In March 2003, Social Democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schröder announced a series of reforms that his government plans to undertake in order to deal with Germany’s pressing economic problems. These reform proposals, known as Agenda 2010, include cutting unemployment benefits, making it easier to hire and fire workers, reducing health insurance coverage, and raising the retirement age. The reforms mark a change in the direction of the German Social Democratic Party’s (SPD) economic policy. Rather than promoting traditional social democratic values such as collective responsibility, workers’ rights, and the expansion of state benefits, Schröder declared that “We will have to curtail the work of the state, encourage more individual responsibility, and require greater individual performance from each person. Every group in the society will have to contribute its share.”1 Despite opposition to these reforms by labor unions and leftist members of the party, Agenda 2010 was approved by nearly 90 percent of SPD party delegates at a special party conference in June 2003.2 Several of the reforms, including health care and job protection reforms, were passed by the legislature at the end of 2003 and took effect on 1 January 2004.
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Pamela. Camerra-Rowe (2004) studied this question.