BERLIN, May 14 (Xinhua) -- German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has suggested the minimum wage in the country should be raised to 15 euros (16.18 U.S. dollars) per hour over the next two years.
He made the statement in an interview with local magazine Stern on Tuesday. According to current plans, the minimum hourly wage in Europe's largest economy will only be raised from 12.41 euros to 12.82 euros. A special commission, in which both trade unions and employers are represented, was set up in 2015 to determine the minimum wage increases.
Scholz criticized that some of the commission's members "have unfortunately broken with the social partnership tradition of deciding by mutual agreement." Employers had insisted on minimal increases which was "breaking taboo," he said.
Fulfilling a central election promise, the German government introduced a statuary minimum wage of 12 euros back in 2022. With this step "we have thus created the biggest salary improvement in years for employees in the low-wage sector," Scholz said.
Germany's second largest trade union Verdi has also been calling for a minimum wage of 15 euros, referring to an EU directive stipulating a minimum wage of 60 percent of the median income. "Millions of employees, the majority of them women, live on the minimum wage," Verdi said.
According to the union, the planned increase of 41 cents was not enough. "As average wages will continue to rise, we need a minimum wage of 15 euros an hour in 2026," Verdi Chairman Frank Werneke said recently in a statement.
Due to the continuous minimum wage increases, the gap between low and high incomes in Europe's largest economy is slowly narrowing, the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) said at the end of April.
At 36.48 euros per hour, the top 10 percent of high earners in Germany take home just less than three times as much as the bottom tenth. In previous years, the wage ratio had been slightly higher at around 3.3.
A clear majority of Germans also favor a higher minimum wage. According to a Forsa survey, 57 percent support a minimum wage of 15 euros per hour, while 38 percent would leave it at the planned increase. (1 euro = 1.08 U.S. dollar)
