More and more jobs in Berlin Federal government breach of Berlin/Bonn Act grows
Bonn · The federal government is expanding its ministries substantially, but mainly in the capital of Berlin. Politicians from Bonn complain that this breaches the Berlin/Bonn Act, which was enacted after the capital moved from Bonn to Berlin.
"In the last six months, the federal government has created around 1,200 new jobs in the ministries, but only a fraction of them in Bonn," writes Katja Dörner, a member of the German Bundestag from Bonn. She made the statement in a joint press release with another Bundestag member, Alexander Graf Lambsdorff. The total number of federal ministry posts climbed for the first time to more than 20,000 as of the new year. However, 86 percent of the new jobs were located in Berlin.
While 13,731 staffers work in the federal ministries in Berlin, there are only 6,433 ministerial jobs in Bonn. The Berlin/Bonn Act, enacted in 1994, determined which federal ministries would move to Berlin when the capital of Germany shifted from Bonn to Berlin, and gave Bonn certain commitments about preserving the city as a location for government workers. The recent statistics show the number of ministerial jobs in Bonn to be below one third - a clear violation of the Berlin/Bonn Act, which stipulates for the majority of jobs to be in Bonn.
Dörner and Lambsdorff write that the development is "unacceptable given the background of the promises made to the city and the region". "In the forthcoming talks on a Bonn agreement, we expect the federal government to come up with a concrete proposal on how to secure jobs in Bonn fairly and permanently.” Negotiations on the contract, which is to supplement the Berlin/Bonn Act, have not yet begun.
Orig. text: Andreas Baumann
Translation: ck
