Press Release No. 42/2015 IG Metall: “Bureaucracy Curb” Must Not Become a Deregulation Offensive

Frankfurt am Main – IG Metall has warned that the accompanying “one in, one out” rule in the recently passed Bureaucracy Relief Act opens the back door to a paradigm shift. “‘One in, one out’ slows down or even stifles social and technological innovations. The sustainable social and economic benefits of regulation-driven innovation cannot be measured by the compliance costs of a law,” said Detlef Wetzel, President of IG Metall, on Wednesday in Frankfurt. “The legislature seems to have forgotten that social regulation is a constitutional mandate.” The union leader criticized business lobbyists and employers’ associations for their intention to use the “bureaucracy brake” to launch a deregulation offensive. “The BDA is already signaling that regulations governing contract work and temporary staffing must be streamlined. We will not accept that,” said Wetzel.

“By law, it is no longer substantive and sector-specific policy that determines the appropriateness of measures, but solely the cost to the company—that is à la carte employer policy and is not appropriate for government work committed to the common good,” said Jörg Hofmann, Second Chairman of IG Metall. Legislative proposals would thus be subject to a blanket suspicion of bureaucratic costs, without considering what benefits or improvements are associated with a given law. This would also affect regulations on employee participation, occupational safety, and health protection. “If we had been bound by this straitjacket during the 2009 crisis response, hundreds of thousands of jobs would have been at risk, and the very foundation of German industry would have been called into question,” said Hofmann.

Accompanying the recently passed Bureaucracy Relief Act, the Federal Cabinet has established the “one in, one out” rule, under which burdens on the economy resulting from new legislative and regulatory proposals must be offset elsewhere by equivalent measures within one year.