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Ten years on: Eastern Germany still awaits transition
from brown coal to “Blühen Landschaften”
Ten years after reunification, the differences between living standards in West and East Germany are still considerable. The hopes of many people in the eastern lands of a quick transition from drab Communism to the promised “Blühende Landschaften”,or “flowering landscapes”, have failed to materialize. Still, for many former East Germans, working and living conditions have improved: freely chosen employment, freedom of association and better protection against invalidity and illness for older people.
UECKERMÜNDE, Germany - This former East German town has smartened itself up, like someone replacing a depressing grey smock with a stylish new suit of clothes.
The market square is newly paved with red bricks, the shops lining its sides gleaming from a fresh coat of paint.
On the nearby coastal beach of this small, northeastern village in the Federal Republic, large quantities of fine sand have turned the Oderhaff lagoon from a brackish backwater into a broad beach beckoning summer visitors from Berlin.
Ueckermünde not only looks better, it is better. Bordering the crystal beach, once-crumbling facades and dreary state storefronts have given way to new housing and smartly dressed shop windows. Inside, shelves groan with consumer goods which shoppers could have only dreamed about ten years ago.
Change, but was it good?
When Herbert Quade walks past all this on his way to the yacht harbour, the sparkling glass facades of the new "Cultural Centre" built in the 1990s, remind him that a great deal has changed since Germany's reunification ten years ago.
Today Mr.Quade is a pensioner with plenty of time to spend - at long last - on sailing his small boat. As chairman of the works council after the changeover of 1989, he spent seven years fighting for the survival of VEGU, the "West Pomeranian Ironworks". The struggle paid off - the works are still there, if under another name.
In the days of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), VEGU, a manufacturer of cast-iron parts, had been the largest employer in the area, with its workforce of 1,200. In 1990, a year after the changeover and immediately before the introduction of the West German Deutschmark (DM), most of the old social facilities at the works had been abolished and the workforce had been reduced by about 200. At that time, Herbert Quade had voiced the fear that a further 200 might have to go.
What actually happened was worse, far worse. In 1995, after several changes in ownership and several waves of dismissals, the company was employing only 250 persons - and was still the largest employer in the small town on the Oderhaff lagoon. A year later, 75 more jobs had disappeared and definitive closure seemed to be only a matter of time. When Quade retired in 1996, only 85 of his workmates, men and women, were left behind in a highly insecure situation.
Salvation came in early 1999, in the form of "Intermet GMBH", a subsidiary of an American group of companies, with headquarters at Neunkirchen in the Saarland in Western Germany. The firm, specializing in half-finished cast-iron parts for the automobile industry,wanted to develop its capacity; it bought the works, then on the very brink of the abyss, and put it back on its feet.
Today, what was once the VEGU is called "Intermet Ueckermünde" and, with a workforce of around 150, continues to be the largest commercial employer in the infrastructure-deficient area. A certain amount of recruiting still goes on. Herbert Quade has reason to be proud of his many years of committed effort. The company has survived - unlike most other enterprises of the old GDR economy.
Global dialogue on the future of work
The ILO at EXPO 2000 In a speech to the world on 3 October, the tenth anniversary of German
reunification, ILO Director-General Juan Somavia reminded his audience that
there is a “global decent work deficit”. The address was part of the ILO’s
contribution to the Global Dialogue on “Future Works - Labour, Sustainable
Business and Social Responsibility” from 2 to 5 October at the World
Exhibition 2000 in Hanover, Germany.
HANOVER - With, over 3,000 people a day dying because of work-related accidents and diseases, one-third of the world’s labour force either unemployed or underemployed, 90 per cent of the working age population having inadequate social protection and half the world’s population living on less than two dollars a day, ILO Director-General Juan Somavia said here recently we must reduce this worldwide “decent work deficit”.
He expressed a strong belief that decent work is possible: “Some may think decent work for all is a dream. I would simply remind them that today we celebrate the tenth anniversary of a dream that many believed could not be realized...German reunification.”
The Director-General advocated policies and solutions “that improve the lives of ordinary people and their families” and “institutions and policies at the global level which promote and reflect common values and goals”. He asked for leadership in the multilateral system and in civil society: “Governments have to look beyond the next election. Enterprises have to look beyond the bottom line. Unions have to look beyond the next negotiation, nongovernmental organizations have to look beyond the next demonstration, and international organizations have to look beyond their bureaucratic interests.”
Juan Somavia insisted that the basic rights in the ILO Declaration on Fundamental Principles and Rights at Work “are valid in all countries at whatever stage of development, from the sweatshops and ‘inner cities’ of the North to the shanty towns...of the South.” According to the Director-General, these rights “are not dependent on an economic justification - they stand on their own - but in general they are good for productivity, too”.
The speech was followed by a discussion with prominent representatives of the world of work and the academic community, including Ursula Engelen-Kefer, vice-chairperson of the German Trade Union Federation, Club of Rome member Patrick Liedtke, and Raymond-Pierre Bodin, Director of the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions. The presence of the German TV channel “Deutsche Welle” assured a worldwide audience for the speech and the debate.
A series of workshops co-organized by the ILO addressed salient contemporary issues of employment and work. Participants discussed to what extent social dialogue leads to better labour market outcomes. Exemplary initiatives to combat unemployment, and innovative forms of social dialogue and collective bargaining were presented by academics, government officials, representatives from workers’ and employers’ organizations, NGOs and the ILO.
Future of Work - Future of Women’s Labour
The future of women’s labour and the role of affirmative employment policies at the enterprise, national and international levels were other topical issues. In spite of higher and more visible female labour participation worldwide, a “decent work deficit” for women persists. Promising new approaches to improving women’s access to quality work and to reducing social exclusion should involve all levels of society. The discussions in the workshops highlighted the positive effects of enabling national equality policies, including monitoring mechanisms, strengthening social responsibilities of the business community, developing solidarity networks among vulnerable groups of women, and fostering a broad social dialogue on gender equality, as a strong pillar of their development agenda.
New country, old story
The story of the pensioner Herbert Quade and "his company" is a run-of-the-mill East German story. The transformation of the economic system and of a whole system of values which took place ten years ago has changed almost everything in the lives of former citizens of the GDR.
Despite the billions of DM pumped in by way of subsidies, the 1990s saw East German industry collapse practically across the board. Unemployment exploded. Almost every East German has had a spell of unemployment since the changeover. For many it meant the final farewell to active life.
In the early 1990s the number of persons in employment fell from 11 million to the present level of about 6.7 million. Of about 2 million jobs in East Germany's metal industry, only 300,000 are left today. The downward trend has only been halted in the past two years. Today, for the first time since the changeover, there is a slight upturn. But unemployment in Eastern Germany, amounting as it does to 16.6 per cent of the active population (1.3 million), is still roughly twice the West German figure. Some 400,000 persons are covered by job creation schemes and retraining projects of various kinds.
Germany today offers an ambivalent picture of an integrating economy and a society whose two halves have not fully overcome its mental divisions. Economic differences between West and East continue to be appreciable. Although the trade unions have sought to align East German salaries with those in the West for years, real take-home pay for workers in the East remains 20 to 30 per cent below that of their counterparts in the West, while the work week is longer by as much as one or two hours. Of course, this is not an easy task if we consider the ongoing considerable backlogs in production. Experts agree that this gap between East and West may be closed during the coming decade.
Traces of the past are still to be seen everywhere - in spite of the smartened-up city centres and the bright new paint of refurbished cities, such as Leipzig, Halle or Berlin. The broken windows of many industrial ruins remind one of the collapse of an entire national economy.
In residential areas, many grey, undecorated houses which were characteristic of the East German townscape remain untouched and unimproved. Many are also uninhabited and left to ruin. The unwashed windows of these empty dwellings are symbolic of the mass exodus to the West. Hundreds of thousands of people, often young and capable, have left their homes because they could see no future for themselves in East Germany. The population of Ueckermünde, for example, has lost 3,000 of its 15,000 residents. Most of them moved to West Germany.
The other side of the coin is that the East German lands have completed a crash course in the difficult development from an industrial to a service-oriented society. Only 31 per cent of all jobs are now located in the manufacturing industries (as against 34 per cent in West Germany), almost all the rest being in the public or private services sector.
There are signs of an economic upturn in success stories like Stefan Schambach, a young entrepreneur whose e-commerce company "Intershop", with headquarters in the United States, has today given him the status of a "global player". At his German headquarters in Jena (Thuringia), Schambach currently employs 320 persons, most highly skilled. "Jenoptik", also located in Jena, is another example of the successful transformation of an East German industrial undertaking into a modern high-tech enterprise.
Investments by major groups of companies, such as Volkswagen at Mosel or Opel at Eisenach, have created highly productive industrial islands in a region swamped by crises. Yet the dynamic economic upswing of the last two years has largely swept by East Germany because the reconstruction process was less dynamic than expected.
Taken as a whole, East Germany's economic growth is lagging behind the growth rates observed in West Germany. Regions less attractive to tourists, such as Ueckermünde in the northeast or Görlitz in the southeast of the new lands are threatened with desolation.
More beauty, but few buyers
According to Herr Kruse, the head of the economic department of Ueckermünde's municipal board, not a single manufacturing company has set up shop in the city in the past three years. Despite efforts to sell the "flowering landscape" and unspoilt environment to potential investors, large tracts of industrial land outside the city gates, developed at great cost with public funds, are being overgrown with grass.
Herr Kruse has little hope of attracting any new companies in the foreseeable future. And the same is true of most other officials responsible for economic policies in places outside the major agglomerations such as Leipzig and Berlin.
Still, while hopes of an early alignment between East and West German living conditions dwindle, the former works councillor Herbert Quade is enjoying his retirement. He is now 62 years old. Four years ago, when he took early retirement, he was less well-off than he is today.
Not only the company but he, too, was standing on the very brink of an abyss. After recovering from two heart attacks, doctors told him another four years as a works councillor in such troubled times would probably kill him. Today he is content merely to drop in at "his" old company once every few months. He is pleased to see that things there are looking up at last. The success is partly due to him. But he knows what a heavy price he and many of his former workmates have had to pay for it.
For Herr Quade the battle is over. But life goes on. In a few days' time, he says, he will sail his boat in a German-Polish regatta between Ueckermünde and Stettin (Szczeczin) on the mirror-smooth waters of the Oderhaff lagoon. That's something that would have definitely been impossible eleven years ago.
Martin Kempe