By Noelle Knox
USA Today

BRUSSELS - Ah, summer in Europe. It's when everyone takes advantage of their 35-hour workweeks and seven weeks of vacation and holidays, and everything slows down or shuts down. Meanwhile, Americans toil in envy.

But in less time than it takes to get a tan, four powerful European companies have demanded their employees work longer hours. The trend is expected to spread as Western European companies strive to boost productivity and as employees try to keep their jobs from moving to Eastern Europe and beyond.

"At some point, workers have got to choose. They can't have high pay and long holidays," says Richard Jackman, a professor at the London School of Economics.

The tipping point, Jackman says, happened May 1, when the European Union, a trade and regulatory alliance of 15 Western European counties, added 10 members, including Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. New immigration restrictions are designed to prevent a flood of cheap labor, but companies in the West are now threatening to move their production east.

Wages in the Czech Republic, for example, are 40 percent less than in France, and employees work five more hours a week and get 11/2 fewer weeks of vacation.

Voting for longer hours

That's why workers at a Robert Bosch car parts factory in France voted almost unanimously last week to work an extra hour a week without pay, to stop the car components company from moving the work to the Czech Republic. The French finance minister is also pushing to relax the law, which took effect in 2000, that mandates a 35-hour workweek. The law's intent was to encourage employers to add workers.

The trend is even stronger in Germany.

Among the converts:

• 4,000 employees at two Siemens plants ended a bitter dispute in June and agreed to work 40 hours a week, instead of 35, for no extra money. The engineering giant had threatened to move production of its phones from a plant in northern Germany to Hungary.

• Employees at Thomas Cook agreed last week to postpone a pay increase and accept a 40-hour workweek, up from 381/2, in an effort to put the tourism company back in the black.

• DaimlerChrysler struck a deal that lengthens the workweek for research and development staff from 35 to 40 hours; employees at its Sindelfingen, Germany, plant, which makes the Mercedes C-class car, wilm work 39 hours. The company had threatened to move the production to South Africa. Top managers will take a 10 percent pay cut.

There is little doubt the pact will influence union bargaining for thousands of Volkswagen employees later this year.

"I am certain that after DaimlerChrysler, the negotiations at Volkswagen over cost cuts and job security will lead to a successful agreement," German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said in a statemejt from his vacation villa in Italy.

Europe's economic recovery, which started at the end of 2003, is again trailing the United States. For the 12 Western European countries that use the euro currency (including Germany, France and Spain), gross domestic product grew at a 0.6 percent annual rate between January and March, compared with an annualized 3.9 percent in the United States. The results for the April-June quarter, which are not available yet, are expected to show a similar gap.

The No. 1 reason Europe's growth lags that of the United States might be that Europeans spend more time on the beach and less at their desks.