Criticism of the cobbled-together pension reform: East German minister-presidents receive backing from the DGB

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Working themselves to the bone? Reduced pensions for anyone who retires too early? This is now a concern even for the three CDU Minister-Presidents from Thuringia, Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt. Will they be able to see it through? It would be the first time that CDU Minister-Presidents have shown any backbone in the Federal Republic’s completely out-of-kilts social policy. All the while, they are suddenly facing a media backlash from the leading Western media outlets. Leading the charge is *Der Spiegel*.

On Tuesday, 4th August, the magazine ran the headline: “The resistance of the eastern state premiers is brazen”.

From *Der Spiegel*’s perspective, the arguments put forward by the three Minister-Presidents are untenable. The move, it claims, “calls into question the necessary pension reform.”

Of course it does. What else could it do? The reform is a patchwork scheme that fails to solve the problems and hits precisely those who have been unable to build up a second source of income for their old age. Above all, many workers in the East,

The chaotic debate surrounding the reform has not arisen because three Minister-Presidents now want to say ‘no’, but because it is ill-conceived and, once again, hits the wrong people.

Coalition in chaos

This is also the view of Sarah Vollath, pension policy spokesperson for the Left Party parliamentary group in the Bundestag:

“The coalition is sinking into utter chaos when it comes to pension policy. What the CDU/CSU and the SPD are getting up to is a rather disgraceful spectacle at the expense of pensioners and workers, because they are simply using the preservation of a full pension after 45 years of contributions as a political football in the election campaign. A great many workers are counting on being able to decide freely how to spend their retirement after 45 years of hard work.

This must remain the case in future too! The back-and-forth between the CDU/CSU and the SPD demonstrates once again what has been going wrong in pension policy for many years. The East German minister-presidents are lashing out at the government and, in the run-up to the election, are presenting themselves as champions of workers. The fact that Minister Bas then calls for order, even though she has absolutely no control over her own department, is the height of hypocrisy. This behaviour by the CDU/CSU and the SPD is irresponsible and is causing confidence in the pension system to plummet ever further.”

And what if they are serious?

The fact that the headwind facing the three Minister-Presidents – Sven Schulze (Saxony-Anhalt), Michael Kretschmer (Saxony) and Mario Voigt (Thuringia) – is so strong also stems from the fact that they actually have the power to scupper the reform package.

And they are certainly toying with the idea of doing just that. That’s politics. It’s part of the game. All the more so when the federal government has once again presented nothing but a patchwork solution, without actually tackling Germany’s pension problem. Those refusing to do their bit are sitting in Berlin.

Support from the DGB unions

And the three Minister-Presidents are now also receiving clear support from the trade unions.

The German Trade Union Confederation in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Saxony-Anhalt, Brandenburg, Saxony and Thuringia welcomes the clear stance taken by the East German Minister-Presidents in the pension debate. Anyone who has worked for 45 years has earned their retirement. Particularly in physically and mentally demanding jobs, many workers are simply glad if they can remain in employment until their early 60s at all.

Moreover, the current waves of redundancies in the east are affecting, first and foremost, people over the age of 55. It is all the more cynical, then, when Minister for Economic Affairs Katharina Reiche discredits this legitimate claim by labelling it ‘early retirement’. This merely demonstrates how far removed this debate is from the reality of life for many workers.

“In eastern Germany in particular, the upheavals following reunification have shaped many people’s working lives,” says the DGB, addressing the situation of eastern German workers directly. “Many people were unable to build up a private pension. To this day, wages often remain below western levels and the inheritance rate is extremely low. For many, the statutory pension scheme is therefore the central pillar of their retirement provision. A system based on years of contributions is therefore considerably fairer than one linked to average life expectancy. At the same time, the basic pension, together with its basic pension supplement, must be strengthened so that people who have worked for many years and paid contributions are better provided for in old age, even if they were on low wages.”

The latter is a problem that the proposed reform package does not even address. As a result, those who were miserably paid during their working lives are penalised in old age as well, for not having been able to secure a decent pension on their meagre wages.

The trade unionists’ conclusion: “Anyone who has worked all their life deserves respect, recognition and a pension that enables them to live in dignity in old age.”

The German Trade Union Confederation’s demands on pension policy can be found at www.dgb.de/geld/rente