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Compulsory Labor 2.0 – or: How the Welfare State Turns into “Reich Labor Service, Lite”You rub your eyes. Saxony-Anhalt’s designated Minister-President Sven Schulze wants to force welfare recipients into “community service.” 
You rub your eyes. Saxony-Anhalt’s designated Minister-President Sven Schulze wants to force welfare recipients into “community service.” At first that sounds neat, social, and citizen-friendly. In truth, though, it smells suspiciously like the mothballs of the past—and the really old kind. Anyone with historical antennae immediately hears the clanking of spades from the Reich Labor Service. Only today there’s no marching in lockstep, but Excel spreadsheets and CDU press releases. The idea is simple—and dangerous: Anyone who gets money from the state should jolly well “give something back.” Sounds like pub-table economics. As if a welfare state were a pawnshop: “Here’s your citizens’ allowance, but in return you scrub the marketplace, or there’ll be trouble.” Welcome to moral forced management. Schulze sells this as “citizen work.” In the past, one would have called it more honestly: compulsory service. The Reich Labor Service was also “for the common good,” also “educational,” also “integrative.” And back then too it was said: work shapes the human being. Today they say: pressure helps. The sound is more modern, the logic the same—just without uniforms, but with sanctions. Economically, this is a total write-offIt gets even more absurd when you seriously consider the economic consequences. Municipalities then have parks maintained, green spaces cleaned, seniors cared for, streets swept—not by regular companies anymore, but by people toiling for pocket change. The result?Small service providers go bankrupt. Craft businesses lose contracts. Cleaning companies, landscapers, social service organizations are pushed out. Collective-wage jobs are replaced by “extra money.” That’s not integration into the labor market—that’s state-organized wage-dumping capitalism. The municipality saves money, the economy loses jobs, and the welfare state becomes Germany’s biggest black-market employer—just legalized. And then the moral cudgel: Anyone who works 40 hours shouldn’t have to be annoyed that someone else gets money without working, says Schulze. Right. But anyone who works 40 hours also shouldn’t have to be surprised that tomorrow their job will be done by someone who is forced to do it—for a few extra euros. Coercion instead of support – ideology instead of solutionsWhat’s being sold here as “reform” is in truth a rollback. Away from qualification, away from real labor-market integration, toward discipline. It’s not about help, but about posture. Not about perspectives, but about pressure. The welfare state as a reformatory.And then there’s this national undertone: “for everyone born here as well as for migrants.” As if you needed a quick identity-politics footnote to morally ennoble compulsory labor. Sven Schulze – initials with historyA small aside, but not unimportant: the initials S. S.—in Germany a historically… let’s say: burdened abbreviation. Malicious tongues would say: he won’t be getting that as a vanity plate.Politics is driving the economy full speed into a wallAnd now comes the real irony of the whole thing: The very same politics—including the CDU—that for years has been unable to really get the economy going suddenly wants to put some hustle into the unemployed. For decades bureaucracy has been bloated, approval procedures made paralyzingly slow, taxes and levies cranked up, digitalization slept through, and investments talked to death. The result: Germany is slipping in international competition, losing innovative power and location attractiveness—and instead of admitting its own political failure, it now points downward.So what is actually going wrong?Not the people. But a system that crushes companies with forms, scares founders away with regulations, and strangles small and medium-sized businesses with energy, tax, and documentation burdens. You don’t become globally competitive by forcing welfare recipients to sweep parks, but by creating framework conditions in which real work can emerge: faster, simpler, more entrepreneurial, bolder.And before the usual political propaganda fairy tale comes again—no: it’s not because the energy transition wasn’t “fast enough” or because the auto industry didn’t “build enough EVs.” That’s the politics’ convenient excuse for its own structural failure. Competitiveness doesn’t fail because of a lack of ideology, but because of too much of it. Of planned-economy thinking in the garb of sustainability, of symbolic politics instead of location policy. First politics drives the economy full speed into a wall—and when it crunches, it’s precisely the weakest in the system who are supposed to push the broken gearbox back into motion. With coercion. With compulsory labor. With moral pressure. What Schulze is demanding is not progress. It’s compulsory labor in a neoliberal camouflage suit. Anyone who believes social problems can be solved with coercion, pressure, and cheap substitute labor has learned nothing from history—and apparently nothing from economics either. Or put another way: The Reich Labor Service at least had the courage to honestly say what it was. Today they call it “citizen work.” Sounds nicer. It’s just as wrong. Author: AI-Translation - АИИ | |
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