No, Ben has hardly had any good experiences with the job center so far. Several attempts were made to sanction him, says the 39-year-old from Cologne, “for example because of a missed appointment that I never found out about.” He then successfully lodged an appeal, “but not everyone can do that”.
Ben does not want to give his surname publicly, because he is severely obese, he is dependent on a walker and, according to his own statements, is unable to work. He feels badly treated by the job center.
“The culture and the tone in the job center have not changed at all,” he says, referring to a new conflict that arose after his stomach reduction.
Read more about citizen income
“Because of my illness, I am dependent on dietary supplements. However, the job center did not process my application for further approval for months and rejected the additional requirement on the grounds that I did not need one in the previous year and that there was no medical indication. The additional requirement only arises as a result of the stomach reduction.”
Does the citizen money miss its purpose?
The aim of citizen income is actually to avoid such conflicts. The “biggest social reform in 20 years”, as Minister of Labor Hubertus Heil (SPD) calls it, should create more “communication at eye level”; the consultations for the “customers” of the job centers were therefore intensified and the official language simplified.
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The social welfare reform has now been in force for six months. The second stage ignited in early July. An “extended tool box” for various grants, the so-called cooperation plan and new exemption rules, apply from now on.
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That would improve the job opportunities for benefit recipients, says Elena Zavlaris, managing director of the job center in the Berlin district of Tempelhof-Schoeneberg. “It’s easier for you to qualify and continue your education.”
So far, it has been difficult to assess how well citizen income actually works. This is also because there is no quantifiable goal against which achievement or failure could be measured. In addition to the increased standard rates, the focus is more on “activation” through incentives – and the associated cultural change.
This is easy to observe in Berlin, even outside the job centers. The management strives for a more open and positive image: Away from the dusty authorities to be closer to the citizens, as Lutz Mania, head of the job center in Mitte, puts it. This is not ordered by politics, emphasizes the head of the authorities in an interview with WELT. Rather, one wants to react to the negative perception in the population.
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In a survey from March, only 0.6 percent of Berliners rated the job centers as “very good”; 6.7 percent as “rather positive”. The employees therefore now organize stands at street festivals and appear as sponsors at the Special Olympics. They are also involved in the course of “Pride Month”, a poster in the Mitte job center shows the head of the authority, Mania, standing next to a rainbow flag and showing a “thumbs up”. “The job centers want to relax,” wrote the “Tagesspiegel” about the image change.
The coming months will show whether more people will find work as a result of the basic income. In Berlin alone, as of May, 453,586 people are counted as so-called beneficiaries of standard benefits. 326,424 of them – i.e. almost 72 percent – are “employable”, i.e. could work. And it is important to get these people out of need and into the labor market with better qualifications, as Heil puts it. “We have to provide even more intensive advice and support, especially in cases of social hardship,” says Mania.
The problem: the majority of service recipients do not even show up for advice. “On a good day, maybe half come,” says Mania. Does more mildness and accommodation really help? He’s convinced. “The stigma is gone now. If someone doesn’t come to the appointment, we have to go again. The tools we have now are helping.”
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Mania reports on home visits where people didn’t understand the letter from the job center due to a lack of language skills or didn’t even open the mail for weeks. They are often people who suffer from depression, are addicted to drugs or have slipped into crime. He doesn’t want to give up on these people.
Citizens’ income now enshrines individual support – so-called coaching – for people with psychological or family problems by law. Financial incentives such as the further training allowance and the elimination of the placement priority should also bring more motivation.
Instead of accepting the next best temporary job, a long-term qualification can be opted for. Mania tries to put citizen money in a positive light. “The thing has huge chances. The law contains things that the job centers themselves have been demanding for years.”
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Helena Steinhaus, on the other hand, who helps recipients of social assistance in conflicts with the job center with her association “Sanktionsfrei”, can hardly see any improvements. “From our point of view, nothing has changed. The money is not enough to live on,” she says to WELT. The power imbalance between the job center and benefit recipients has also remained. “There can be no question of eye level.”
After the end of the Covid-related moratorium, Steinhaus observed an increase in sanctions again. In addition, only new recipients would benefit from some of the regulations of the new citizens’ allowance, such as the waiting period for looking for a job, paying rent and protecting assets. “The new waiting period makes no difference for people who are already receiving unemployment benefit 2.”
Berlin alone spends 460 million euros a year on so-called integration measures. This actually leads many people back into the labor market – but not even every second person succeeds. In the capital, the graduation rate is currently around 30 to 38 percent. Mania speaks of “air up”. The proportion is now set to increase, for example through new incentives such as the further training bonus, which is awarded for successful intermediate and final examinations and is intended to prevent dropouts.
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The job centers need more money for all of this – but paradoxically, an involuntary austerity plan is soon to come. “The job centers are chronically underfunded when it comes to administration costs,” says Stefan Graaf, spokesman for the federal network of job centers.
Authority should save, but can not
A parliamentary question from the Union faction, which was first reported on by the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, shows that the budget funds that flow into the integration of the unemployed have fallen by a good 300 million euros to around 4.5 billion euros compared to the previous year. There is a slight plus for the administration of the job centers: 5.25 billion euros are available; 49 million euros more than in the previous year.
For basic security for the unemployed, however, the Federal Employment Agency has to make do with 700 million euros less, as its boss Andrea Nahles says. At the same time, their own costs are rising, for example due to inflation or because wage increases cause the wages of their own workforce to rise. For many job centers, this means they have to move money that was actually planned for the integration of long-term unemployed to cover administrative costs.
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However, the citizen income increases the amount of work – and with it the costs. “Many cases are complicated, the consultation effort has increased,” says Mania. Communication is not always easy: 46 percent of job center customers in Berlin have a foreign passport. Visiting people at home is also personnel-intensive. Two employees always set off together.
And the staff is actually already scarce. 6109 employees are currently working for the Berlin job center – that is 46 fewer than a year ago. “We would like to have more staff stability,” says Mania cautiously. In plain language, this means for the balance sheet: the innovations should bring simplifications, but initially mean more effort.
“We’re going for less bureaucracy,” Minister Heil recently announced. In reality, on the other hand, the number of documentation and billing has increased, as Mania reports. “The documentation requirement is very complex”.
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This is also reflected in the finances. The budget of the Berlin job center this year is 947 million euros – just over half are administrative costs. And new challenges are already in store. In addition to the second stage of the citizens’ allowance, other tasks have been added – such as the processing of housing benefit applications, which the job centers have also been taking on since the beginning of the year.
“I see a limit to resilience,” says Christina Ramb, Chair of the Board of Directors of the Federal Employment Agency. In recent years, there have been millions of applications for short-time work benefits during the pandemic, tasks related to the payment of child benefits and the care of refugees from Ukraine. “We have become the federal agency for everything,” criticizes Ramb.
After all, digitization saves capacities at least in some places. With a digital mailbox, the job centers and their customers can now deal with correspondence online, including queries and late submissions, instead of sending letters back and forth. The application for citizen’s income can also be submitted digitally, and other functions have been added to the Federal Employment Agency’s app. In the coming years, millions more are to be invested in digitization and automation.
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