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It's also asking that employers top up their salary whilst doing so, that appears to be the sticking point with employers. It is a major step beyond the state d

It's also asking that employers top up their salary whilst doing so, that appears to be the sticking point with employers. It is a major step beyond the state doing the subsidising, as can happen with maternity/paternity pay. It also strikes me as one of those measures that assumes that the good times (good order books, low unemployment) are here to stay. It rather feels like they're making themselves a hostage to fortune. Given some of Germany's success has come from the Euro reducing what would otherwise be appreciative effects on the deutschmark, it is worth remembering that governments / states are happy to benefit when the factors beyond their control are positive, less so when they turn against you.

ddebernardy 9y ago
> It also strikes me as one of those measures that assumes that the good times (good order books, low unemployment) are here to stay. 42 people holding as much wealth as 3.7 billion might also have something to do with it: https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2018/jan/22/inequality-gap-widens-as-42-people-hold-same-wealth-as-37bn-poorest https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2018/jan/22/inequalit...
- padobson 9y ago
  The inequality doesn't bother me so much, but I do think such inequality gives labor a bargaining position - a position the union in this article is wisely using to its advantage.
  - marnett 9y ago
    why is it that inequality doesn't bother you so much?
    - p1esk 9y ago
      Because if being rich is your goal, no one stops you from achieving it, other than yourself.
      - marnett 9y ago
        That's a gross over-simplification of wealth accrual. Hyper-concentration of wealth will most certainly prevent new entrants from entering the coveted class of the 1500 worldwide billionaires. Regardless of desires to be wealthy, inequality has a lot more to do with inherited wealth, not the ability to be lucky as an entrepreneur. There are plenty of billionaires (and millionaires, etc) who did nothing but enter the world with the correct surname.
        p1esk 9y ago
        Hyper-concentration of wealth will most certainly prevent new entrants We have hyper-concentration of wealth now. Yet there are new entrants entering billionaire class every year. There are plenty of billionaires (and millionaires, etc) who did nothing but enter the world with the correct surname. And there are plenty who did not have the correct surname at birth.
        fao_ 9y ago
        > We have hyper-concentration of wealth now. Yet there are new entrants entering billionaire class every year. Your proof? Most of the 'new entrants' actually have quite a wealth of already accrued money. For example, Jeff Bezos had a loan from their parents for 300k, which is equivalent to for 15 people's yearly salary
      - coliveira 9y ago
        The market system is a competition, so by definition everyone is (at least potentially) trying to stop you from achieving wealth. Just ask anyone who started a business, for example. Saying that the only obstacle is in the individual is, at a minimum, disingenuous.
        majewsky 9y ago
        And that's assuming a hypothetical perfect market. The real world has monopolies, rent-seeking and other obstacles that make it harder for new contenders to enter a market.
- dgdas9 9y ago
  We've been over this several times now. Oxfam uses very disingenuous criteria, and their numbers are not to be trusted. They consider debt to be negative wealth, which means that a middle class family with no net savings and a mortgage on their house is "poorer" than a starving child with 2 cents on their pocket.
  - RHSeeger 9y ago
    How does that work? Wouldn't the house be considered an asset then and, assuming it's not underwater, put the family back in the black?
    - pnutjam 9y ago
      Shh... Your ruining his narrative.
      - metiscus 9y ago
        I believe the point stands. If a penniless, homeless child has a worth of 0, and I have a house valued at 80,000 with a 90,000 mortgage, am I really worse off than the child without a home? Assuming I have a job and can make payments.
        deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
        pishpash 9y ago
        If you assume you can make payments, then you are equivalently assuming your job has present asset value (or that you have human capital). So yes, a full accounting will show you are not actually underwater. If you are delusional and have no job security, then yes, you're worse off than the child.
    - Erikun 9y ago
      That specific example is a bad one as you say. A better is perhaps student loans. I recommend checking out BBCs More or less, they has covered the issues with Oxfams claims several times.
- cmdkeen 9y ago
  Even if we buy into that (and I fully agree with ddebernardy) you're assuming that those 42 people's accrual of wealthy will continue to stimulate the German electrical and machinery based sectors. I'd cast doubt on that, they probably already have Miele appliances in every one of their homes, all the BMWs and Mercedes they need for when the supercar is inconvenient. Unless they are in the market for a submarine there isn't really much more they can do to drive demand. It is likely the middle classes, and the newly rich middle classes abroad who are driving German exports. What matters far more is that the unions are essentially asking for a temporary 20% pay increase (plus a 6% permanent one) for two years every so often. Making the, not unreasonable, assumption that pay is a major component of manufacturing costs that would suggest that if the world economy falters (consider Brexit, Trump, southern Eurozone issues, a war on the Korean Peninsula, Iranian protests) German manufacturers might suddenly find themselves very uncompetitive.
  - majewsky 9y ago
    I think you're missing the point, and you actually agree with grandparent. When people point to extreme wealth inequality, they usually argue that redistribution of wealth will give said money to people who actually use it to consume, thereby getting it back into circulation and benefitting their local economy.
    - kermitfrog 9y ago
      Hi, I'm Rich Factory Owner. If you take my profits and redistribute it among the people to consume, that's a great opportunity for me and my buddies to raise prices to make up for the difference!
      - RodericDay 9y ago
        Here's where the much-admired free market would kick in and stop you from hiking them up too much.
      - dane-pgp 9y ago
        Is your argument that governments should do more to stop illegal price-setting cartels? If so, I agree with you.
- danbruc 9y ago
  One of the Oxfam reports [1] states »The 1,810 dollar billionaires on the 2016 Forbes list, 89% of whom are men, own $6.5 trillion – as much wealth as the bottom 70% of humanity«. Let's assume they accumulated all this wealth in just 10 years, how much better off could everyone have been if we evenly spread the money instead of putting it into the pockets of just 1,810 people? If we spread it across all 7.6 billion people over 10 years everyone would receive $85.25 per year or $7.12 per month or $0.23 per day. So while the rich are really rich they are also very few and in consequence spreading the wealth among the many poor has a much smaller impact than many expect without doing the math. I am not saying that it would have no impact, it could probably lift the about 20% of the world population still living in extreme poverty - $1.90 or less per day - above the extreme poverty line if spread among them but it certainly wouldn't make everyone on Earth rich. If you do the math for other scenarios, for example calculate how much better of all the employees of a company could be if the top executives would just receive average wages, you almost always get similar results. That still doesn't mean that I am okay with such situations, far from. I think more equality would be a good thing on its own even if the difference for most people would be relatively small. [1] https://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/publications/an-economy-for-the-99-its-time-to-build-a-human-economy-that-benefits-everyone-620170 https://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/publications/an-economy...
  - petra 9y ago
    Haven't Bill Gates shown what these kinds of money could buy for billions ? isn't it a fairer approach to judge such things ?
    - danbruc 9y ago
      They certainly helped to improve the situation of many but I am not sure that they managed to affect a billion people. And you can certainly do a lot of good with a couple of billion dollar but you can not make really many rich. And that was my main point, the wealth of the very top is not what makes the poor poor just due to an uneven wealth distribution.
  - pishpash 9y ago
    There are many ways to spread it evenly. You can build infrastructure, or make loans and investments to capital-constrained communities, etc.
- soccerz 9y ago
  You cannot expect me to make responsible decisions so long as non-normal distributions are allowed to exist!
pgeorgi 9y ago
There are more than enough measures available to employers in Germany in bad times (eg Kurzarbeit, "short work", which all but saved the German economy in 2008), so bad times needn't be an argument for restricting participation in the wealth of good times.

ddebernardy 9y ago

> It also strikes me as one of those measures that assumes that the good times (good order books, low unemployment) are here to stay. 42 people holding as much wealth as 3.7 billion might also have something to do with it: https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2018/jan/22/inequality-gap-widens-as-42-people-hold-same-wealth-as-37bn-poorest https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2018/jan/22/inequalit...

padobson 9y ago
The inequality doesn't bother me so much, but I do think such inequality gives labor a bargaining position - a position the union in this article is wisely using to its advantage.
- marnett 9y ago
  why is it that inequality doesn't bother you so much?
  - p1esk 9y ago
    Because if being rich is your goal, no one stops you from achieving it, other than yourself.
    - marnett 9y ago
      That's a gross over-simplification of wealth accrual. Hyper-concentration of wealth will most certainly prevent new entrants from entering the coveted class of the 1500 worldwide billionaires. Regardless of desires to be wealthy, inequality has a lot more to do with inherited wealth, not the ability to be lucky as an entrepreneur. There are plenty of billionaires (and millionaires, etc) who did nothing but enter the world with the correct surname.
      - p1esk 9y ago
        Hyper-concentration of wealth will most certainly prevent new entrants We have hyper-concentration of wealth now. Yet there are new entrants entering billionaire class every year. There are plenty of billionaires (and millionaires, etc) who did nothing but enter the world with the correct surname. And there are plenty who did not have the correct surname at birth.
        fao_ 9y ago
        > We have hyper-concentration of wealth now. Yet there are new entrants entering billionaire class every year. Your proof? Most of the 'new entrants' actually have quite a wealth of already accrued money. For example, Jeff Bezos had a loan from their parents for 300k, which is equivalent to for 15 people's yearly salary
    - coliveira 9y ago
      The market system is a competition, so by definition everyone is (at least potentially) trying to stop you from achieving wealth. Just ask anyone who started a business, for example. Saying that the only obstacle is in the individual is, at a minimum, disingenuous.
      - majewsky 9y ago
        And that's assuming a hypothetical perfect market. The real world has monopolies, rent-seeking and other obstacles that make it harder for new contenders to enter a market.
dgdas9 9y ago
We've been over this several times now. Oxfam uses very disingenuous criteria, and their numbers are not to be trusted. They consider debt to be negative wealth, which means that a middle class family with no net savings and a mortgage on their house is "poorer" than a starving child with 2 cents on their pocket.
- RHSeeger 9y ago
  How does that work? Wouldn't the house be considered an asset then and, assuming it's not underwater, put the family back in the black?
  - pnutjam 9y ago
    Shh... Your ruining his narrative.
    - metiscus 9y ago
      I believe the point stands. If a penniless, homeless child has a worth of 0, and I have a house valued at 80,000 with a 90,000 mortgage, am I really worse off than the child without a home? Assuming I have a job and can make payments.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - pishpash 9y ago
        If you assume you can make payments, then you are equivalently assuming your job has present asset value (or that you have human capital). So yes, a full accounting will show you are not actually underwater. If you are delusional and have no job security, then yes, you're worse off than the child.
  - Erikun 9y ago
    That specific example is a bad one as you say. A better is perhaps student loans. I recommend checking out BBCs More or less, they has covered the issues with Oxfams claims several times.
cmdkeen 9y ago
Even if we buy into that (and I fully agree with ddebernardy) you're assuming that those 42 people's accrual of wealthy will continue to stimulate the German electrical and machinery based sectors. I'd cast doubt on that, they probably already have Miele appliances in every one of their homes, all the BMWs and Mercedes they need for when the supercar is inconvenient. Unless they are in the market for a submarine there isn't really much more they can do to drive demand. It is likely the middle classes, and the newly rich middle classes abroad who are driving German exports. What matters far more is that the unions are essentially asking for a temporary 20% pay increase (plus a 6% permanent one) for two years every so often. Making the, not unreasonable, assumption that pay is a major component of manufacturing costs that would suggest that if the world economy falters (consider Brexit, Trump, southern Eurozone issues, a war on the Korean Peninsula, Iranian protests) German manufacturers might suddenly find themselves very uncompetitive.
- majewsky 9y ago
  I think you're missing the point, and you actually agree with grandparent. When people point to extreme wealth inequality, they usually argue that redistribution of wealth will give said money to people who actually use it to consume, thereby getting it back into circulation and benefitting their local economy.
  - kermitfrog 9y ago
    Hi, I'm Rich Factory Owner. If you take my profits and redistribute it among the people to consume, that's a great opportunity for me and my buddies to raise prices to make up for the difference!
    - RodericDay 9y ago
      Here's where the much-admired free market would kick in and stop you from hiking them up too much.
    - dane-pgp 9y ago
      Is your argument that governments should do more to stop illegal price-setting cartels? If so, I agree with you.
danbruc 9y ago
One of the Oxfam reports [1] states »The 1,810 dollar billionaires on the 2016 Forbes list, 89% of whom are men, own $6.5 trillion – as much wealth as the bottom 70% of humanity«. Let's assume they accumulated all this wealth in just 10 years, how much better off could everyone have been if we evenly spread the money instead of putting it into the pockets of just 1,810 people? If we spread it across all 7.6 billion people over 10 years everyone would receive $85.25 per year or $7.12 per month or $0.23 per day. So while the rich are really rich they are also very few and in consequence spreading the wealth among the many poor has a much smaller impact than many expect without doing the math. I am not saying that it would have no impact, it could probably lift the about 20% of the world population still living in extreme poverty - $1.90 or less per day - above the extreme poverty line if spread among them but it certainly wouldn't make everyone on Earth rich. If you do the math for other scenarios, for example calculate how much better of all the employees of a company could be if the top executives would just receive average wages, you almost always get similar results. That still doesn't mean that I am okay with such situations, far from. I think more equality would be a good thing on its own even if the difference for most people would be relatively small. [1] https://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/publications/an-economy-for-the-99-its-time-to-build-a-human-economy-that-benefits-everyone-620170 https://policy-practice.oxfam.org.uk/publications/an-economy...
- petra 9y ago
  Haven't Bill Gates shown what these kinds of money could buy for billions ? isn't it a fairer approach to judge such things ?
  - danbruc 9y ago
    They certainly helped to improve the situation of many but I am not sure that they managed to affect a billion people. And you can certainly do a lot of good with a couple of billion dollar but you can not make really many rich. And that was my main point, the wealth of the very top is not what makes the poor poor just due to an uneven wealth distribution.
- pishpash 9y ago
  There are many ways to spread it evenly. You can build infrastructure, or make loans and investments to capital-constrained communities, etc.
soccerz 9y ago
You cannot expect me to make responsible decisions so long as non-normal distributions are allowed to exist!

pgeorgi 9y ago

There are more than enough measures available to employers in Germany in bad times (eg Kurzarbeit, "short work", which all but saved the German economy in 2008), so bad times needn't be an argument for restricting participation in the wealth of good times.