Extend the ability to offer temporary employment contracts – relax the tight restrictions on dismissals
Lawmakers should create greater statutory scope for temporary employment contracts covering a longer term – say, four years – and not make this subject to the consent of wage negotiators.
In connection with job protection legislation, one needs to consider that the current rules protecting employees against dismissal [Kündigungsschutz] make it harder for unemployed persons to enter the labor market. These rules should be made less stringent in order to improve the employment prospects of jobless persons. The social considerations regarding redundancy dismissals [Sozialauswahl] should be defined more clearly. Legal provisions should be enacted that enable newly recruited persons to voluntarily waive dismissal protection rights in return for an agreed-upon redundancy compensation package in the event that they are subsequently laid off. The relaxation of dismissal protection rights should be extended from firms employing up to five employees to firms with up to twenty employees.
(Proposal 12, sections 469 et seqq.)
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Health policy: pragmatic steps plus conceptual perspectives
(sections 483 et seqq.; Chart 6)
33. In the field of health policy, the German Council of Economic Experts suggests a dual approach: on the one hand, the Council has devised a package of measures aimed at mobilizing efficiency reserves within the existing public health service structure; and on the other hand, it has developed two further-reaching reform strategies aimed at transforming the present system.
A crucial requirement for the necessary dampening of the growth in contribution rates is to introduce immediate expenditure-side reforms to mobilize the presumed efficiency reserves in the present system. Corresponding reform measures should seek not only to tackle the cost-bloating disincentives in the patient-doctor relationship and to redefine the respective roles of the statutory health insurance system [Gesetzliche Krankenversicherung] and the private health insurance scheme [Private Krankenversicherung], but also, in particular, to modernize the present outmoded pharmaceuticals distribution system and to give individual health insurers [Krankenkassen] greater contractual freedom vis-à-vis health service providers.
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35. This precarious budgetary development is not only a consequence of the poor cyclical momentum but also of insufficient fiscal consolidation efforts in the past. Therefore, it is also wrong to blame fiscal policymakers’ limited room for maneuvering – which many people feel is insufficient, given the present economic situation – on the rules of the Stability and Growth Pact. Furthermore, the current debate on the pact’s rules is also taking place at the wrong time, as it is precisely now that the rules need to face their first real test.
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