220 WINFRIED SÜß
that cannot be compared to anything other than the initial phase of the
economic miracle. These policies also clearly motivated many long-term
as well as short-term unemployed people to get back on the job market.
Approximately eight hundred thousand people have found jobs with full
social security benefi ts through this system since 2009. Most of these
jobs, however, have been only part-time positions. This touches on the
highly problematic downside of the “German job miracle,” namely even
more increases in social inequality and the considerable long-term prob-
lems related to the fi nancial situation of the social security system. In
particular, the Hartz reforms have strengthened the trend toward more
part-time work and mini-jobs. With about 6.5 million employees (approx-
imately 20 percent of the total workforce), post-reunifi cation Germany
has one of the largest low-wage sectors in Europe, which has exacer-
bated the problem of people with jobs who still suff er from poverty.
- Changes in the leitmotifs of social policy. The move away from the
principle of ensuring standards of living may very well be one of the
most far-reaching social policy readjustments over the long term. Before
2005, social policy debates in Germany were mostly about the fi nancial
resources of individual branches of the social security system. Following
the confl icts that surrounded the Hartz reforms, however, social policy
has increasingly become more about ensuring a basic level of protection,
which is refl ected in the current debates over poverty in old age and the
minimum wage. Put more bluntly, social assistance, which was originally
intended to be a stop-gap measure for problematic situations that were
not otherwise covered systematically within the German welfare state tra-
dition, has shifted from the periphery to the center of social policy. If this
trend ends up being permanent, it would imply a break in the continuity
of the German welfare state tradition.
Although they have evolved, the leitmotifs of gender politics in so-
cial policy have also changed signifi cantly. The male breadwinner model
(which often appears in a modifi ed form as a male breadwinner plus an
extra female income) is still quite present in today’s social reality, but
family and social policy in Germany has been shifting more and more to
the adult-worker model, which puts the focus on the working individual
as opposed to the family as a social unit. This model also assumes that
all adult family members are gainfully employed. Unlike the old West
German child-raising allowance, the parental benefi ts policy that was in-
troduced in 2007, for example, is calculated according to income, and
both parents are required to reduce their employment in order to take
advantage of the full length of benefi ts.
At least at a programmatic level, there has been a shift since the Red-
Green coalition from a protective welfare state to one focused on bolster-