WeeklyWorker

15.09.2004

Mobilising against Hartz IV in Germany

Over the last couple of months, up to 130,000 people have taken part in the so-called Montagsdemonstrationen (Monday demonstrations) against a new law attacking unemployment benefits. Could these provide the spark for the long overdue foundation of a real working class party? Tina Becker reports

Taking effect from January 1 2005, the new law (dubbed ‘Hartz IV’ after the bureaucrat who drafted it) will mark a dramatic worsening for all those out of work for 12 months or longer. This will affect many families: the unemployment rate in Germany as a whole has been at 12% for months now, with 9.6% without a job in the west, while in the former German Democratic Republic the figure is as high as one in five.

Hartz IV is part of the far wider reaching ‘reform package’, Agenda 2010, of the Social Democratic government. This has already seen massive attacks on pension rights, social services and drastic cuts in the health services: just like in Britain, the patient now has to pay for more and more services. These attacks on the German working class are part and parcel of the drive of the European bourgeoisie to bring down living standards and reduce working conditions in the interests of profitability.

For the first year of their unemployment, workers in Germany receive a fixed percentage of their average income for the previous year - 60% of what they earned after deduction of taxes. However, after 12 months, this will get cut down to a measly €345 (£236) per month in the west and €331 (£226) in the east. Also, the so-called ‘long-term unemployed’ will have to accept any job offered to them - no matter if it is on the other side of the country, has no connection to their usual profession or means accepting a wage just a few euros above unemployment benefit level. Only those with dependent family members might be excused from moving.

As Germany is one of the seven countries in the European Union without a statutory minimum wage, Hartz IV could result in salaries being massively driven down across the board. There will be hundreds of thousands of new so-called ‘one-euro jobs’, where the worker literally earns one euro (68p) per hour on top of benefit. Again, the ‘long-term unemployed’ will have to accept such jobs, otherwise they risk seeing their benefits cut. Frank-Jürgen Weise, head of the national unemployed agency (Bundesagentur für Arbeit), estimates that there will be “at least 300,000-400,000” of those one-euro jobs created - if anything, this looks like a conservative estimate (Bild Zeitung September 11).

So an unemployed engineering worker from Hamburg could be ordered to move to Bavaria to cut trees - for benefit plus one euro an hour. However, such ‘employment’ comes without sickness pay or accident cover and carries with it no right to strike or set up a union committee. One-euro workers can be sacked at a minute’s notice.

Naturally, this is great for business: bosses can offer the most shitty jobs and know that somebody will have to accept it. And, of course, this is a real threat to all those workers who still have a ‘normal’ job - employers know they can get somebody to do the same work for a fraction of the union rate.

Up to its neck in all of this alongside the governing SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) is its coalition partner in crime, the Green Party. The Greens fully support Agenda 2010. Foreign minister Joschka Fischer - one of those Greens with a relatively radical political past on the German left - has defended the new attack: “The only political argument I hear against Hartz IV is that everything should stay the way it is. I would be in favour of that if we could pay for it. But we cannot pay for it. If we just sat back - like the government of Helmut Kohl did for fear of losing power - Germany would lose its competitiveness, unemployment would rise dramatically and social security would mushroom” (Berliner Tagesspiegel August 26). Having supported the deployment of German troops in Afghanistan, the Greens are not even attempting any more to appear leftwing.

While the demonstrations against Hartz IV indicate an increase in working class militancy, protests alone cannot effectively challenge the neoliberal agenda. Real leadership is needed, but that is easier said than done in today’s Germany. Most trade unions have endured the recent attacks almost stoically, having lost hundreds of thousands of members in recent years. The services union, Verdi, and IG Metall - two of the biggest unions in Europe - are somewhat involved in the demonstrations, but have yet to pull their weight or initiate effective industrial action against the attacks.

Similarly, the German left is riddled with contradictions. As the only real left party with any influence, the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) plays a very contradictory role in these demonstrations and politics generally: it is heavily involved in the protests, particularly in the former east Germany. Although it tries to talk down its own part, in many areas it provides the backbone of the demos: the PDS prints the leaflets, organises the route for the marches, provides the stewards and sets up the speakers’ platform.

In the forthcoming federal elections in some east German states, it now looks certain to emerge victorious in Brandenburg and come second in Sachsen. In fact, the fight against Hartz IV has revived the party’s flagging fortunes: After the 2003 parliamentary elections, the PDS was left with only two directly elected MPs in the Bundestag, after having failed to reach the 5% threshold. In the west, the party is lucky to pick up one or two percent.

Its continuing move to the right has certainly lost it a lot of its traditional support. Wherever it is part of the government (Berlin, Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vor-pommern, etc), it has put in force wide-ranging cuts in social services and generally played the role of ‘responsible’ politicians - in other words its regional programme is pretty similar to what it is now opposing on a national level in the shape of Hartz IV. This contradiction has left it open to criticism from the left - and of course the government, which has waged quite an effective campaign to ridicule the party.

The PDS has long given up any notion of fighting for a socialist alternative, mainly seeing itself as an alternative SPD in eastern Germany. This resulted, for example, in the first mass-produced PDS placard (‘Hartz IV is poverty by law - let’s get rid of it’) being replaced with toned down version (‘Hartz IV is poverty by law - we stand by you’). And that the PDS undoubtedly does: distributing hundreds of thousands of information packs on the new law, helping claimants fill in forms, etc.

But what is needed to fight effectively against such attacks is not a local social service (as useful as that might be for many poor east Germans). A clear political alternative is long overdue. Whether the currently emerging ‘Wahlinitiative Arbeit und soziale Gerechtigkeit’ (Electoral Initiative for Labour and Social Justice) can provide it is very doubtful, however. Nevertheless, all democrats, socialists and communists should welcome its foundation - and fight hard to make it a vehicle capable of challenging not just the recent attacks, but the whole system that produces such injustices over and over again.