The German Civil Service Union (DBB) is demanding significant changes to the proposed salary reform legislation. While the union generally welcomes the reform, it has stated in correspondence with the Federal Interior Ministry, which was reported on by the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung”, that parts of the current draft are unconstitutional.
Federal Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU) announced mid-April plans to raise the entry salaries for federal civil servants. Under the new system, these salaries would bypass the initial experience stage and start directly at the second experience level, a move that the DBB supports.
A major point of contention is the proposed shift in salary calculation. The legislative draft no longer calculates civil servant pay based on the principle of the sole earner. Instead, it assumes that a civil servant’s salary must be sufficient for a four-person household. Going forward, the pay structure will incorporate a presumed partner income of approximately 20,000 euros annually. Civil servant representatives dispute this, pointing out that the partner’s income “cannot be forced upon the civil servant and depends on the actions of third parties”. They argue that such an “arithmetic reduction of the entitlement to maintenance” is inadmissible.
Furthermore, Dobrindt plans to implement pay increases in the B-scale that are less drastic than those proposed for the A-scale. His intention is merely to transfer the wage gains achieved by public service employees to the top-tier civil servants. Consequently, the DBB suggests a critical review of the current salary gaps within the B-scale. Specifically, the planned gap between salary groups B 3 and B 4-set at 1.6 percent-is viewed by the union as incompatible with both the merit principle and the principle of distinct spacing.
The DBB is effectively raising two requirements derived from the Basic Law Constitution: the merit principle (which dictates that the suitability and professional competence of civil servants must be reflected in their pay) and the principle of distinct spacing (which requires minimum gaps between pay grades). Previously, the Constitutional Court had ruled that the principle of distinct spacing was violated if the gaps between groups had narrowed by at least ten percent over the past five years. According to data from the Civil Service Union, this requirement is not met in the B-scale, a detail the Federal Interior Ministry declined to comment on when queried by the newspaper.
