What if Germany weren't the Eldorado of the European economy? To question it, although the growth of the Teutonic country and its contained public debt are the envy of the whole continent, it is aanalysis conducted by the Labor Research Institute of the University of Duisburg-Essen.
According to the report, published on the cover of the centre-left newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, nearly one in four office workers in Germany is underpaid. Indeed, in 2010, 23,1% of German workers, i.e. a good 7,84 million people, appear to have received a wage of less than 9,5 euros gross per hour, a threshold below which the salary is considered "low" (i.e. less than two-thirds of the country's average salary).
Of these nearly 8 million employees (increased by 2,3 million since 1995), at least 1,4 million receive wages even lower than 5 euros gross per hour, while two and a half million receive less than 6 (the average across all is 6,6 euros an hour): among them above all women, former East Germans and precarious workers, in particular that category of workers who are satisfied with small jobs (often part-time) subsidized by the State as an alternative to continuing unemployment.
But all this also happens in the wealthy West, as the same research points out: "The exponential increase in low wages since 1995 is mainly due to the former West Germany". If it is true that the old GDR continues to suffer from an averagely more difficult socio-economic situation, it is therefore equally true that, contrary to the cliché of a Western locomotive of the country, it is above all on the other side of Berlin that poverty and precariousness continue to increase .
And in any case, the phenomenon does not only concern precarious or part-time workers: as many as 800 full-time employees have a monthly salary of less than 1.000 euros gross.
Read also the Süddeutsche Zeitung
