GERMANY: There's not much chatter in the queue of sweating, squinting tourists snaking down the steps of the Reichstag parliament building in central Berlin, writes Derek Scally.
They've been waiting an hour to visit the spectacular glass dome and what little conversation can be heard is mostly about the near 40-degree heat. A few others are talking about the latest rise in unemployment. Over 10 per cent of German workers are jobless and the figure is rising. In eastern states it is nearly twice that with one in five now without work.
New reforms are on the way to revitalise the economy with tax cuts matched by cuts to the welfare state and the abolition of many privileges enjoyed by German employees over decades. But few visitors to the Reichstag yesterday were aware that the security staff checking their bags represent the German workers of the future: not employed by the government but by a personnel agency, a steadily growing phenomenon.
Politicians in the parliament chamber have recently debated loosening the labour laws to introduce more so-called yellow-pack jobs already familiar in Ireland. But few politicians know that the cloakroom attendant that took their coat or the security man they passed on the way in is an agency employee who may be earning as little as €4.50 an hour.
"There's not much left at the end of the month, even if you work 10 hours a day on your feet," said one such worker. "I could probably get more on social welfare, but I want to work even if the pay and the long commute don't really make it worthwhile." "\ talk about a living wage, but they should look a little closer at their own staff here in this building," says another.
Through the nearby Brandenburg Gate and into the former East Berlin, the city-state government has another situation entirely. Saddled with debts of over €35 billion, the government is slashing its budget and payroll. However, the employees it would like to fire are not disposable agency staff but civil servants, known as Beamte, an extraordinarily privileged group of workers that are next to impossible to let go.
The city has decided to take all 6,000 employees who are surplus to requirements and transfer them with full pay and benefits into a new authority called "Jobpool".
The state government says this will make it easier to place them in new jobs: until now, a social welfare office in one part of Berlin could be chronically short-staffed while suitable employees sat elsewhere in the city doing the crossword on full pay.
With Jobpool, the city will be able to send their employees to any public facility in the city that needs staff. It's possible that the civil servants will be quite literally given away to private companies to work while still on full pay from public funds, a wage bill of around €110 million a year.
Jobpool will add yet another level of bureaucracy to the already Kafkaesque public administration in Berlin and will cost €5 million a year to run. But it's clear from employment reforms that the farcical Jobpool situation will be part of the past while the agency employees in the Reichstag are the future.
Mr Wolfgang Clement, the tough-talking economics and labour minister, is determined to push through reforms that will bring German into line with the rest of Europe and the US. He wants to make it easier for firms to hire and fire workers and increase the attractiveness of low-paid work, so-called "mini-jobs".
Germans may grumble about reform, but they know which way the wind is blowing. Just how much things have to change was made clear recently when the newspaper Die Zeit explained to readers the phenomenon of "working poor", a foreign concept here.
The government is taking the right steps to convince people of the need for reform, particularly if it ends such situations as the Jobpool employees. But German hearts turn to stone at the notion of yellow-pack jobs such as those in the Reichstag.
Outside the parliament building on the scorching steps, mention of the cheap labour working inside leaves visitors visibly shocked. "€4.50? That's a pittance," says one outraged woman. "I'm a pensioner so I'm glad I'm not working any more if that's the way things are going." "And I'm afraid they are," says her husband. "Down our way in Frankfurt even the window cleaners get paid more than that."