According to the draft law, the statutory minimum wage is to rise to twelve euros per hour as of October 1st.
(Photo: dpa)
Berlin The Confederation of German Employers’ Associations (BDA) hopes that the parliamentary procedure will result in changes to the draft law raising the minimum wage to twelve euros. They are counting on the federal government being “capable of learning and understanding” and that the “most fundamental attack on collective bargaining autonomy” will at least be weakened, said BDA general manager Steffen Kampeter on Monday when presenting a legal opinion on the planned law.
According to Minister of Labor Hubertus Heil (SPD), the Federal Cabinet should decide on the draft law from his house as early as this Wednesday. Accordingly, the statutory minimum wage is to be raised to twelve euros per hour on October 1st. After that, the Minimum Wage Commission, made up of employer and employee representatives, should decide again. The intervention of the legislature would undermine more than 100 existing collective agreements.
The Göttingen international law expert Frank Schorkopf, from whom the BDA had commissioned an expert opinion, considers the planned law to be constitutionally questionable for several reasons. The Minimum Wage Commission makes its adjustment decision for two years. According to their latest decision, the gross minimum wage will rise from the current EUR 9.82 per hour to EUR 10.45 from July.
Companies and collective bargaining parties have adjusted to the fact that this value will then apply until the end of the year. According to Schorkopf, the government’s further increase in October violates the principle of trust.
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The legislature can certainly intervene, but only if this is necessary, proportionate and appropriate. However, Heil’s ministry did not comment at all on aspects of proportionality in the draft bill. In addition, politicians cannot easily reverse a system decision once it has been made – namely that the independent minimum wage commission decides on the adjustment of the minimum wage limit.
>> What Hubertus Heil is planning: This is in the draft bill for the Minimum Wage Act
And finally, the Ministry of Labor makes it clear in the justification for the law that it actually wants a living wage, i.e. a poverty-proof minimum wage. However, the independent minimum wage commission will not be able to meet this requirement because it has a different task. The assurance of the legislature that politicians only want to intervene once is not very credible if a living wage is postulated at the same time.
Fundamental attack on collective bargaining autonomy.
(Photo: Michael Huebner)
Kampeter criticized the fact that Minister of Labor Heil wanted to remove the boundary between wage policy and state support. The BDA expects that the draft law will be amended, for example by later entry into force or transitional periods for existing collective agreements. Trust in the “Struck Law”, according to which no draft law leaves the Bundestag in the same way it entered.
In addition, the employers’ association has also commissioned an expert opinion on labor law, which is also intended to be used to convince people. However, there are no plans to go before the Federal Constitutional Court in the next few days. In Karlsruhe, the BDA would not be able to sue anyway, only those parties to the collective bargaining agreement directly affected by interventions in collective bargaining autonomy, for example an employers’ association that concludes collective bargaining agreements.
Strict rules for digital timekeeping are probably off the table
Together with the minimum wage, the federal government also wants to raise the mini-job limit from 450 euros to 520 euros. There had been a lot of trouble here because Heil wanted to impose daily digital recording of working hours in eleven sectors mentioned in the law to combat undeclared work. This would have affected the construction industry, the building cleaning trade or the hospitality industry, for example.
As the Handelsblatt learned from association circles, only one test order is to be anchored in the law, which deals with the question of whether electronic working time recording is generally possible to check compliance with the provisions of the Working Hours Act and the statutory minimum wage. This would mean that additional recording of tariff surcharges, for example, is off the table for the time being.
More: These are the four consequences of the largest salary increase in German history