It is outright hilarious how the same people who complain about a loss of social cohesion in modern German society have overseen one aspect of just this fragmentation: measures to make the labor market "more flexible".
To be fair, Germany introduced a national minimum wage on 1 January 2015, once again lagging behind pretty much any other industrialized country. There are exceptions to the minimum wage, with the result that many of those who really need it won't be getting it until 2017, and this coincides with a national election year.
The projected January 2016 hike of health insurance premiums by 0.2 to 0.3 will be borne exclusively by workers after the current government killed the 50% split payment share of employers and workers. Packaged in a law that allows workers to switch insurers at will in order to "promote competition" between insurers, the K-Landnews and some real experts warned it was a poison pill for two reasons: health insurance costs do not have a history of going down, and the structure of the industry and the medical providers are set up in a way that defies competition.
But compared to a death by a thousand cuts, the labor market measures were more like taking a bulldozer to a kids sand castle.
One of the best examples of this is Deutsche Post (DHL). The post WWII German postal service was a government agency combining telephone, mail operations and a bank. Employees were civil servants, both the privileged lifers "Beamte" and regular white collar government employees - the latter paying payroll taxes and social security deductions, the former not.
Starting in the 1980s, privatization began. New hires could no longer join the privileged ranks of "Beamte" but were unionized employees. Telephone operations were transferred into a separate company that is now Deutsche Telekom. To sweeten the deal, regular citizens were offered discounted shares. It is no coincidence that this model was not limited to Germany, British readers will be familiar with it, too.
The career civil servants, who could not be laid off under the German constitution, continued to enjoy their protected status through an expensive accounting trick. The government continued to be their official employer and the workers were permanently assigned to Telekom, which reimbursed the government.
The same approach was applied to the remaining mail and banking operation Deutsche Post, and the majority of banking operation was sold off to Deutsche Bank.
The civil servant workforce is diminishing as more and more reach retirement age. But, as we wrote in an earlier post, it still came in handy in the latest strike at Deutsche Post.
Not having the right to strike (in return for privileged treatment), Deutsche Post called on "volunteers" among them to alleviate the effects of the strike.
But splitting up the workforce did not stop there.
Post offices in small towns were closed in large numbers, their civil servant employees transferred to offices in nearby bigger towns to make up for worker turnover there.
Small town post offices were then handed over to private contractors. From the outside, you wouldn't know: the store signs are the same, the uniforms are the same.
But they are not employed by Deutsche Post.
This meant, we could go to the Post Office and hand in mail during the latest strike.
We are not unionized, we are not on strike.
What happens to the mail?
The driver, also a subcontractor in official colors, would take the mail to the nearest sorting facility, where it would be stored until the end of the strike.
Up until this point of the narrative, we have civil servants, regular employees, subcontractors, and temp workers.
While the unionized worker at Deutsche Post proper are well paid, the subcontactors and temps make less, just above the minimum wage for the lowest.
Enter the day laborers. They are similar to the UK's zero hour contract workers with one exception: The day laborers of Deutsche Post do not even have a contract.
Yes, sounds like the Home Depot parking lot, doesn't it?
Except that Germans don't have Home Depot and are short of Mexicans.
According to the service workers' union, a full-time equivalent of about 10 000 workers, out of a grand total of 180 000, is currently filled by day laborers.
Day labor is exactly how the scheme operates. You get a call, you go in, you sign a contract for that one day, you work, that's it.
Next time they call, you get another one-day (or shift) contract. Despite the scheme being officially limited to replacing workers who are temporarily unable to work, it is not rare that the worker being "replaced" by a day laborer is actually on the job.
Many day laborers do not dare to go against the policies, but when a case goes to court, it can look like one reported in the article. A worker signed about 200 individual contracts in the year 2014 alone. Given that she had been working under this scheme for seven years, this added up to about 1400 contracts.
So, about 30 years ago, you had a well paid job. Today, some have well paid jobs (management salaries are much higher in the privatized entity), others work as day laborers.
If you ask if service is better and/or cheaper, the answer is no. A Postbank account is expensive as f***. To get your mail forwarded, you pay - it used to be free.
To pick up an undelivered package can add up to a day trip to a green field sorting facility.
But, hey, DHL is a worldwide operator, Deutsche Telekom owns a US mobile phone company, and Deutsche Bank, well, you must have heard of their business practices by now.
Shareholders are happy.
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