BRATISLAVA, Oct 29 (Reuters) - Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said on Wednesday he welcomed plans by Opel, the German unit of carmaker General Motors , and German phone giant Deutsche Telekom to cut the working week to save jobs.
"Any way of organising working hours which avoids lay-offs and leads to new hiring is progress," Schroeder told journalists on a visit to the Slovakian capital Bratislava.
Schroeder said he could not judge if this would be the case with the plans of these two firms but noted that carmaker Volkswagen , on whose supervisory board he used to sit, has a good model of a 30-hour working week.
"If others come to a similar imaginative way of organising working time, we can only welcome that," he said.
Sources at Opel, which is in the middle of a turnaround plan aimed at returning it to profit, said on Tuesday that the firm was considering reducing its working week to 30 hours in a bid to cut costs and secure jobs. The firm would not give details.
Deutsche Telekom said on Tuesday it would propose cutting weekly work hours to 34 from 38 and reducing wages by the same proportion for its 100,000 German employees in next year's wage talks, to avoid cutting 10,000 jobs.
Schroeder promised to cut stubbornly high unemployment when he came to office in 1998, but the jobless ranks have continued to swell and the government only expects average unemployment to dip slightly next year to 4.36 million.