Left party urges "East Summit" for wage equalization in the East
Employees in the West earn an average of 3752 euros. In the East, the average is only 3157 euros. The East-West pay gap is still significant more than 30 years after reunification. Dietmar Bartsch calls on Olaf Scholz to make wage equalization a top priority.
The left-wing parliamentary group in the Bundestag has called for an "East Summit" in view of the persistent wage differences between East and West Germany. Federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz must take up the matter, parliamentary group leader Dietmar Bartsch told the Funke Mediengruppe newspapers. "The issue of wage harmonization must urgently become a top priority if the frustration in the East is not to boil over."
East German employees are still second-class workers in many areas. According to the remuneration statistics of the Federal Employment Agency (BA), the average gross monthly salary of full-time employees subject to social security contributions in eastern Germany was almost 600 euros lower than in western Germany at the end of 2022. The so-called median salary was 3752 euros in the old federal states and 3157 euros in the new federal states.
Smaller companies and fewer collective agreements in the east
According to the BA, the reasons for the differences, some of which are considerable, are likely to include company size, industry structure and collective bargaining coverage. At 30.5 percent, the proportion of employees in companies with 250 or more employees in relation to all employees was lower in eastern Germany than in the west (37.3 percent). Collective bargaining coverage in the east is also significantly lower. At state level, according to the BA statistics, the range in western Germany was from 4127 euros in Hamburg to 3385 euros in Schleswig-Holstein and in eastern Germany from 3806 euros in Berlin to 2935 euros in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.
Differences were even more pronounced in districts and independent cities: The highest median salary was achieved in Ingolstadt in Bavaria (5282 euros), the lowest in the district of Görlitz in Saxony (2650). The "median" divides the surveyed values into two equally sized groups and is less susceptible to individual particularly high values than the average. The pay of 50 percent of employees is therefore below the median, while that of the other half is above.
Significantly fewer special payments than in the West
This mean value does not take into account outliers such as the salaries of high earners. The arithmetic mean, on the other hand, divides the total income by the number of full-time employees, which means that a salary in the millions can statistically compensate for many lower salaries.
According to figures released by the Federal Statistical Office in the summer, employees in eastern Germany earned an average of 13,000 euros less per year than their colleagues in the west. The average gross annual salary for full-time employees in the west was therefore 58,085 euros in 2022, compared to 45,070 euros in the east. This is also due to special payments, which are almost twice as high on average in the West and have recently risen faster than in the East.
Read also:
The left-wing advocacy for an "East Summit" highlights the need to address the ongoing issue of wage disparities between eastern and western Germany, where average earnings in the east are significantly lower than in the west. This discrepancy, persisting nearly 3 decades post-reunification, has led The Left to appeal to Chancellor Scholz for prioritizing wage equalization.
In light of the continuing pay gap, eastern Germany can be regarded as a region where contentment with wages is hard to come by for many employees. Analysis by the Bundesagentur für Arbeit reveals that eastern German employees frequently find themselves in lower-paying industries and companies with fewer collective agreements, contributing to the significant wage differences between the regions.
Source: www.ntv.de
