German Unions and the Working Poor
Ever since Shipler’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Working Poor: Invisible in America (2004), the term working poor has entered the realm beyond industrial sociology.
Put rather simply, the working poor are workers whose income has fallen below the poverty line. They work but remain under the poverty threshold. They work but are poor – these are the working poor.
In Germany, these are workers with an income of €12.50 [$13] in 2022. These workers make up a whopping 19% of all workers in this country – almost every fifth job.
In a long-awaited and very recent decision, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) on November 11, 2025, only partially upheld Denmark’s lawsuit and annulled two provisions in the EU Minimum Wage Directive.
These were criteria for determining and updating wages, and a provision that prevents a reduction in wages. According to the judgment, the EU’s Minimum Wage Directive stands.
German trade unions were relieved by the ECJ’s explanations on the application of the EU Minimum Wage Directive. It is clear that European governments remain obliged to decisively improve collective bargaining. Germany’s government has to do some homework. Three tasks are issued for Germany to beef up low wages:
- Laws to support the working poor must come without restrictions.
- More generally binding collective agreements (the Allgemeinverbindlichkeitserklärung or AVE) are needed. An AVE is a very specific peculiarity of German labor law. According to German law, such an AVE is issued in accordance with §5 of Germany’s Collective Agreement Act. It means that a collective bargaining agreement becomes binding for all employers and employees not previously bound by collective agreements within an industry and the scope of a collective agreement. In other words, an AVE extends a collective bargaining agreement to all workers in an industry.
- Working and labor relations without collective bargaining or an AVE must finally come to an end.
Since German collective agreements cover significantly less than 80% of all workers, Germany’s government is obliged to finally submit an action plan to increase collective bargaining rights.
The EU’s Minimum Wage Directive is intended to protect workers from poverty and to promote appropriate minimum wages and collective bargaining standards. The EU still does not set a minimum wage, but it does provide – among other things – a reference point of 60% of a median wage. This should guide EU member states.
Germany’s minimum wage will increase in 2026: €13.90 per hour (January 1, 2026) and €14.60 (January 1, 2027) – even though German trade unions argued that it requires €15 per hour. This was not quite reached. A survey conducted by Forsa (June 2025) showed that two thirds (66%) of Germans support a minimum wage of €15 ($17.50].
Overall, the balance sheet for Germany over the past 10 years is rather modest compared to other EU countries. Germany’s low-income workers have benefited in particular. In East Germany, the increase has been substantial. The minimum wage has helped reduce wage inequalities across various regions of Germany.
This is by no means self-starting. If there are only small increases, as is currently the case, this weakens the positive effect of the minimum wage. Stronger increases are needed.
While wage development in the lower income range almost stagnated between 2008 and 2013, there were significant increases after the introduction of the minimum wage in 2015, especially in Eastern Germany.
The working poor in Germany are not just individual cases. There is a structure of low-wage employment in Germany. Those affected by low wages are not a homogeneous group. On the contrary, certain employment groups carry a particularly high risk of earning only a low hourly wage.
This is particularly pronounced among mini-jobbers at 80.8% of a full income. They have a much higher low-wage risk than full-time workers. The next groups are part-time workers. At about 23.8%, women have a higher low-wage risk than men at 14.6%. Temporary employees are significantly more often affected by low wages, and the same applies to non-permanent employees.
Age also continues to influence the risk of low wages. About half of all workers under the age of 25 earn an hourly wage below the low-wage threshold. For older workers – over the age of 54 – the low-wage risk is slightly above average at just under 22%. Migrant workers also face an above-average low-wage risk at 29.5%.
On the other hand, workers with an academic degree (8%) have a significantly lower risk of low wages than workers with vocational training. However, workers with other qualifications carry a much higher risk of low wages.
Despite the high low-wage risk among low-skilled workers, 57% of low-wage earners had completed vocational training and another 14% even had a university degree. The vast majority of low-wage workers had a medium or high skill level. A little more than one quarter of low-wage workers have no formal qualification.
Women accounted for around 60% of all low-wage employees. The majority of low-wage earners come from the middle-age groups (25–54 years: 54%). However, the share of older people (from age 54) is 29.5%.
Low-wage jobs in Germany are by no means limited to part-time employees and mini-jobbers. Most of Germany’s low-paid workers have completed vocational training, are employed on an indefinite basis, or work full-time. This indicates that low-wage jobs are by no means confined to the fringe. Instead, these workers at the very bottom can be found in standard forms of employment. In other words, the precariat is advancing into standard employment.
While being part of Germany’s low-wage sector, migrant workers assure the prosperity of Germany. Yet even cleaners struggle for dignity. These migrant workers – while ensuring Germany’s prosperity – live in barracks and sleep in their cars. Those who are cheated out of their wages are threatened and beaten. Recently, Germany’s influential “Deutschlandradio” called it “Germany, Your Slaves” – Deutschland, Deine Sklaven.
Migrant workers in Germany’s low-wage sector are considered invisible. They are confined to the lowest level of the pyramid. Capitalism produces a hierarchical labor market, hierarchical workplace structures, and hierarchical work regimes.
Yet, in Germany’s low-wage sectors, it is the migrant who makes the hotel beds, washes towels, cleans offices, brushes toilets, sterilizes surgery theatres, works as a window cleaner, labors in aged-care facilities, empties rubbish bins, and cares for the elderly and the lodgers. Low-paid migrant workers dig up asparagus, harvest strawberries, and pick apples.
They build apartments, pave sidewalks, clean universities, wash your car, clean street furniture, deliver parcels, cool airline food, and scrub shopping-mall floors. They slaughter pigs, cut up chickens, flip burgers, make kebabs, do the checkout at petrol stations, and disassemble turkeys.
They wash and care for old people who are no longer able to do it themselves. They rush through warehouses and deliver the pizza, jeans, and Christmas presents.
Behind these statistics are real lives and real work situations of migrants who labor in different industries in Germany’s low-wage sector. Just as Pulitzer Prize winner Shipler says in Invisible in America, those who clean up Germany’s Stadtbild and feed Germany’s growing number of elderly in care homes are Germany’s invisibles – they have no voice.
Yet they come from Poland, Bulgaria, Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, and many other countries.
Even though Germans often do not see them – or do not want to see them – migrants work in many industries, including construction and slaughterhouses, assuring that even the neo-Nazi AfD voter can have his beloved Schnitzel and Hackbraten, as well as keeping Germany’s infamous Autobahn highways free of snow and ice.
Virtually all of this underpins Germany’s position as one of the world’s great economies – third place after the USA and China. Measured by GDP, it stands at 5 trillion US dollars (2025).
Meanwhile, corporate managers have invented a sheer endless number of employment-contracts to ensure low-wage workers remain confined to the precariat – outsourcing and subcontracting being only two examples. They work in what Germany’s foremost investigative journalist, Günter Wallraff, called in 1983 Ganz Unten – “down there.” The condition of Germany’s working poor is by no means a new issue.
Then as now, working conditions are defined – impressively and comprehensively – by discrimination, racism, xenophobia, fear, fraud, wage theft, violence, and human trafficking. This is part of everyday life in Germany’s low-wage sector and for far too many migrant workers.
Many of those affected live in the shade – far removed from the glittery world of the neoliberal “winner takes it all” society. Germany’s working poor slog along – often under very poor, unhygienic, illness-causing, and inhumane conditions.
They live in cramped, sometimes unsanitary accommodation, working in areas where occupational safety regulations are given little consideration. Thanks to the triumph of the neoliberal anti-state, “less bureaucracy,” “eliminate red tape,” etc. ideology, workplace inspections are rare, if they happen at all.
Meanwhile, health insurance is often insufficient, irregular, or simply non-existent. No help in the case of illness or accident. More often than not, the boundaries between legal and illegal business are blurred – this too is nothing new in capitalism, as Friedrich Engels noted in his 1844 classic on the condition of the working class, generally defined by exploitation.
This occurs not just in the mentioned industries, but reflects structural conditions that are, seemingly, very difficult to change, as the working poor are hit with a triple whammy:
- Education: poor education (not knowing their rights);
- Insecurity: frequent job changes due to high insecurity; and
- Threats: threats by their bosses – which, in the case of migrant workers, include threats of deportation.
Yet there are strategies of open and covert resistance, such as:
- Evidence: collecting evidence (wagetheftisacrime.com, photographing timesheets, etc.);
- Online: exchanging information via WhatsApp groups or Facebook forums;
- Information: gathering information on minimum-wage law;
- Unions: calling local trade unions or NGOs (e.g., Amnesty International); and
- Solidarity: creating solidarity among co-workers – what Pyotr Kropotkin once called “mutual aid.”
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