AUSTERITY NEWS A general collection of stories, snippets, and economic indicators to measure the declining levels of our living standards on a national and <strong>world</strong>-wide scale.
German Economy: A Process of Brutal Exploitation DR. WEBSTER G. TARPLEY round the <strong>world</strong>, dissatisfaction is growing with the Anglo- American economic model, which presents itself as a system of free markets and free trade. There is also growing dissatisfaction with the extreme disparities of individual income this model has created. Not surprisingly, many observers have seen an attractive alternative in the German social market economy, featuring a highly regulated system in which small and medium export-oriented companies are prominent, and in which trade unions play an integral part, both in factory councils and by placing representatives on corporate boards. But a closer look at Germany reveals that the social market economy of earlier decades now includes a vast low-wage sector of workers who have become second-class citizens, receiving much the same status which undocumented Hispanic immigrants in the United States would occupy under plans put forward by the Republican Party and supported by many Democrats. The German low-wage sub-economy has a name: it is called Hartz IV, named after the former personnel boss of the Volkswagen concern, and enacted into law under the auspices of the former Social Democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schröder -- with massive complicity from the neo-corporatist German trade unions -- and successively amended several times, thus accounting for the IV. German working people have just completed their eleventh year under the yoke of Hartz, which came into full effect in January 2003, and has been expanded and perfected by Europe’s reigning <strong>austerity</strong> enforcer, Christian Democratic Chancellor Angela Merkel. 3 million, 4 million, and then 5 million workers. Hartz wanted to prevent these The various Hartz plans started as a response to the permanently high levels collecting their full jobless benefits over millions of unemployed workers from of unemployment which have prevailed an indefinite period, as was often the in West Germany and then in reunified case before 2003. His response was to Germany, since the early 1980s. These design a system which shunted unemployed workers off the unemployment high jobless levels are themselves a reflection of the slowing of <strong>world</strong> economic progress in the decade after the rolls after about one or two years, de- insurance rolls and onto the welfare demolition of the highly successful 1944 pending on their age, and to impose a Bretton Woods system, which was terminated by Nixon and Kissinger on ment on these welfare recipients. stringent low-wage workfare require- August 15, 1971. During the 1980s and Workfare means that welfare victims 1990s, Germany was afflicted by unemployment in the neighbor-hood of often functioning as strikebreakers, are required to work for their benefits, and always contributing to a race to the bottom in labor conditions. The workfare requirement, in the opinion of some, amounted to the institution of a kind of slave labor. This article first appeared on Press TV; W.A.R. does not own the rights to this article. To read the full article, please visit: www.presstv.com/ detail/2014/02/26/352307/germaneconomic-powerhouse-on-sand/ No, this is not a creature from the Star Wars “bar scene,” this is Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, 2005 - present. Photo: Michael Sohn / AP WORLD AUSTERITY REPORT 12
Change language