Protest in Berlin

Old Karl Marx would surely have been happy to see them:
on the boulevard named in his honor, the Karl Marx
Allee in what was once East Berlin, at countless buses
were lined up in good, German-orderly rows. Though they
were tourist buses of every size, color and advertising
slogan, their passengers were not tourists, but union
members, about 200,000 of them. They looked happy
enough, especially when they climbed out, often after
five, six and more hours on the road and pre-dawn
departures. But they were angry all the same, angry
enough to make the trip and join this giant crowd,
which was matched by about 100,000 each in the
northwestern city of Cologne and the southwestern city
of Stuttgart.

The demonstration near Berlin’s famous Brandenburg Gate
was to register their protest. It was an irony that the
government they were protesting about was not made up
of right-wing parties, but rather a coalition between
the Social Democratic Party, for which most of them
certainly voted, and the once leftwing Greens. The
Social Democrats, led by Gerhard Schroeder, were first
voted in because of the right-wing policies of Helmut
Kohl’s government, and reelected because Schroeder and
the Greens’ Fischer opposed involvement in the Iraq
war. But now they were cutting deeper and deeper into
all the gains won by working people in years and
decades of struggle, some going all the way back to
Chancellor Bismarck in the 1880’s.

First there was medical insurance, the pride of
Germany’s working people, still far ahead of the
rip-off methods in the USA, but now being cut, piece by
piece, with new fees for visits to doctors and
dentists, with steadily rising prices for medicine,
hospital care, eyeglasses, hearing aids, dentures. Then
there were the pensions, also ahead of US social
security, but steadily eroding with stagnant rates but
new charges, which, for those with the smallest
pensions, were beginning to prove disastrous.

Most alarming, perhaps, were the cuts in jobless
insurance, planned for the coming year, which will
drastically cut payments to those unemployed for longer
periods, forcing them down to welfare levels - and
threatening to cut all payments unless they are willing
to take any job offered them, no matter how unrelated
to their trade and how badly paid. At the same time,
previous safeguards against getting fired have been
reduced, making jobs less secure than ever. With
approximately 4 1/2 million unemployed currently - the
official figures - pressures are building up from all
directions.

To make matters even worse, state and municipal
employers are now demanding a longer work week - up
from the 38 1/2 hours achieved in past years and going
back to 40 or even 42 hours. Social Democrat party
leaders are joining these attacks. The right-wing
oppositional parties are demanding that a longer work
week should also become the rule in private industry.
"We must all make sacrifices," they say, and claim that
somehow this would help reduce the unemployment
figures. Even here, Schroeder and other government
leaders have totally failed to contradict them.

While some of the demonstrators came from the Hamburg,
Lubeck and Hanover areas of northwestern Germany, the
greatest number were from the east, the area of the
former German Democratic Republic, where a huge
proportion of the industrial base was closed down right
after German unification. Thus, while unemployment in
Germany as a whole is close to 10 percent, it is nearly
double that in the East, and in some areas 25 percent
and more, causing emigration to the west at an alarming
rate, especially by young people who see few chances at
home of learning a trade or getting a job.

Some of those demonstrating recalled that in the "bad
old German Democratic Republic", constantly denounced
in the media even thirteen years after its demise,
there were neither unemployment nor any medical fees,
and there was almost total job security.

Chancellor Schroeder and his associates have publicly
decided to ignore the protests. All their so-called
"reforms" are necessary, they claim, if Germany is to
maintain its status in the world economic scene, and if
big companies are to be dissuaded from moving eastwards
where wages are far lower. The same threat is being
used all over Western Europe, but increasingly in
Eastern Europe too, with the resulting attacks on wages
and social welfare all over the continent.

A threatened breakaway from the Social Democratic Party
by disgruntled members, especially in the union
movement, is still in the discussion stage, with
Schroeder and his partners issuing dire warnings
against any members involved. The Party of Democratic
Socialism, which opposes the Schroeder "reforms," is
currently represented in the Bundestag by only two
delegates, and the party is partially limited by its
participation with the Social Democrats in two state
governments. It still represents a threat, in East
Germany especially, however, which helps explain why
big flags with its initials, waved in front of the
speakers’ platform during the demonstration, were
carefully cut out of national TV news reports.

Although the road ahead seemed rocky enough, the
protests marked a new level of activity and
independence by the unions, who were closely allied to
the Social Democratic Party in the past.
Dissatisfaction is growing rapidly in the country, the
polls show a severe drop in popularity for the Social
Democrats - now about 29 percent - and it is becoming
increasingly difficult to ignore the anger. The button
worn by most participants said "Aufstehen" - "Stand up"
– and many observed that although results of the
protests were uncertain, they certainly had a greater
chance to achieve changes by standing up and fighting
than by resigning to their fate.

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