Agency Report –
A lower minimum wage for seasonal workers in German agriculture would constitute discrimination under both national and European law, a spokesman for the Labour Ministry said on Wednesday.
Ahead of a key agricultural summit this week in Berlin, the president of the German Farmers’ Association, Joachim Rukwied, has proposed that seasonal workers should receive 80% of the statutory minimum wage, as their lives are not based in Germany.
Rukwied warned in the Rheinische Post newspaper on Monday that a hike of the minimum wage to €15 ($17.40) per hour, as planned under the new government’s coalition agreement, would endanger the livelihoods of many “vegetable, fruit and wine farms.”
A decision on raising the minimum wage from the current €12.82 per hour is expected by the independent commission responsible on Friday.
Agriculture Minister Alois Rainer told the Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland media group that experts “are examining whether there is a legally secure way to make exceptions to the minimum wage possible.”
However, the Labour Ministry spokesman on Wednesday told the Tagesspiegel newspaper that there were no plans for exceptions to the minimum wage under the coalition agreement between the centre-left Social Democrats and Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s conservative bloc.
