Chainsaw maker STIHL chief calls for longer hours without extra pay
STIHL's Grandson Demands a 40-Hour Work Week at No Extra Cost as Germany's Industrial Base Slides
Poinews.com – Nikolas Stihl, the third-generation leader of the Waiblingen-based power-tool giant, has laid out an unflinching blueprint for what he sees as Germany's economic survival: workers must put in more hours each week, and employers should not have to pay a premium for the additional time. Speaking publicly about the state of the national economy, the entrepreneur framed the issue not as a labour-rights question but as an existential one for the country's manufacturing capacity and social safety net.
"The German economy has been stuck in crisis mode for years. The prerequisite for overcoming the persistent weakness in growth is better framework conditions."
Stihl's remarks land at a particularly sensitive moment. STIHL, which manufactures chainsaws, trimmers, and other outdoor power equipment, marks its centenary in 2026. Founded by Andreas Stihl in 1926, the company has grown into a global operation generating €5.48 billion in revenue in 2025 and employing 20,246 people across its network. It has held the title of the world's best-selling chainsaw brand continuously since 1971, a record that underscores how deeply the firm is embedded in both rural livelihoods and professional forestry operations worldwide.
A Shrinking Industrial Core
The urgency in Stihl's tone reflects hard data. Over the preceding eight years, he notes, Germany has shed roughly 15 percent of its industrial output. Month after month, approximately 15,000 manufacturing positions vanish. For a company whose identity is bound up with German engineering, that trajectory is not an abstraction; it is a direct threat to the supply chains, supplier ecosystems, and skilled-workforce pipelines on which STIHL depends.
"The situation of the German economy is serious, very serious. In the past eight years we have lost around 15 percent of our industrial output. Month after month Germany is losing around 15,000 industrial jobs."
Stihl warns that the erosion of the industrial base would, if unchecked, cascade into the welfare state itself, eroding the fiscal capacity to fund pensions, healthcare, and social transfers.
External Pressures and Domestic Drag
The entrepreneur does not ignore the external shocks compressing margins: US tariff measures, China's state-directed industrial strategy, and broader geopolitical friction all weigh on exporters and global supply chains. Yet he insists the dominant drag is home-grown. In his accounting, the culprits are an overregulated economy, energy prices that remain structurally elevated, labour costs that have outpaced productivity, a tax burden he considers excessive, and a gradual decline in the quality of education and vocational qualifications feeding the workforce.
Reforms That "Do Not Go Far Enough"
The current federal coalition has announced a package touching statutory health insurance, pension financing, tax architecture, and labour-market rules. Stihl characterises these as reasonable compromises but argues they fall short of what is needed to reverse a structural decline. He cautions that unwinding the measures now would deal a devastating blow to business confidence in political decision-making.
"Now we need to muster all our strength for further reforms that will then generate tangible investment and growth impulses. For that, the governing coalition and the social partners must overcome their own reservations in order to live up to their responsibility towards Germany."
Among the next steps he enumerates: dismantling bureaucratic red tape, expanding the aggregate volume of work performed in the economy, bringing labour costs back into line with productivity, and building stronger incentives for research and development spending.
Administration as Service Provider
A recurring theme in Stihl's remarks is the quality of the state's own operations. He calls for what he terms "high-quality public administration" governed by clear rules, streamlined and swift procedures, proportionate reporting obligations, and digital workflows supported by artificial intelligence. Statutory reporting requirements, in his view, should be abolished as a default and retained only where their necessity is explicitly and individually justified. If authorities reposition themselves as service providers to citizens and firms rather than gatekeepers, he argues, trust in Germany as a business location and in its political institutions will recover.
The Work-Volume Argument
At the centre of Stihl's case is the proposition that Germany's total hours worked must rise. He frames the debate explicitly: it is about preserving prosperity and keeping social benefits at current levels, not about labelling employees lazy.
"If we want to maintain our prosperity and keep social benefits at a high level, the total volume of work in the economy has to increase. A higher volume of work boosts economic output. In that sense, the debate about more work is a debate about preserving our prosperity, and by no means a debate about employees being lazy."
He proposes several levers: incentivising overtime, extending working lives with fair carve-outs for physically demanding roles, drawing more fully on the existing labour pool (including unemployed and part-time workers), and attracting skilled migrants. On sickness absence, he advocates that employer-paid sick pay begin only from the second day and that telephone-in sick notes be abolished.
40 Hours, No Premium
The most pointed element of his intervention targets the upcoming collective-bargaining round. From October 2026, trade unions and employers in the metalworking and electrical sectors are scheduled to open negotiations. Stihl warns that the productivity advantage Germany once enjoyed over key competitors no longer exists to justify the current wage premium.
"We no longer have the productivity advantage over key competitors that used to justify our high labour costs. That is why I advocate increasing weekly working hours to 40, without any pay compensation."
He concedes he is asking a great deal of employees but stresses he does not intend to take anything away from anyone. The objective, he insists, is to remain competitive, keep production on German soil, and safeguard existing jobs. STIHL operates production facilities in eight countries, maintains 40 of its own sales and marketing subsidiaries, and distributes through more than 50,000 specialist dealers worldwide. Non-wage labour costs—pension contributions, health-insurance levies, and long-term-care charges—remain a further structural burden he flags as needing attention.
Stihl also notes that productivity gains from digitalisation and expanding AI deployment will not, in his assessment, offset the negative effects of demographic change. With Germany's working-age population contracting, the arithmetic of output per available worker tightens, making the volume-of-work argument, in his framing, not optional but imperative.
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