Unemployment can happen to anyone – and often enough it hits us hard: debts, worries about the future, identity crisis. That doesn’t have to be! It doesn’t matter if you want to get back into a job quickly or if your life strength is too precious to ruin you for the profit of other people: As a community, we look for the right solutions.
Even without membership – tell us about the job center!
In order to be able to help effectively, we depend on the experience of many people with the individual teams and clerks, but also with the strategies of the job center as a whole. Help yourself and others and write us a short note about your experiences: Which team and which clerk did you work for? How did they react to your situation? What does your integration agreement look like (number of job applications etc.)? What did you take sanctions for? Your information helps us to prepare accompaniments well and to work out optimal strategies with those affected (potentially you too!).
Join the Union – You’ll never walk alone!
We are an voluntary structure and an association that supports each other financially and practically. We therefore do not provide pure services – solidarity is not a one-way street. On request we will gladly refer you to our unemployment counselling services and share our experiences with individual teams.
However, anyone who gets involved as a member and thus dares to be more committed will soon see that it is worth it. As trade unionists we try to consult together, to find strategies for the period of unemployment together, if necessary to look for bearable jobs and apprenticeships and to keep bad jobs and wage dumping from our neck.
This also includes joint accompaniment to the job center, defence against integration agreements, legal action against sanctions and practical financial solidarity.
Perspectives – Together against sanctions and wage dumping
The fear of unemployment, of sanctions, paternalism and heteronomy drives us again and again into lousily paid, but at least self-chosen dumping jobs. The fear of the job centre also keeps us quiet when things are going badly in the company, when we don’t get respect or when legal standards are undermined. At the same time, the Job Center also refers people to temporary employment and dumping companies, to whom hardly anyone would otherwise volunteer. The abolition of the sanction system should therefore be quite pragmatic in the interests of all wage dependents, because it contributes significantly to the continuous deterioration of employment relationships.
In addition, we fundamentally reject the idea of keeping people in the most bitter poverty and worry and even depriving them of the minimum subsistence level. There are good reasons for not wanting to work for a wage, for example because the activities that are important to us and where we are needed are not paid for or cannot be funded out of profit logic. There are plenty of examples of this in the social, educational and cultural fields. Perhaps for ethical reasons we also refuse to waste ourselves on the logic of global profit. Much of the work done today is superfluous, occupational therapy, seeking work on principle, not out of social necessity. Globally speaking, an ever-increasing percentage of humanity is becoming redundant as a result of industrialization and digitalization.
Whoever refuses to do paid work is therefore not an enemy of society for us, but merely a human being who recognizes the value of their lifetime and draws a respectable consequence from it. The enemies of society, on the other hand, are those who want to force the majority of the world’s population to work by adhering to an outdated economic system that does nobody any good and destroys us and the planet.