BERLIN — The German chancellor’s party is exploring the idea of a minimum wage for workers, abandoning its previous opposition to such a policy, party members said Sunday.
Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats Union is debating a proposal for a minimum wage before a November congress, said Peter Altmaier, the party’s chief parliamentary whip.
“It will be a good debate ... and at the end will be a major step forward,” Altmaier tweeted.
Unions and employers in Germany’s leading industries traditionally hammer out individual wage agreements.
Merkel’s party has previously rejected the idea of a blanket minimum wage.
But pressure from within the party resulted in an agreement to propose legislation that would set a base wage for jobs that do not fall under an existing wage agreement.
“The CDU has previously believed that an industrywide agreement can be found,” Karl-Josef Laumann, a Christian Democratic Union member who worked on the proposal, told WDR broadcaster Sunday. “But where there is no such agreement, we can set a minimum wage.”
Labor Minister Ursula von der Leyen told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung “it is no longer a question of whether we will have a minimum wage, but how we will agree to the right amount.”
The proposal says the minimum wage could be based on the current lowest hourly pay for temporary workers - $9.76 per hour in the east and $11.03 in the west.
Front Section, Pages 2 on 10/31/2011