December 8, 2007 (LPAC)--The German trade union federation DGB has launched a postcard action using Franklin Delano Roosevelt's image, to support the recent government decision to begin to introduce a minimum wage. Two years ago, the German trade-union confederation DGB published a newspaper ad with the same content. Now, the Rheinland-Pfalz office of the DGB has printed a postcard with FDR's picture and the headline: "A Man Must Live From His Work!" The text is a quotation from FDR, translated into German: "No business which depends for its existence on paying less than a living wage to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By living wage, I mean more than a bare subsistence level -- I mean the wages of decent living."
The entire conflict over minimum wages in Germany goes back more than ten years, when construction workers began massively mobilizing against super-cheap labor from Portugal, Spain, Ireland, and Greece, employed at construction projects to displace workers who had negotiated agreements for decent wages. After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, more and more workers employed at super-cheap wages, and largely with no health benefits or even accident insurance, flooded Germany, well beyond the construction branch. Then the deregulation of labor markets by the EU Commission added another problem: mini-jobs at mini-pay.
At the beginning of 2005, the German government, then headed by Social Democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, announced its intent to enact a minimum wage law, a project which was called off when Schroeder was replaced by neo-con Christian Democrat Angela Merkel, after the early national elections in September of that year.
During 2006 and 2007, especially when consumer price inflation rampaged in the wake of the banking crisis beginning late July 2007, momentum has been building among the German labor movement which has forced the Social Democrats, a partner in Merkel's Grand Coalition government, to insist on a minimum wage. Faced with increasing pressure from her own party's labor union current as well, Merkel has adopted the minimum wage proposal, to the deep embarrassment of the neo-con camp. It is to be introduced first for postal workers, at 9.80 euros/hour in January 2008.
Other sectors will then follow (at least ten sectors, according to the SPD, including part-time workers, of whom there are officially 630,000). Chancellor Angela Merkel said that the government will watch the effects of the Deutsche Post deal, and if there are no counter indications, other sectors will follow by March 2008.
It should be noted that when the German labor federation (DGB) began its nationwide minimum wage campaign in spring 2005, it ran newspaper ads with a picture of FDR, and his famous statement of 1938 calling for the minimum wage in the United States. The interesting special context of this was that the German LaRouche Youth Movement were actively campaigning in the western German state of North Rhine-Westphalia for the state parliament elections there in May 2005, under the banner of "LaRouche Revives FDR."
A chorus of propagandists for Anglo-Dutch monetarism has protested against the introduction of the minimum wage provision, claiming that it will force firms out of the market through increasing labor costs. These vultures include ECB President Jean-Claude Trichet, the City of London organ the Financial Times, and the OECD. Today the FT carried an interview with the leader of the opposition FDP party, Guido Westerwelle, saying that German Chancellor Angela Merkel (CDU) must be blamed for a "populist" drift in Germany. Westerwelle said, "From now on, the minimum wage level will infect every electoral campaign, every political discussion. One economic sector after another will be dragged into election campaigns."
A survey this week showed 78% of Germans are in favor of the minimum wage provision.
