Around 718,000 companies have reported their plans to reduce working hours to Agentur für Arbeit branches as of 20 April 2020. While the local employment agencies continue to receive such reports, the curve is clearly flattening out. This data is based on special evaluations conducted by the Federal Employment Agency and does not represent the official statistics.
Although plans to reduce working hours continue to be reported, the total number of companies has fallen by 7,000 to around 718,000 over the past week. This is because some short-time working arrangements were recorded twice, as some companies had reported their plans to reduce working hours in more than one way, such as by post and online. These duplicates have since been cleaned up during the processing of the reports.
Plans to reduce working hours reported by one in three companies
Short-time working arrangements have been reported by almost one third of companies in Germany that have at least one employee subject to national insurance payments. There are just under 2.2 million companies in Germany that have at least one employee subject to national insurance payments.
BA continues to reshuffle its staff
Over 8,500 BA employees are now processing reported reductions in working hours and paying out short-time working allowance – fourteen times as many as usual.