At nine o'clock on a freezing December morning, Kerstin Boughalem, 50, is already at her post at the doors of the evangelical parish of Rixdorf, in the middle of Berlin's multicultural Neukölln neighborhood. Her task is to control access to the facilities that the parish has given to Tafel, the food bank for people without resources founded 30 years ago that survives thanks to donations from supermarkets and its army of volunteers. When the truck arrives with the food, she will let the users pass in groups of ten, who accumulate with their carts on the sidewalk, still with patches of snow. Most are regulars and know how it works; They chat animatedly and take it easy.
Boughalem has a lot in common with some of them. She is a recipient of the so-called citizen income (bürgergeld, in German, literally citizen money), the benefit received by those who have exhausted unemployment and have no other means of subsistence. He could be on the other side of the queue, but he is on the side of those who help with their time. “I volunteer,” she says with a hint of pride. “Of course I would like to work and have more income, but it is impossible for me,” she laments. She has tried. With full-time jobs, but also with some minijob, as short-hour jobs that don't pay are known in Germany. None were viable. One of her three children has a disability and every so often she has to accompany her to the hospital when she is admitted.
Heated by the conservative opposition, the debate has resurfaced in Germany about whether it is worth working, whether it is more comfortable to live on subsidies than to have a job with a minimum wage that provides the same or little more than the bürgergeld, the most important social reform of the legislature for Chancellor Olaf Scholz. “Who wants to get up early and be able to receive money from the State without any effort?”, they have been crying out for weeks on television and in tabloid newspapers such as Bild the leader of the CDU, Friedrich Merz, and his general secretary, Carsten Linnemann. The announced 12% increase in the benefit as of January 1 has given them the perfect excuse to relaunch the controversy. “Which employee receives such salary increases?” Merz asked.
Boughalem, a German who adopted her ex-husband's surname of Turkish origin, is bothered by the debate, although she recognizes that there may be cases of people who prefer to live without working. She is motivated, she assures, and trained (she has two FP equivalent degrees, in social assistance and as a hospital cook). However, she has now been living on social benefits for more than a decade; This year she with hers 502 euros from her plus around 400 from her daughter. With those 900 euros a month she maintains her house. She is going very fair, she says, especially in recent months, due to the inflation that has affected food and the cost of energy. The last electricity bill: “211 euros,” she points out.
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Precisely, to counteract the very high inflation that Germans have endured since the Russian invasion of Ukraine – now moderate at 3.2%, but which exceeded 10% at the end of last year – citizen money is updated in 2024. A beneficiary without family responsibilities will go from earning 502 euros per month to 563 euros. For some, that 12% increase is too much. Merz has proposed not applying it and thus save and help close the budget gap that grips German public finances, in crisis after a Constitutional ruling turned all public spending upside down. “The increase is excessive if we take into account that those who receive it should have an incentive to join the labor market,” the Christian Democrat leader insisted.
Conservative media have also given rise to the idea that in the house of a family that lives on bürgergeld The same applies as if one of the parents worked for the minimum wage. In a recent survey, 64% of Germans fear that social benefits could discourage them from working. In the survey, by Forsa for the magazine Stern, it can be seen that the voters of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Christian Democrats of the CDU are the most critical of the increase in benefits. 85% in the first case and 78% in the second think that it will no longer be worth it for recipients to look for a job.
“Any job—regardless of income—represents a greater disposable income than not having any job and depending solely on the bürgergeld“, counters Holger Schäfer, an economist specialized in the labor market at the German Institute of Economics in Cologne, close to the employers' association. The expert recognizes that, “in principle, any social assistance regime incorporates a certain disincentive to work,” but he defends the German basic income, except in some very specific points. One of those drawbacks – contemplated in the regulations of the bürgergeld, but also from its predecessor, the controversial Hartz IV – is the possibility of working a few hours a week without losing the benefit and adding income. As designed, he says, “it encourages part-time work, but discourages accepting full-time jobs.”
Public television has tried to demonstrate that statements such as that of the leader of the Christian Democrats, who said that “people will not go back to work because they will calculate that they get more at the end of the year with transfers from the State than if they work in a simple job” are actually false. Even after the January 1 hike, the program Monitor has calculated, with the help of the Institute of Economic and Social Sciences (WSI) of the Hans Böckler Foundation, close to the unions, that a person without family responsibilities gets on average 532 euros more if they work full-time for the minimum wage, while Families with three children get between 429 and 771 euros more, depending on the age of the minors.
The key is that low-income earners also have the right to additional benefits, such as housing allowance or child benefit, in addition to greater tax relief on earned income. “In all the simulations you get more money if you work, and sometimes the difference is very clear,” Bettina Kohlrausch, director of the WSI, told the program. The difference between both regimes has been minimal. Since the minimum wage was introduced in 2015, it has gone from €8.50 to the planned €12.41 at the beginning of 2024, an increase of 46%. In the same period, citizen income increased by 41.4% in the case of single people.
Social aid has been one of the points of friction between the three parties of the Government coalition – social democrats, greens and liberals – which, in mid-December, finally managed to agree on cuts for the 2024 budget without touching benefits. . The FDP liberals asked to cut corners on social spending, something that Chancellor Olaf Scholz's party flatly refused to do. The general secretary of the liberals, Bijan Djir-Sarai, agreed with the conservative opposition in paralyzing the increase in the bürgergeld. “It is clear that the welfare state in Germany costs too much money. One in every three euros spent by the Government is allocated to social spending. This is no longer possible,” he said in a recent interview with the newspaper Bild. Finally, and despite the debate about the generous German welfare state, the benefit is not touched. In a matter of days, Boughalem and the more than five million Germans, including adults and children, who receive the bürgergeldthey will see their income rise by 12%.
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