What is working time for you? How do you value looking out of the window, short coffee breaks, going to the toilet, looking at your smartphone because you are waiting for an important private message? How important is it to you to plan (or not plan) your time, work time, free time and life time independently and in a self-determined way? How important do you consider freedom to be for a rich, healthy and meaningful life together?
In my last blog "Enabling instead of burdening - entrepreneurs in concern" I gave you a fairly broad, rather general overview out of concern for current developments. Now, I would like to continue my assessment with a personal example, an example that particularly upsets me personally as an entrepreneur: a point of view beyond ideology and mistrust.
When ideology undermines trust
My company allsafe stands for a way of doing business that combines economy and ecology. Our approach to the circular economy is embedded in a foundation of four values to which we at allsafe are committed in our daily work: Personal responsibility, fairness, innovation and customer orientation.
These values are an expression of an attitude for which freedom and trust are fundamental. Only in a world in which freedom and trust are effective - which can also be an entrepreneurial world - can the values of personal responsibility, fairness, innovation and customer orientation be fully utilized.
And that's why it makes me extremely angry and - compared to my other emotional outbursts - furious that trust and freedom are being undermined by a policy that has become bogged down in ideology.
Ideology versus trust-based working hours
For over 20 years, we at allsafe have practiced trust-based working hours throughout the company, even in production. The employees at allsafe value this freedom and the trust that is part of working life as a result.
The law on working time recording prevents us from doing this. Trust-based working hours are then no longer possible. A corporate culture that we have built up at allsafe for over 20 years is being destroyed. Willfully, I would say. Trust is being undermined and neither I, who hold our corporate culture and values dear, nor my employees like that. The obligation to clock in and out makes them feel controlled and reminds them of a bygone era with dusty time cards. And the resentment they express is unquotable in its strong choice of words.
This legislative initiative also reminds me of the old days: The Stone Age of capitalism, when the image of the evil entrepreneur was born, who exploits workers and sucks them dry. Employees must be protected from him and his position of power. Ask entrepreneurs what they think about their position of power in times of a shortage of skilled workers and a shortage of employees.
Unfortunately, this image of the evil capitalist is still frighteningly fresh in the minds of politicians who, for example, support the law on time recording. And from my point of view, this image is based purely on ideology. It does not correspond to reality. And so the law is not a solution to a real problem. It only exists because ideology and mistrust are in charge. It goes back to the Stone Age of capitalism with full ideological force.
The law exists because freedom and trust are less valued, because there is a prevailing attitude that believes that we can somehow get ahead by imposing rules and regulations and prohibitions. And my impression from conversations is that for one or two business owners, this kind of stifling could be the famous drop in the ocean. Along the lines of: "If everyone says I'm the evil capitalist - then that's what I'll do. Then I'll just play by the rules that are set for me."
The social danger of such an attitude, which amounts to disenfranchising people, which pursues politics in such a way that people do not recognize the meaning in political decision-making processes, a politics in which ideologies call the shots - I have outlined the main features of these dangerous shadows that threaten us in my last blog.
With this article, a look inside the company, I would like to demonstrate how close these shadows have already come to us.
How important is it to you to have the freedom to organize your time, work time, free time and life time?
I realize from my reaction that this is enormously important to me - because such freedom and the trust that goes with it are at the core of my entrepreneurship. the core of my entrepreneurshipand the DNA of my company (just like profit-sharing for all employees and working together as equals). I realize that I don't want to go full throttle back into a world shaped by ideology. As an entrepreneur and a human being with a clear conscience to shape a healthy future for all of us - and that is only possible with freedom and trust.
Detlef Lohmann
