Politico: Germany mulls scrapping minimum wage for refugees
Refugees and migrants could be paid less than minimum wage if they do not have equivalent qualifications under a new proposal in Germany, Süddeutschen Zeitung reported Monday.
The plan, co-authored by the employment, finance and education ministries, would see employees permitted to pay refugees and migrants who are in the process of acquiring professional skills within a company less than the normal minimum. During that period, their work would be considered a “mandatory internship” and therefore not bound by wage rules.
From: Germany mulls scrapping minimum wage for refugees – POLITICO
Fuck that’s nasty. Powers that Be are up to more fuckery.
As if deliberately creating havens for Rapefugees wasn’t enough?Report
Yeah, this creates all kinds of perverse incentives that are going to make things worse for everyone.Report
I can’t see that going anywhere good either.Report
Why should a business be expected to pay minimum wage to someone with no skills, education and doesn’t speak the language? A business has to get some value from the employee.Report
notme,
Yes, I’m aware of how much you are in favor of child slavery. Thanks for being upfront about it, but really, this is Germany and not the United States. I feel we ought to hold them to a higher standard.Report
For starters, you don’t know they lack those things.
More importantly, the business is choosing to employ these people. Why?Report
@notme The problem in this particular case, if you are a person with nativist tendencies such as yourself, is that you have just created an incentive for employers to hire refugees instead of natural born German citizens.
Which I suspect you knew, and still had to reflexively defend it on the basis that it’s right wing and liberals will hate it.Report
“…on the basis that it’s right wing and liberals will hate it.”
Honest question… is it right wing? Given that it’s coming from Merkel’s govt. this seems to my outside eyes very neo-liberal and to be a very good example of attempting to dig your way out of the hole you’ve created.
It certainly might be a naked attempt at exploiting cheap labor – the Merkel right-wing plan all along… but I’ll be confounded if I can distinguish it from the Globalist neo-liberal plan for labor betterment (and humanitarian relief).
As I say, seems like a lose/lose option… if you don’t do it, then you potentially have large groups of unemployed and assimilated populations; but if you do do it, then you potentially have large groups of Trade workers displaced by cheap labor.
Either way, honestly not seeing a left/right divide here… just an attempt to thread the needle. It might work, it might not. It might even work in one sense and still fail in another.Report
Don’t mind rtod, he’s just taking a cheap shot at me by assuming that my objection to something is based on nativism or that it would make liberals angry.Report
Marchmaine,
Allowing rapefugee districts isn’t indicative of “actual true” neoliberalism. Just that the people in charge are bastards and really don’t care about us. Just like the nascent American race war.Report
I think it is true that this proposal creates an incentive for employers to employ refugees. Honestly I think all minimum wage laws are BS because I don’t think that the gov’t should be in the business of setting wages. It isn’t a gov’t function. That being said, if the gov’t is going to force places to pay minimum wages I don’t see why someone should be forced to pay that same minimum wages to someone that has even fewer job and language skills that the typical German burger flipper. So despite your desire to believe otherwise, it really doesn’t have anything to do with liberals and what they think, or racism, etc.Report
I’m against minimum wage laws (but won’t go to the mattresses to fight them). But I’m even more against exceptions to the rules. Law by asterisksis how the bad guys win.
Eta – and my objection to minimum wage laws goes away almost completely when I consider some de miniumus level is a valid way of enforcing the 13th amendment in the US.Report
Why should a business be expected to pay minimum wage to someone with no skills, education and doesn’t speak the language?
Much less elect her governor of Alaska.Report
Really, that’s the most intelligent thing you can add? And folks say I don’t add anything to the discussion.Report
I’ve been critical of the minimum wage, but I’m even more critical of schemes like this. (One politician in Sangamon has suggested that the minimum wage apply only to people over a certain age, say, 25, which to me seems like a recipe for age discrimination.)
ETA: disclosure: I didn’t read the entire article, just the excerpt here.Report
Was the plan for the refugees to stay in Germany indefinitely?
Like, a new post WWII/Turkey situation? If so, I think that Germany will find that they made a lot of assumptions about the refugees that were true about the Turks that ended up not being true about the refugees and these assumptions evaporating in the harsh light of what actually ended up being true will more quickly result in a general consensus that, of course, the refugees were never going to be staying in Germany forever. They came here to be safe and then, now that the unpleasantness in (country) is over, they’re going back to (country).
I mean, if the main thing that they were hoping for was a bunch of good hard menial workers who would be grateful for an opportunity to work hard doing unskilled labor in a first world country, I think that they’re finding that they made a handful of very bad assumptions.
Those assumptions have secondary effects and tertiary effects and those tertiary effects are now coming to light.Report
I mean, if the main thing that they were hoping for was a bunch of good hard menial workers who would be grateful for an opportunity to work hard doing unskilled labor in a first world country, I think that they’re finding that they made a handful of very bad assumptions.
I’d imagine their thinking was more along the lines that you’ve championed wrt US immigration policy for … well, ever since I’ve been here: if they want to come and work then we’ll take ’em.Report
Probably right. Question is whether the German people know that.Report
if they want to come and work then we’ll take ’em.
What’s the unemployment rate of the refugees, then? 6%? 7%?Report
Nice work. Points for difficulty. And landing!
Add: Nice clipping of the actual sentence too!Report
Let’s quote your entire sentence, then:
I’d imagine their thinking was more along the lines that you’ve championed wrt US immigration policy for … well, ever since I’ve been here: if they want to come and work then we’ll take ’em.
And then I can repeat my question:
What’s the unemployment rate of the refugees, then? 6%? 7%?Report
Back when you were championing US immigration policy taking in immigrants the unemployment rate was 6%, 7%. That didn’t seem to disincline you from advocating for more immigration. (I mean, it’d take some time to look up the comments but I hope we both can agree – out of honesty – that you’ve been a champion of immigrants coming to the US because they’ll work and thereby add to “society”.)Report
I wasn’t asking “What’s the unemployment rate in Germany?”
I was asking a very, very different question. Here, let me copy and paste it again:
It’s the answer to this very, very different question that colors this statement that I will also cut and paste again:
Report
If unemployment rate of refugees isn’t any higher than unemployment of the ethno-congenial then what’s the problem? Are those folks more likely to ….???
Here’s my point, to put it bluntly: you (in particular) have been an advocate of taking “whoever wants to work for a wage” in this country, and that specific belief (right or wrong!) has led to the reactionary backlash those of us in the US are going thru, but what lots of other countries are going thru as well. So don’t pretend that it’s a small thing, one that’s way over there, see it behind those other things!, that’s led to where we’re at.
Neoliberalism and open borders is a wonderful idea, except when it isn’t.Report
If unemployment rate of refugees isn’t any higher than unemployment of the ethno-congenial then what’s the problem?
You know what, I agree with that.
If the unemployment rate of the refugees isn’t any higher than the unemployment of the ethno-congenital, then we do not have a problem. At all. Heck, I’m even willing to exclude women from that, given the various norms that I presume exist in the wretched countries these refuges come from. Additionally, it’d be wrong to include children and the elderly in that.
Those that are left, do we know what their unemployment rate is?
Here’s my point, to put it bluntly: you (in particular) have been an advocate of taking “whoever wants to work for a wage” in this country, and that specific belief (right or wrong!) has led to the reactionary backlash those of us in the US are going thru, but what lots of other countries are going thru as well. So don’t pretend that it’s a small thing, one that’s way over there, see it behind those other things!, that’s led to where we’re at.
Hoo, boy. Yeah, I had that coming. And still yet deserve worse. There’s a lot of very, very bad things that are going to happen because of this belief. Even if it was closer to “right” in the “right or wrong”, the fact that it’s going to lead to… well, a lot of very bad things… makes its rightness kind of moot.
But, even pretending that its rightness is more important than what follows, the unemployment rate of the refugees is *HIGH*. Like, higher than that of Germany.
And there are narratives out there that argue that the employment rate of the refugees is, effectively, a rounding error.
Here’s one story out there that I remember from September. Here’s the lede:
Take 10,000 and cut it in half because we’re already excluding women. That’s 1 in 5,000. Let’s cut it by 80% because we want to exclude children. That’s 1 in 1,000.
We engaged in some serious shenanigans there and that’s still an incredibly daunting number of unemployed refugees.
What’s the current unemployment in Germany, though?
6.2%. The google tells me that this is a “record low“.
Neoliberalism and open borders is a wonderful idea, except when it isn’t.
We’re going to learn that lesson good and hard and one of the by-products that I see attending is that the word “racism” will become toxic. Not to be called “racist”, mind. But toxic on the part of the accuser. And, by god, there are going to be a ton of consequences on the other side of that.Report
Pondering the case of Germany i think their recent history makes them a poor case study. In the 90’s West G absorbed East G which meant taking in lots of folks with different/poorer education and a whole of load of different mores and attitudes and survival skills. As i remember hearing about that was a bit of culture shock for both sides and that is with sharing a language and history and culture. The GDP of WG took a hit for a while as i remember. Of course the unified Germany has gone on to be a power.
Also Germany has a long history of Turkish immigration and relations although they haven’t allowed the Turkish immigrants to truly assimilate i believe. So a lot of their history makes them a peculiar case. I wish we had blog corespondents in Germany to flesh out/correct all this. I do slightly know a couple from Germany ( Frankfurt), they are friends of my in laws but i don’t have any way to get in touch with them.Report
I think it was Merkel’s plan that the refugees would stay, assuming she even thought that far ahead.Report
At least these refugees aren’t backed by nuclear weapons, ya?Report