by Recently, Germany introduced an economy wide minimum wage. This led to better jobs, better incomes, an increase in productivity, no upsurge in inflation and no decline of employment growth: “Higher wages, shorter hours The comparison of both worker groups shows that the minimum wage has worked. As intended, the hourly wage of the interviewed minimum wage workers rose from €6.70 to €8.20, an impressive 22 percent. This is a multiple of the wage increase in the control group, which amounted to 4 percent. However, this also shows that the average hourly wage had not yet reached the minimum wage of €8.50, which is not due to exemptions from the minimum wage (we excluded these from the data). At the same time, weekly working hours of minimum wage workers fell by 90 minutes, whereas working
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Recently, Germany introduced an economy wide minimum wage. This led to better jobs, better incomes, an increase in productivity, no upsurge in inflation and no decline of employment growth:
“Higher wages, shorter hours The comparison of both worker groups shows that the minimum wage has worked. As intended, the hourly wage of the interviewed minimum wage workers rose from €6.70 to €8.20, an impressive 22 percent. This is a multiple of the wage increase in the control group, which amounted to 4 percent. However, this also shows that the average hourly wage had not yet reached the minimum wage of €8.50, which is not due to exemptions from the minimum wage (we excluded these from the data). At the same time, weekly working hours of minimum wage workers fell by 90 minutes, whereas working time in the control group increased somewhat. In particular, the share of employees with very long working hours of more than 45 fell markedly. This also runs counter to the trend of the control group. Finally, despite lower average working hours, the monthly gross wage climbed from roughly €840 to €990. This is important, since it is the gross wage more than the hourly wage that matters for being able to meet living expenses.
Happier despite higher workload
These results paint the minimum wage in glowing colours for affected workers. However, how did companies react? Manager interviews conducted in another IAB survey showed that firms focused more on raising worker productivity than on layoffs. Our results confirm this from a worker perspective.”