Just last week, Mercedes-Benz announced billions in profit for 2022. At the same time, the car company applied for short-time work for its plant in Bremen – 700 employees are said to be affected for eleven days in March. The outrage is great. But the company rejects the criticism.
Mercedes-Benz has applied for short-time work for its plant in Bremen. This was confirmed by a group spokeswoman for the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” (F.A.Z.). According to the works council, around 700 employees will be affected for more than 11 working days from the beginning of March. In view of the double-digit billions in profits that the group announced last week, this is met with outrage: “Short-time work and billions in profits do not go together,” said Dennis Radtke, deputy chairman of the CDU social wing, the newspaper. Short-time work should be used to keep skilled workers in the company in difficult times. “Using public funds to maximize profits is indecent.”
According to a company spokesman, Mercedes employees received short-time work benefits in the double-digit millions last year. He defended the group aggressively against the criticism: The short-time work benefits are financed from unemployment insurance funds, in which Mercedes and its employees have participated for decades. “From 2010 to March 2020, Mercedes-Benz employees did not receive any short-time work benefits. In the last 10 years, employees and the company have paid a low single-digit billion amount into unemployment insurance.” Mercedes paid 3.3 billion euros in income taxes alone in 2021, and a similar amount is expected for the past year. A large part of this is in Germany.
The labor market economist and head of the Bonn Institute for the Future of Work Simon Jäger criticized the data situation for short-time work. “We’re flying completely blind in Germany because we don’t have the data.” In addition to the desired insurance effect, there is a deadweight effect because some employees would not have been laid off anyway, and a reallocation effect because the employees do not move to other companies. “There are these three effects and we don’t know how big they are,” he laments.
