In the federal election campaign, the CDU and CSU had rejected the SPD's promise of an unscheduled minimum wage increase to 12 euros because it was an inadmissible interference in the work of the collective bargaining parties.

Now the traffic light coalition wants to decide on the increase on June 2nd in the Bundestag - but according to leading Union politicians this does not go far enough.

They are calling for additional new requirements so that the statutory lower wage limit will rise faster in the future, even after it has been increased to 12 euros on October 1st.

Dietrich Creutzburg

Business correspondent in Berlin.

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“It is now time for the minimum wage to be increased to 12 euros.

People deserve that," said Karl-Josef Laumann, Social Affairs Minister of North Rhine-Westphalia and chairman of the CDU employee wing, the FAZ "But such a one-off increase does not solve the problem." New legal regulations are needed to deal with those with three Minimum Wage Commission staffed by union and employer representatives at a faster pace.

"The way the Commission is working at the moment, it won't work," he criticized.

"If this is not changed now, in a few years we will have the same salad as today."

The announcement makes it clear that the Union's change of course, which has been evident for some time, was not just related to the recent state election campaigns.

In the Bundestag debate at the end of April, the CSU social and economic politician Max Straubinger also surprised in this direction: He suggested bringing the increase to 12 euros from October to July 1st - to relieve companies of the conversion effort: July 1st an increase from the previous EUR 9.82 to EUR 10.45 will come into effect anyway, as was still regularly decided by the Commission in 2020.

The CDU has other plans

Compared to the minimum wage of 9.50 euros in force in the second half of 2021, the 12 euros mean an increase of 25 percent in any case.

However, Laumann also justified his demand with a view to warnings from employers and from the FDP that the minimum wage should not be a political pawn.

"Sure, a political minimum wage is wrong, but if there is no other way, I support it," he said.

Unfortunately, the minimum wage has “not been properly adjusted” in the past.

“That would have been the task of the Minimum Wage Commission.

Now politicians have to step in and fix it.”

According to the CDU reading, the demand for stricter legal requirements for the Commission also serves to facilitate the return to rule-based minimum wage increases.

"One could think that the SPD is concerned with conducting election campaigns on the minimum wage in the future," Laumann concludes from the fact that the traffic light bill does not want to change the work order of the commission.

In fact, this is due to the fact that the FDP did not agree to the 12 euros in the coalition negotiations of its own accord, but as part of a barter deal that was unpleasant for the SPD and the Greens: In return, it wrested an increase in the mini-job limit from them.

So far, the law has stipulated that the Minimum Wage Commission should base its resolutions on increases, which are due every two years, on the development of collectively agreed wages.

With the 12-euro law, however, they are now clearly overtaken.

The head of their employee group in the Bundestag, Axel Knoerig, has already outlined what new guidelines for the commission could look like from the point of view of the CDU: Old age security or the development of the social subsistence level could be added as legal standards.

The collective wage criterion was also regulated in this way in 2014 under Labor Minister Andrea Nahles (SPD) because the industrial unions feared that minimum wage increases could indirectly act as a percentage guideline (or even limit) for their collective wage demands.

However, weaker unions like Verdi openly rely on the minimum wage as a lever for higher wage agreements.

However, the SPD's position on the minimum wage has also changed: According to the 2014 law, this can only be the absolute lower limit against "unreasonable" low wages.

Now the 12-euro law is intended to “further develop” the minimum wage into an instrument of “social participation”.

The employers, however, see it this way: The companies that have to generate all wages are used for socio-political goals.

Politically, the FDP is currently having a particularly difficult time declaring its yes to the 12 euros.

And she also gets to hear from the Union that she is betraying the independence of the Minimum Wage Commission.

Meanwhile, FDP labor market expert Carl-Julius Cronenberg wonders how the CDU can act as a defender of this independence if it is also planning new guidelines for the commission.