The value of work has to be equal to the value and importance of the investors.

*Under German Illness, we understand leisure time interrupted by work.