Germany’s Civil Servants Face a New Pay Scale
Ahead of the upcoming election, the government has submitted its last legislative draft: a pay scale increase for federal civil servants in the lower and middle ranks, with higher salaries and more child and housing allowances. The background is a 2020 Constitutional Court ruling, which stated that the income of civil servants in the lower salary brackets had a too small gap with the citizen’s basic income – only if they were single and had to pay rent and support a family.
The Springer Boulevard newspaper, Bild, used the bill as expected, presenting the usual scapegoats: the poor, the unemployed, and those who receive too much from the state. They are not to blame for inflation and the housing market explosion, but the newspaper used the trick of comparing a low-paid civil servant with two children and a non-working wife to a citizen’s family of the same size, living in the most expensive area of Munich.
Privileges of the Bureaucracy
At first, it is true that the German state distributes very different privileges to its civil servants. The gap between the lower and higher salary brackets is enormous, likely not least to promote the will to climb the career ladder and to create additional obedience.
According to the German Civil Servants’ Association (dbb), the starting salary of a civil servant in the lowest salary bracket A3 is currently around €2,700 gross per month, plus regional cost-of-living adjustments for children and housing. In the highest salary bracket B11, the monthly gross salary is around €16,100, without including additional allowances.
The Karlsruhe ruling, however, concerned judges and prosecutors, who are subject to a separate regulation. There, the starting salary in the salary bracket R2 is around €5,500 gross, and the highest salary (R10) is around €14,800, both without including additional allowances.
For comparison, a single recipient of the citizen’s basic income receives a monthly basic rate of €563, plus regional, differently calculated “adequate” housing and heating costs. In Leipzig, for example, this would be a maximum of €415.40, so the recipient would have a maximum of €978 for everything. In Munich, with much higher rents, a single person would have a claim to a housing supplement of up to €950 and thus a maximum of €1,513 per month.
Bullshit Comparison on Bild’s Level
To make a stir on Bild’s level, this realistic comparison is less suitable. So, the classic German family must be used: two adults, two children. To maximize the outrage effect, the fictional citizen’s family lives in the most expensive district of Munich. The civil servant, on the other hand, receives the lowest salary and is also a single parent, as the wife takes care of the children.
Here, the remark is allowed: If a single mother with two children does not work and receives the citizen’s basic income, she is considered “lazy” – although she does nothing but take care of the children and the household, just like the fictional civil servant’s wife. However, the latter is still considered a stay-at-home parent.
Aside from that, the comparison is quite crooked. No average earner in Germany can afford to support a four-person family with a normal income today. This is indeed intentional: to push women into the labor market, the single-parent model from the 1970s in the old West Germany had to be made impossible. Wages had to go down, while living costs went up.
Fictitious Milkmaid Calculation
To really stir up the pot, Bild makes a milkmaid calculation: According to the new income, a civil servant in the second-lowest salary bracket, including child benefit, would have a net income of around €42,000 per year, after deducting all taxes and social insurance premiums. This would be approximately €3,500 in the monthly household budget.
For comparison, Bild then conjures up the fictional citizen’s family in the most expensive Munich district – which would only receive about €200 less. Now, the regulation rates per person in the household depend on age. For a child under six, there is €357, for an older child of six to 13, €390, and for a spouse, €506. Without housing supplement, a family with a child under six and a 10-year-old would receive €1,759.
However, in Munich, the family would receive up to €1,677 in housing costs, and would thus have a total of €3,436 per month. In Leipzig, on the other hand, it would have a claim to a maximum of around €803 in housing costs, and would thus have a maximum of €2,562 per month, including child benefit and housing supplement, as the latter is deducted from the regulation rate.
Verhöhnung of Average Earners
Since not only in Munich, but also in Leipzig, there are civil servants, and as not many of them have the lower salary bracket, and if they do, it’s usually only at the start, the calculation Bild makes is from the start already nonsense. Then, also using the single-parent model, is a clear mockery of all normal employees.
A minimum wage earner with a four-person family would, since this year, have a maximum of around €2,200 gross and €1,700 net per month. With a child benefit of €510, the family would have a claim to an additional top-up, as the family’s net income would be below the poverty line. Correspondingly more would be in the family’s pocket. And, of course, a civil servant with a large family and a low salary could also top up.
In other words: For every worker and employee, the government takes for granted a second income from a family. It has to, or else it would have to set the minimum wage so high that it at least covers the upkeep of a family of average size. But it doesn’t, unlike now for civil servants.
Useful Scapegoats
It is not surprising that the Springer press uses the draft for a new civil service pay scale to stir up resentment against the unemployed. Political and media hate campaigns of this kind have been a part of election campaigns for decades, and the individual parties, from the Union to the SPD, the Greens, the FDP, and the AfD, do not spare themselves.
Scapegoats are very useful for politics to divert attention from their own mess: from the population-hostile energy policy, for example, which has driven up the prices of electricity, heating, and food. And not only that: Where unemployment becomes so unbearable that every small wage earner already panics at the thought of it, the government also doesn’t have to bother much about tolerable working conditions anymore: a perfect hamster wheel with an integrated downward spiral, against which no one resists in the end.