BERLIN, June 3 (DPA/EP) –
This Friday, the Bundestag approved the increase in the minimum wage to twelve euros per hour, a measure that will come into force on October 1st, following a proposal by the Labor Minister, the Social Democrat Hubertus Heil.
The proposal has garnered the support of the Social Democrats (SPD), Greens and Liberals (FDP) coalition and opposition party La Izquierda, while MPs from the conservative Democratic Union and Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) and the far-right Alternative for Germany ( AfD) abstained from voting.
The minimum wage is currently 9.82 euros gross per hour, an amount that will rise to 10.45 euros on July 1 and to 12 euros from that point onwards, according to the German news agency DPA.
The government estimates that there are currently around 6.2 million workers earning less than the stated hourly wage. In the debate before the vote, Heil emphasized that both women and the residents of East Germany would particularly benefit from this increase.
In this sense, Heil has emphasized that without Olaf Scholz as chancellor, there will be no increase in the minimum wage, after the SPD politician made the increase in the minimum wage one of the main promises of the campaign for the federal elections in September 2021.
For its part, the German employers’ association BDA has criticized the decision. “We are not concerned with the level of the minimum wage,” said the president of the employers’ association, Rainer Dulger, in a statement to the German newspaper Welt.
“The federal government is not sticking to the agreements that we made in 2015 when we created the minimum wage commission and introduced the statutory minimum wage,” he emphasized. For example, the BDA denounced having overcome the commission of employers and trade unions.