In the wake of the global economic slump, Germany may not appear to be an island of the blessed, but it is the industrialized country that has best absorbed the threat of additional mass unemployment. Although companies have been cutting staff for months, the unemployment rate has only risen moderately so far. The solution to the riddle is that, thanks to statutory regulations, this country has the largest low-wage sector in Western Europe, which is continuing to expand during the crisis. The drugstore chain Schlecker has just been allowed to demonstrate how employment can be maintained: A large part of the workforce was handed over to a temporary employment agency and rehired on much worse terms. The freshly minted Minister of Labor questioned whether everything was above board here. This concern is hardly credible because she herself announced greater pressure on Hartz IV recipients a few days earlier. The direction was given by the council of experts of the Federal Government, the so-called economic wise men, who had already suggested in December, just in time for Christmas, a decrease of the standard rate by 30 per cent to 251.30 euro per month. That would be the previous rate for children from 6 to 13 years. In order to implement this, the additional income borders are to be raised. The Hartz IV receivers could then use forced cheap labor to – perhaps! – achieve a starvation income at the same level as the old standard rate. Last week the economic wise man Wolfgang Franz upped the ante by introducing forced community service for the annoyingly superfluous as a supplement. The wisdom apparently consists in the fact that “wages and bread” is understood as the deliberate creation of a caste of serfs of the labor administration and the cutthroat Klitschen. If there is better food in jail than millions of “working poor” can afford, one hopes to have emerged “strengthened from the crisis” – if the world market does not put a spoke in the wisdom-soaked wheel.
Originally published in the print edition of the weekly newspaper Freitag on 01/14/2010
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