Austrian Labour Chamber Rejects 41-Hour Week Push, Citing €2.5bn in Unpaid Overtime
Published on 09/03/2026 at 22:50 | Editorial boerse-global.de
The head of Upper Austria's Chamber of Labour has pushed back hard against industry calls for longer working hours, pointing to fresh figures that show employees across the country already donated billions of euros in unpaid overtime to their employers last year.
Andreas Stangl, president of the Arbeiterkammer Oberösterreich (AK OÖ), used the data to argue that any extension of the standard working week would pile further strain onto a workforce that is already absorbing significant unrecompensed demands on their time.
The dispute traces back to a proposal floated in mid-August 2026 by Kari Ochsner, who leads the Lower Austrian branch of the Federation of Austrian Industries (IV NÖ). Ochsner suggested that companies should either be allowed to introduce a 41-hour working week or, as an alternative, see a number of public holidays scrapped. Industry representatives typically frame such measures as a route to stronger competitiveness and higher output.
But the labour side sees matters differently. According to figures compiled for 2025, Austrian employees clocked a total of 170.1 million hours of overtime and extra work. Of that total, 45.9 million hours went entirely unpaid — a volume of uncompensated labour that the chamber values at €2.5 billion.
That, Stangl argues, is proof that workers are already making a substantial contribution that frequently goes unrewarded. Adding more hours to the regular working week would only deepen that imbalance, he said.
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Rather than lengthening the workweek, the chamber is pressing for measures designed to ease the burden on staff and strengthen their financial position. One central demand concerns overtime premiums for part-time employees, who currently receive a 25 percent supplement. The AK OÖ wants that raised to 50 percent as fairer recognition of their flexibility.
The organisation is also calling for an extension of the statute of limitations on overtime claims, proposing a three-year window so that workers can still assert their entitlements after the fact. In addition, the chamber wants a sixth week of annual leave introduced, available from the very start of a new employment relationship, rather than after years of service.
Taken together, the demands signal a clear stance: no further compression of working time, and a stronger push for relief instead.
