← Back to Life & Law

Life & Law · Module 7 of 7

Everyday labour law

Overtime, extra days, a sick child, a quick talk in the corridor: these questions come straight from our accompaniment work in Leipzig. Here you'll find the rules in plain words, with the matching sections of the law and seven cases to think along.

The seven modules

  1. Everyday contracts (BGB)Online
  2. Employment contracts and labour lawOnline
  3. Tenancy agreements and tenancy lawOnline
  4. Family and custodyOnline
  5. Jobcenter, objections and disabilityOnline
  6. Traffic and insuranceOnline
  7. Everyday labour lawYou are here

Module 7: Everyday labour law

Eight cards on working hours, overtime and deadlines – so you keep track of your hours and your rights. Each card gives you the German legal term for contracts, emails and conversations.

1Your agreed working hours apply

How many hours you work and on which days is set out in your employment contract or in the written statement of your working conditions. That agreement applies. A spoken request to come in more often doesn't change the contract automatically – not even if you've helped out a few times. If you want to work more hours permanently, that belongs in a written change to your contract.

German term: Vereinbarte ArbeitszeitLaw: § 611a BGB · § 2 NachwG

2When overtime can be ordered

Your employer may only order overtime if your employment contract, a collective agreement or a works agreement provides for it – or in a genuine emergency. Otherwise extra work is voluntary. The Working Hours Act also sets limits: no more than ten hours a day, eight on average.

German term: Überstunden, MehrarbeitLaw: § 106 GewO · § 3 ArbZG

3Overtime is paid or balanced with time off

If your employer ordered, approved or tolerated overtime, you get it paid or balanced with time off. A clause such as „All overtime is covered by your salary“ is invalid if it doesn't name an upper limit. Overtime is work you have already done – it has nothing to do with your annual leave.

German term: Überstundenvergütung, FreizeitausgleichLaw: § 612 BGB · § 307 BGB

4Write down your working hours

Employers must record their staff's working hours (Federal Labour Court, 13 September 2022). Keep your own list anyway: date, start, finish, breaks and who asked for the extra work. In a dispute you have to prove your overtime – your notes are the basis for that.

German term: ArbeitszeiterfassungLaw: § 3 ArbSchG · § 16 ArbZG

5Deadline clause in your contract

Many employment contracts contain a clause under which claims lapse if you don't assert them within a deadline. According to the Federal Labour Court, this deadline must be at least three months, and the most your employer can demand is text form – an email is enough. Search your contract for the words „Ausschlussfrist“ or „verfallen“.

German term: Ausschlussfrist, VerfallklauselLaw: § 307 BGB · § 309 Nr. 13 BGB

6Claims expire after three years

If there's no deadline clause, claims for pay and overtime expire after three years, counted from the end of the year in which they arose. Overtime from September 2026 therefore only expires at the end of 2029. It doesn't lapse on 31 December – unlike holiday, which follows its own rules in the Federal Holidays Act.

German term: Regelmäßige VerjährungLaw: §§ 195, 199 BGB

7Agree on your time off in lieu

When you take your overtime off is decided by your employer – fairly, taking your wishes into account. Simply staying at home counts as unexcused absence and can lead to a formal warning or even dismissal. Suggest specific days by email and get them confirmed.

German term: Freizeitausgleich, SelbstbeurlaubungLaw: § 106 GewO · § 626 BGB

8When your child is ill

If your child is under twelve and ill, or needs care after an operation, you may stay at home with a doctor's certificate. People with statutory health insurance get child sickness benefit from their health insurer for a limited number of days a year. Depending on the contract, your employer keeps paying your wages for a short time (§ 616 BGB), but many contracts rule this out.

German term: KinderkrankengeldLaw: § 45 SGB V · § 616 BGB

Quiz: test your knowledge

Seven anonymised cases from our accompaniment work. Tap an answer – then you'll see the explanation with the matching section of the law.

  1. Question 1Your employment contract says 30 hours a week, spread over Monday to Thursday (7.5 hours each). Your boss asks you verbally to come in on Fridays too. Are you automatically obliged to work every Friday?

  2. Question 2Under your 30-hour contract, Friday is your day off. You wanted to help out voluntarily but have to cancel because your child is having an operation. On Saturday you still help out for two hours at an important appointment. On Monday you're told you should have worked all of Saturday to „make up“ for Friday. Is that right?

  3. Question 3At your employer's request, you've built up around 90 hours of overtime in three months. Your contract says untaken holiday lapses on 31 December. Does that mean your 90 hours of overtime lapse on New Year's Eve too?

  4. Question 4Even though overtime doesn't lapse on New Year's Eve: why still shouldn't you leave your overtime from September agreed only verbally for months?

  5. Question 5You don't want a row with your boss, but you want to make sure your 90 hours of overtime aren't lost. What's the smartest step?

  6. Question 6You have 90 hours of overtime on your account and want to take days off for it in December or January. Can you simply stay in bed tomorrow morning and say: „I'm taking overtime off today“?

  7. Question 7Your boss catches you in the corridor and, in fast German, starts accusing you of something about your contract and demands that you sign something on the spot that you don't fully understand. How may you react?

What you can do now

  • Note your start, finish, breaks and any extra work you were asked to do every working day, for example in your phone's calendar.
  • Search your employment contract for the words „Ausschlussfrist“ or „verfallen“ and put the deadline in your calendar.
  • Report your overtime once a month in a friendly email, with a list of hours and a request for a short confirmation.
  • Suggest days off in lieu by email in advance and keep the confirmation.
  • When you're handed a document to sign, ask for time to think, take it home and have it checked in peace.

Personal advice

Trade union (Gewerkschaft): members get legal advice and legal representation all the way to the labour court. You'll find an overview of the unions at the German Trade Union Confederation (dgb.de, in German).

Legal application office at the labour court (Rechtsantragstelle): there you can have a claim against dismissal or for unpaid wages recorded free of charge. At first instance you can represent yourself.

Faire Integration: advice for migrants and refugees on pay, working hours, dismissal and accommodation – free of charge and in many languages (faire-integration.de).

Sources

This guide gives you general orientation on German law. For your specific case, an advice centre or a lawyer is the right place to go.

Dear friends from Ukraine, you’ve been with us for several years now, and it’s good that you’re here! Because you bring your experience with you – and because I, in turn, know from experience that Ukrainian people have many qualities we in Germany can benefit from.

Good that you’re here. We want to learn from you too, and you should know that you are valued as members of our society just as much as everyone else. It’s important that we also learn from newcomers, and above all from people from other so-called cultures and societies.

What Ukraine built without a “big sister”

In a short time, Ukraine managed to move forward, including in tackling corruption. Of course not everything has been achieved yet – that’s only logical. But I felt it myself, year after year: when I travelled to Ukraine in the summer with my partner at the time, who came from Kyiv, I noticed that things were moving forward. As a German, life in Kyiv kept getting easier for me – and not only for me.

I saw that the people there had built something, and they did it entirely without the help of a “big sister”. We Germans of course had West Germany, and that made it much easier for us to become part of the Federal Republic. Ukraine didn’t have that kind of big support. That’s why I believe that, all in all, Ukraine has achieved a lot.

I met so many people there who think positively. That always inspired me: that despite huge challenges, people didn’t constantly grumble and get worked up, but rolled up their sleeves. And that they were always one big family, organising themselves within the family network, talking things through there and making decisions – very democratically and, above all, very dynamically. I was always fascinated by that unbridled strength: that will to live, that ability to survive and that creativity. They developed a great many new things, above all in IT – in the Kharkiv hub, for example, but not only there – and that IT sector in turn pushed other sectors forward.

Why a million people are here – and what connects us

And maybe at this point many of my fellow Germans will say, when they read this: “Well, if everything is so great in Ukraine, why are those million people still here?”

My answer: because a war of aggression is raging there – and because we would do exactly the same! We GDR citizens, too, used every possible way back then to get our hands on the D-Mark, to get a better life, to get the freedom to travel and to live in freedom. And that’s exactly what Ukrainians are doing now.

It’s not about saying Ukrainians are better than Germans. We are something different, but a great deal connects us: we all love our children. We all want to be happy. We all want harmony, we want health, we want joy. That connects us, because we are all human, because we are all Homo sapiens.

This is no rose-tinted utopia – rather, let’s focus on what we have in common and start from there. And then look for solutions together.

Every human being should have the right to a fulfilled life. That includes having the basic needs of Maslow’s hierarchy met. And among the basic preconditions I count respect for human rights as defined by the UN (and, for refugees, the Geneva Refugee Convention), access to modern education that prepares you for life instead of just testing theoretical knowledge, healthcare, security and care in old age, mobility, and things like food and water. We live in a time in which this is definitely possible, technologically and economically. If it isn’t delivered, then it’s political will that stands in the way. And there aren’t that many places and countries in the world where these fundamentals are guaranteed.

An honest look at your situation today

To give you orientation and a way to navigate, we need to place where we stand as a society and politically. From my point of view, your situation has become harder. There are a few positive factors, but there are negative ones too. I see many people from Ukraine who are increasingly struggling with the challenges here. And the reason is not that you are weak as individuals or as people! It has nothing to do with you personally – these are decisions our society has made:

  1. The step backwards in basic income support: When you arrived in 2022, we had a different government, one that put more weight on public services and invested more in the long term when it came to basic income support (called Bürgergeld from 2023). Back then it made life easier for the people at the very bottom! Bürgergeld was definitely better for everyone, and of course for the refugees too, who received it straight away – which I thought was right and still do. That has now been rolled back by the current Merz government. On top of that, the geopolitical situation has worsened, and that in turn means there are fewer jobs that people from Ukraine can do.
  2. The language barrier in Germany: Germany is a society in which language skills are an absolute must! I believe there are other societies where language skills don’t play such a big role. Of course comparisons are always difficult, but I believe many Ukrainian refugees thought: I speak some English, so I’ll get by in Germany. That is not the case at all. In Germany, English plays practically no role as a common language – in everyday life it basically doesn’t exist. You can hardly communicate with anyone in English. You have to know German and prove it at a certain level. Most Ukrainian refugees fall at the hurdle of German, because they imagined learning the language differently, above all easier – because they had never been in a situation where they had to acquire a second language. My impression and my experience is that 95 percent of the roughly one million refugees from Ukraine are Russian speakers and hardly speak Ukrainian with each other at home. So they grew up speaking Russian and not bilingual. The language barrier, I believe, is still the biggest challenge.
  3. Dead-end cheap jobs and German paper bureaucracy: And of course these cheap jobs: in Leipzig we had Momox, Mytheresa, DHL, Amazon, a bit of REWE too, retail and cleaning. That’s over – those jobs are taken. Maybe McDonald’s is still left, but none of these are jobs with a future. Even if they were willing to settle for these jobs, they wouldn’t get very far with them. Many Ukrainian refugees had a relatively high standard of living at home, were used to certain things and belonged to the upper class of society. Many of them were self-employed and thought they could make that self-employment work even better here. That’s not the case here at all. Germany is very bureaucratic, very paper-based, and has a very complex, by now also very outdated system that is hard to see through. And there they are, caught – they’re stuck in this trap. Going home to Ukraine is hardly an option for them, because nobody is waiting for them there. Many locals say: “What were you doing in the West for five years? You didn’t support us. You betrayed us. You don’t speak Ukrainian. You’re not a Ukrainian. Stay in your Germany.”

This is the picture from my point of view, and I could be wrong.

No bending, no hiding: our shared lab in Leipzig

This new series is called “Arriving in Germany”. It doesn’t necessarily need “Ukraine” on the label, because of course it affects people from other countries in a similar way. The Arabic-speaking community is affected in a very similar way, although the situation there is probably even harder. That’s why we’re focusing on Ukrainian refugees first.

In our SafeSpace and in our Stories on UNO.TEAM, we share experiences, and we’re shaping this space as an open lab – step by step, with concrete everyday questions: how do I communicate neutrally, not negatively, with the Jobcenter? How do I get along with my landlord? To do this, we also link this exchange directly to our interactive law quizzes under Life & Law.

At its heart, this is about exchange, and about having the courage to speak the way we really think and about what really moves us. Not bending ourselves out of shape, not bowing, not hiding and not putting on an act – and not sugar-coating anything either. When we see challenges, we have to name them first. That is the first important step.

And we can change this if we start by joining forces on a small scale. One person is enough to begin with – someone who reads this now and writes to me. If one person gets in touch with me, the first step is taken, and then more people will follow! And then the whole thing gets rolling.

You’re warmly welcome to join in and can contact me any time. We’re building something now, above all in Leipzig – that’s where we’re starting.

🤖 Reflection quiz on Thought #460

Three questions to keep thinking. Choose an answer – you will then get an explanation and a prompt for self-reflection.

  1. What fascinated Torsten most on his summer trips to Kyiv and in his exchange with people from Ukraine?
    A) That the country received massive reconstruction aid from a “big sister” like West Germany.
    B) The unbridled vitality, the democratic decision-making within the family network and the creativity with which a strong IT sector (as in the Kharkiv hub) grew without outside help.
    C) That Ukraine had no economic problems whatsoever.
    D) That only big corporations run the economy there.
  2. According to the post, why are many well-educated or formerly self-employed refugees from Ukraine caught in a “trap” in Germany?
    A) Because they lack any professional qualification or work experience.
    B) Because in Germany you can easily get through offices and working life with English alone.
    C) Because high German-language hurdles, a paper-based, bureaucratic system and basic income support that is stricter today than in 2022 meet people who were used to uncomplicated self-employment in Ukraine.
    D) Because registering a business is prohibited by law in Germany.
  3. What approach is UNO.TEAM taking with the new series “Arriving in Germany” in Leipzig?
    A) An open lab at eye level, where everyday questions (Jobcenter, landlord, everyday law, self-employment) are named without sugar-coating and tackled together, step by step.
    B) A pure language course for the C2 certificate exam.
    C) A closed advice office for dealing with authorities, with fixed contracts.
    D) A pure news portal about Ukrainian domestic politics.
Arriving in Germany
Ukraine
Refugees
Leipzig
Basic income support
Language
Bureaucracy
SafeSpace