prenzlau

WORKING IN PRENZLAU Five years into the European debt crisis, at a time when Germany’s hegemonic role in it—both stoking trade imbalances and imposing debt brakes—had already become apparent, I was offered a job as an unemployment consultant in a small East German town where the largest employer, a solar-panel manufacturer, had closed down, laying off 550 people. Over the next nine months, our task would be to counsel, reorient and reintegrate the redundant personnel back into the productive labour market. I had never worked in this field before, my only contact with labour-market issues stemming from the rather explicitly Marxist seminars on political economy and the ontology of work I taught at Humboldt University. But ‘soft skills’ seemed to be all that was required to enter this industry famous for absorbing white-collar career changers, and I was delighted to earn (considerably) more money than at my teaching job while getting an opportunity to do some fieldwork in the German unemployment regime. In what follows, I want to tell the story of that year, 2014, in Prenzlau, focusing particularly on the work of the consulting company, bob Transfer, whose task was literally to ‘transfer’ people from the socially protected industrial workforce into what might be called the ‘permanent reserve army of labour’. In other words, this is a tale about the production and management of surplus labour in the heart of Europe. At the same time, it is a drama about the post-industrial countryside, caught between local resilience and the tides of globalization, which unfolded during the days between the loss of the last good jobs in the region and the fresh influx of large numbers of non-white refugees, to join those already penned in a Lager on the periphery of the town. Lastly, while a manifestation of crisis, the story takes the form of ‘ordinariness’, which in turn begs questions about the particularities of the German model of crisis management—and, indeed, about our representational categories for grasping the limits to capitalism, or what might lie beyond. Located 100km north of Berlin, Prenzlau—population: 19,000—is not exactly on the periphery of the European project, although as a small provincial town in the economically depressed state of Brandenburg, it is very much on the social, cultural and political margins. Since Berlin has become a cultural magnet and hotbed of real estate and it investment over the past decade, the gulf between the city and its rural hinterland has only widened. Not many Berliners have roots in the surrounding region, which they appreciate for its lakes but also tend to despise for its presumed petty-bourgeois culture and latent fascist tendencies. Conversely, country folk tend to be wary of the big city, even if they have barely set foot in it. The first thing you learn about Prenzlau, as a job consultant, is that this is a ‘structurally weak region’. Not only is Brandenburg a depressed East German Land, but the Uckermark region, the county over which Prenzlau presides, boasts one of the highest unemployment rates in Germany, a little above 10 per cent. In the post-war decades, the gdr managed to fold the Uckermark into its developmental plan by collectivizing agriculture and relocating industrial activity to the region. Unlike agrarian enclosures in the West, the state-socialist approach did not involve casting farm workers off the land; rather, it modernized agricultural production with the help of local farmers as wage proletarians. The fall of the Wall and German reunification spelled a second round of enclosures in the form of deindustrialization, caused by the forced bankruptcy of state enterprises and the seizing of public assets for the funding of subsequent transfer payments—a strategy Eurozone elites would apply to the Greek bailout, twenty-five years later. In the 1990s this plunged millions of workers into early retirement, or saw them enter retraining programmes or set off to West Germany looking for work. Supposedly the reunion of two long-lost siblings, German reunification was rather the annexation of an unevenly developed economy to history’s designated winner. After reunification, the new Länder, as they are known, experienced two ‘recoveries’. The first was a construction boom that fizzled out by the late 90s. The second, running from 2000 to 2012, was a government-subsidized round of industrialization focused on renewable energy, wind and solar power. From the turn of the millennium, the German government poured €31 billion into the photovoltaic industry located in its eastern ‘Solar Valley’. In a classic case of capitalist over-investment, intensified production across Europe and, increasingly, China—aided, indeed, by German technology transfers—pushed down the price of solar panels and solar energy to a level at which Western governments could no longer afford to subsidize the industry. Once government support was phased out, German manufacturers began closing down. In 2011, the local photovoltaic industry had employed 111,000 people; two years later, that number had halved.footnote1 Finally, in March 2013, the Bosch group announced that it would be closing down Aleo Solar, its subsidiary in Prenzlau, adding another 550 workers to the post-industrial labour reserve. ‘Mit BOB zum Job’ Twenty-five years after reunification, the economy of the eastern Länder continues to lag behind the rest of the frg, reinforced by a sparse and ageing population.footnote2 Wages are around 15 per cent lower than in the West. Rural towns like Prenzlau have a hard time attracting new inhabitants, with the notable exception of asylum seekers forced to reside here. Tellingly, perhaps, the two growth industries in Prenzlau at the moment, are elderly care and call centres. Aside from these, a few manufacturing jobs can be found in the seasonal dairy-processing facility, the car-parts supplier or the occasional logistics company. Otherwise, there is always on-site work to be had in assembly, construction or security, a type of internal migrant labour East German men have always seemed better suited for due to lack of employment alternatives and cheaper labour costs. When Aleo Solar announced bankruptcy, employees were given two options: they could either accept a cash severance package and immediately register as ‘unemployed’ (arbeitslos) or they could become employees of the transfer agency for a maximum period of nine months, where they would receive a monthly ‘salary’ (not higher than the severance pay) and figure as ‘job seekers’ (arbeitssuchend). The distinction made by the Ministry of Labour between arbeitslos and arbeitssuchend is formal but not insignificant. Job seekers do not figure in official unemployment statistics and, by entering a quasi-formal employment relationship with the transfer agency, they are supposed to keep the habits of wage labour intact, and be less at risk of dropping out of the labour force entirely. The state benefits doubly from this—by keeping unemployment statistics low and by sharing the cost for managing unemployment with the insolvent company and the transfer agency. By April 2014, when Aleo Solar closed its gates, 75 per cent of its former employees had registered with our agency, bob Transfer. This would not have been possible without the active cooperation of their union ig Metall and the works council at Aleo Solar who fought hard during the insolvency proceedings to secure transfer services for their members. Private consulting firms are the ‘Mercedes’ of the unemployment regime, as one of my colleagues put it. Transfer agencies appeared in the early 90s to help workers and regions cope with the redundancies created by German reunification, expanded from the early 2000s in anticipation of Schröder’s Hartz iv restructuring, and have since become institutionalized as an upscale severance package offered exclusively to unionized workers. They promise better quality services and higher placement figures than state agencies. With their multi-million euro budgets, transfer programmes also serve as important stabilizing forces for the wider region, helping to mute the costs of mass unemployment and maintain the ‘social dialogue’ between labour and capital. In the case of Aleo Solar, the works council presented the involvement of bob Transfer as a negotiating victory, an added bonus amidst unalterable circumstances, thus discrediting more radical alternatives. As a final lure, workers were also told that only those joining the transfer programme would have a chance of being invited back to work for Aleo Solar, should the plant reopen under new management, as was the rumour at the time. Meanwhile, for me, the job in Prenzlau was the best I ever had. Apart from its content, which was rather unglamorous and unimaginative, and its purpose, which reflected the larger problems with this ‘activation’ approach to managing unemployment, the conditions under which I laboured were thoroughly enviable. The job was handsomely paid for part-time commitment, with flexible and self-determined working hours, very little supervision and a relatively collegial and collaborative atmosphere. It even covered travel and accommodation expenses in Prenzlau. And, to my surprise, my superiors and colleagues were more than forgiving of my lack of professional experience and less than perfect language skills; a middle-class habitus made up for my immigrant background, even placing it in a positive light. As decent manufacturing jobs were being dismantled all across the country, the labour-activation regime, with its army of consultants, trainers, mediators and case-workers, has been shaping up as the next growth industry, replacing protected blue-collar jobs with mostly freelance white-collar ones. Our office in Prenzlau sprang up like a pop-up store. Consultants are the travelling salesmen of our age, their wheeled suitcases filled with laptops, mobile printers and scanners, mini-projectors, flyers, brochures, and all manner of office supplies. Provided internet access is available, they can set up a professional-looking workspace anywhere within moments. In a matter of days bob Transfer, headquartered in Essen, had rented us a five-room office space in the centre of Prenzlau and begun outfitting it with new furniture, a small kitchen and generous office supplies, including free drinks and snacks. Our team consisted of ten consultants, half from the western Länder and half from Berlin, plus two female office staff, former Aleo Solar employees from Prenzlau, to ensure some regional balance. The consultants themselves were a highly adaptable and dynamic bunch. Mostly over 45, we were all career changers (Quereinsteiger), coming from sales, banking, management or teaching, and straddling a variety of intermittent occupations across the country. Our team leader, for instance, a mild-mannered maths professor, also taught a weekly college class on the other side of Germany. Another colleague ran a motel in his backyard, initially accommodating Romanian Gastarbeiter and later asylum seekers, paid for by government vouchers. Long commutes and nights spent on the road are part and parcel of a consultant’s job; but handsome pay, prestige and self-determined working hours are supposed to make up for these. Consulting is not a profession that requires a specific education or concrete skills. The expertise consists in the consultant’s ability to embody a vision of entrepreneurial success to which the client aspires. We were expected to convince jobseekers, by our own example, that mobility, personal initiative and salesmanship lead to improved employment opportunities, regardless of the labour market. ‘Rigidities’ and resistance The first thing I learned from colleagues and superiors as a Transfer consultant was that the Uckermark region was not only economically depressed but inhabited by a reserved and stubborn folk, rendered by state socialism into a population devoid of personal motivation and incapable of independent thought. ‘People here have less initiative, because of their history’—‘they like to have things pre-chewed for them’ were common laments during our weekly team meetings. Post-reunification public discourse, which provincial East Germany has never participated in shaping, has traditionally drawn a straight line between the ‘mentality’ problems of Ossies and those of more distant migrant groups as sharing a common tendency for laziness, passivity and dependence on the public purse. The European debt crisis, in designating foreign culprits, had momentarily relieved East Germans of this contemptuous reputation. Shaking up these sedentary habits was one of our central tasks. The atmosphere during the first seminars we organized for the former Aleo Solar employees was predictably tense, exposing the wide social and cultural gap between the besuited consultants at the front of the room and the manual labourers seated around the conference tables. While we were trying to encourage people to discover their socio-emotional competencies or learn how to make job inquiries on the phone, the Aleo Solar workers were far more interested in debating the reasons why the company had closed down and whether it would reopen under new management. The purpose and structure of our exercises, they complained, had more to do with our own urban, white-collar milieu than with the labour-market realities of Prenzlau. Besides, there were very few jobs to be had in the region. When consultants took their complaints seriously, the seminars ran relatively smoothly. When they didn’t, the tensions could rapidly escalate into class confrontation: the more the workers insisted on being taken seriously, the more they were accused of insubordination, feeding the anti-proletarian sentiments some consultants already harboured. For most, Aleo Solar had been the best ‘crap job’ they had ever had—stable, well paid, collaborative, even if work on the assembly line itself was unbearable: ‘You had to stick in there and get on with it’; ‘Intelligence was not welcome’; ‘If you didn’t like it, there’s the door. Plenty who would’; ‘“Machine operator”—the machine operates you’; ‘It was a stupid job, very one-dimensional. Push the button and you’re done’. Still, for most, being made redundant was a shock that took several months to sink in. Only the older people, nearing retirement, could afford to take it lightly. Meanwhile, our job was to convince people to move quickly past false hopes of re-hire and rigid attachments to antiquated notions of security and dignity, to embark on a process of personal transformation. Rigidities, roughly associated with the Fordist mode of social regulation, had to be swept aside to make room for new opportunities. Ours was a benevolent, pastoral task: to help people develop a better sense of themselves and their capacities, through the psychologistic tools of the consulting profession, and so enable them ‘to better sell themselves’. Unlike the caseworkers at the Jobcentre or temp agencies, who mechanically matched people and jobs, and bullied them when they resisted, we were supposed to offer a more sophisticated service that accomplished an all-around transformation in people’s self-perception and general orientation to life. Also, given that bob had secured the contract through trade-union contacts, we were committed to keep our clients out of part-time ‘mini-jobs’ in the low-wage sector, as far as possible. After all, we were an organization with social-democratic leanings. In reality, our lofty aspirations were confined by structural circumstances: a sluggish regional labour market, deindustrialization, the age and poor educational background of our clients, the rigidities of the welfare and further-education systems. Our mission—‘With bob to the Job!’—was self-contradictory: the very market forces we were hired to represent actively frustrated its fulfilment. Yet instead of admitting the tension between the full employability demanded of our clients and the lack of good jobs in the region, we carried out our duties with a voluntarist faith: there is no shortage of decent work, only a shortage of good dreams. But where contradictions cannot be freely voiced, fears are bound to take their place. We spent team meetings devising methods of intimidation—‘Three strikes and you’re out’—to remind our clients of their responsibilities to us. The zeal behind these efforts was remarkable: ‘We are compassionate, but prepared to apply strength if clients refuse to cooperate’, announced an internal PowerPoint presentation. Prenzlauers, in my experience, were far from demotivated. They showed great resilience and adaptability in difficult circumstances. A common résumé included a vocational-school education, several occupations, successive retraining schemes, state-sponsored community labour and dramatically long periods of unemployment. If our clients did not conform to consultants’ norms, it was not down to a lack of initiative but rather one of job opportunities. Whenever a decent position was advertised, people applied in droves. In fact we received notice from the local Department of Labour that local employers had complained about our clients submitting too many cold-call applications, as indeed we had instructed them to do. There were no jobs to be had, and they should stop wasting hr resources with their inquiries, we were told. The real source of contention was not that our clients refused to work but that they were not prepared to accept poorly paid, degrading labour. Having been raised under socialism and, later, under the promise of a generous social capitalism, East German workers did not want to give up their expectations for well-paid, even rewarding work, or accept a radical drop in their standard of living. The men refused to join retraining schemes for long-haul jobs like truck driving. The women resisted the emotional socialization required by feminized occupations like call centre work and elderly care, regarding them as a form of intrusion on their personhood. People shied away from daily commutes to jobs that would barely cover travel costs, and tried to avoid night shifts, knowing from Aleo Solar the destructive effects these had on health and social life. And they consistently refused to leave their families and homes to take on minimum-wage work across the country. During the summer, many preferred seasonal work in the local dairy industry to full-time jobs away from home. Consultants found these cost-benefit calculations incomprehensible, even morally dubious—as if the desire to hold onto decent work and cherish personal relationships and ways of life were luxuries from a bygone era. For them, our clients’ ‘underdeveloped readiness to move’ was testament to the proverbial laziness of Uckermark folk, a classic expression of the mentality nurtured by state socialism and, later, the frg welfare state: ‘People were simply doing too well.’ Indeed, what was allowing older workers, in particular, to bear the brunt of wage stagnation and unemployment was the accumulated wealth of the post-war social model, including cheap homes and garden plots, private savings, low levels of personal indebtedness, pension funds, unemployment insurance and, occasionally, a family wage. To this we should add the low cost of living enjoyed by provincial German workers, especially in the former East, where people lead a stable yet modest existence with consumption limited to discount stores and vacation destinations no more exotic than the nearby Baltic Sea. Although neoliberal legislation has helped to erode these ‘privileges’, in order to spur the workforce into unprotected jobs, some of the de-commodified aspects of the social wage have proved quite stubborn—to the frustration of the consultants. Other forms of resistance were habitual, like the refusal to commute to work, or the expectation of a certain pay grade. Small savings, a garden plot and low living costs encouraged some Prenzlau workers to hold out against exploitative labour for longer periods. Here, Transfer became a real terrain of struggle between consultants trying to loosen what they saw as the entitled ‘mentality’ of East German folk and the latter insisting on their social right to sedentariness, as a cultural bulwark against the imperatives of capital and its temporalities, but also by asserting the sheer economic rationality of the low-income earner. One way of navigating this conflict was through traineeships. From our initial budget of €2,000,000, some €600,000 was spent on training courses. The only caveat: these could not exceed the nine-month duration of the transfer programme, meaning they were limited to short-term certificates—Umschulungen—for low-skilled occupations, not full-fledged degrees. This is a critical factor in blocking the social mobility of manual workers, who can never surpass the education level acquired in their youth. For all the consultants’ insistence that Prenzlauers move to other parts of the country as a means to upward mobility, research shows that low-wage workers are confined to a ‘circular mobility’ between jobs of the same rank, or between temporary work and unemployment.footnote3 The courses we offered in Prenzlau included training for: cashiers, fork-lift operators, security guards, care aides, call-centre workers, lathe operators and the mandatory computer courses. Although tailored to the jobs available in the region, the courses hardly guaranteed decent work: the call-centre course caused a small uprising against the protocols of phone service and emotional labour; the cash-register training equipped people exclusively for part-time ‘mini-jobs’; fork-lift operators were already plentiful in the region and our training courses only added to the competition. By the end of our nine-month programme, 234 of our 400 clients had found work—a 56 per cent success rate—yet three-quarters of these had gone back to work for the company that replaced Aleo Solar. But the new Aleo Solar had little in common with its predecessor apart from the name, which, rumour had it, was bought for €1. People were paid less and worked tougher schedules, on temporary contracts, with no prospect of a works council. A few refused to return, reasoning that the meagre pay could not make up for the gruelling pace of work—or for having to toil under the same management they felt was responsible for bankrupting the company in the first place.footnote4 After nine months in Prenzlau, I felt it was time to leave. The work of an employment consultant inevitably slips into the territory of social work, perhaps even more so in the private sphere where the consultant-to-client ratio is much lower and contact is more sustained. Personally, I often found it difficult to counsel people twenty years my senior, who had far more work and life experience than I, yet much more restricted options. Older consultants were perhaps better equipped to build personal relationships with their clients and provide genuine mentorship during difficult periods. But Transfer also struck me as a missed opportunity. The collective structure and paid free time provided by our programme might have been used to convoke new ideas, relationships and desires, beyond market logics and state clientelism. Instead, Transfer remained an obstinately individualizing market instrument, oblivious to the structures and relations it was helping to buttress and callous about the distinctions between working- and middle-class opportunities it was helping to perpetuate. My last consultation there was with a 52-year-old woman, a tailor by trade, who had gone through various personal and familial difficulties during the months of Transfer. She had hoped to replace someone about to retire from the small manufacturing company where her husband was working but, in the end, the job never materialized. The only options left for her, she thought, were elderly care, which she did not believe she had the emotional and physical stamina for, and cleaning, which hardly can or should be a full-time occupation. The roads ahead of her seemed blocked. Having been trained in the gdr for a way of life that no longer existed, raised a family, then worked on the Aleo Solar assembly line for more than a decade, she had no marketable skills to offer. Her husband earned enough money for her not to qualify for welfare support and they could still live off the achievements of the previous social contract. But she would continue to lose faith in her abilities and agency, falling deeper into the depression she reported when we first met. Austerity Germany Transfer has been a crucial device for managing the transition from stable, unionized jobs to more precarious forms of work—palliative care for the death throes of the German model of social capital and the hopes, rights and habits established, through struggle, under the post-war accumulation regime. Sold to workers as a generous form of compensation by their own trade unions, Transfer is an austerity mechanism, aiding wage repression and greater labour flexibility. It functions as an instrument of dispossession that encloses the ‘privileges’ once guaranteed to workers as rights. The most explicit instance of enclosure in Prenzlau was the dismantling of labour rights at the reopened Aleo Solar. Transfer functioned here as an alibi for cutting the workforce in half and stripping what remained of shop-floor representation. Class consciousness would supposedly disappear, along with the last Fordist jobs in town. The story of productivity-driven redundancy was familiar to Marx: as productivity norms are intensified under the pressure of global competition, more people are cast out of regular employment, to become relative surplus labour. As the term suggests, this is not labour that is entirely superfluous to economic needs or excused from economic tasks. Rather, it is labour whose relation to waged work becomes fragile, sporadic and poorly remunerated. Relative surplus labour is usable when needed, discarded when not, but rarely in control of its own fate. It is also labour that experiences social decline and abandonment from democratic structures of representation.footnote5 A general shift occurred in advanced-capitalist nations from solidaristic protection mechanisms to individualized labour-activation regimes precisely under the political forces supposed to represent the interests of labour. In Germany this passive revolution was accomplished in 2003, through the Schröder administration’s Hartz i–iv laws. Together with wage repression, they helped to stoke the German recovery of the past decade and are a key factor in the trade imbalances that underlie the European debt crisis. The Hartz laws drastically reduced unemployment benefits, introduced new relations of employment—mini-jobs, one-euro jobs, self-employment—and set in motion the labour-activation machinery that repurposes the working population for the needs of financialized just-in-time production flows, in which bob Transfer played its part. Through the transition to full-but-precarious employment, Germany managed to keep wages down, especially in care and human services, and exports competitive.footnote6 By insisting that everyone work, even in part-time, welfare-supplemented occupations, the Schröder and Merkel governments succeeded in swelling a permanent, state-subsidized, reserve army of cheap labour, however stubbornly workers like the former Aleo Solar employees resisted the sort of jobs they were being retrained to occupy. The German state, which prods with one hand and protects with the other, contrives to turn the process into something that is relentless yet bearable. The strength of the German model lies in the strategies it can deploy to mask social divisions and defer conflict. Austerity here does not have the aggressive edge it has in the Anglo-American world, or the sting it has in Southern Europe. Austerity in Germany is not anti-union, although it is at times anti-poor. It is implemented via the methods and institutions of social democracy, greased by targeted cash transfers. For the most part, it assumes the more mundane expression of ‘crisis ordinariness’, in which greater threats are averted through small, less-dramatic adjustments to a downwardly spiralling present.footnote7 During this swift episode of the re-purposing of the Aleo Solar workforce, there was no struggle over the closure (although Transfer itself was a terrain of struggle), people did not lose their homes or savings, and most would adapt and get by on short- and medium-term contracts, interrupted by occasional bouts of unemployment. More than this, perhaps, the experience of Transfer in Prenzlau suggests that in the German model, the very mechanisms that keep a material crisis at bay also serve to choke off the imagining of alter-capitalist commons and new horizons of reproductive autonomy. While in Greece and Spain it was possible to mobilize a resonant anti-austerity discourse, it is less clear how to animate working-class consciousness in a country where the experience of restructuring has been skillfully contained and concealed through a combination of preemptive wage austerity, a low cost of living and a seductive skills revolution of which Transfer is a part. This leads me to suggest, by way of conclusion, that we need another set of lenses to appreciate and articulate crisis in places where people continue to have access to jobs, homes and basic social services—a definition of crisis that assesses capitalism not only in terms of its ability to adequately reproduce the lives of its labouring population, but also considers the types of lives it does in fact reproduce. The dismantling of the last properly industrial workplace in Prenzlau ended a structure of socialization that integrated people along the axis of class or, at least, common work experiences and demands. The reserve army that replaces it represents a negative class position.footnote8 It is, by definition, fractious, abject, and hence perhaps more susceptible to mobilization along ethnic or personalistic lines. The Alternative für Deutschland won 12 per cent in the 2014 Brandenburg Landtag elections, taking votes from the red-red spd–Linke coalition that has governed the state since 2009. pegida, the avowedly Islamophobic anti-immigrant association, organized a small demonstration in Prenzlau in October 2015, though it was met by a counter-protest. When the socially integrative functions of class become eroded and the already fragile status of working life is hit by social decline, renewed allegiance to traditional collectivities tends to replace them, with people turning to the only structure of common imagination still available to them—a shared ethnic identity under attack. The slow unfolding of undignified work, creeping privatization of life, and a culture of fear and resentment towards anything that deviates from the white Christian norm, are symptoms of ‘crisis ordinariness’, unfolding before our very eyes.